Grasping Reality with Both Hands: bradford-delong.com:

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

1. Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump’s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What’s the matter with Kansas? It’ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

2. The idea that the collapse of the aristocratic Roman Free State into the Roman Empire was due to wild dissipative partying—luxus, a vice caught from the Greeks and "Asiatics", giving rise to avaritia, which then leads to ambitio and cupido imperii—was originally a meme put forward by those I regard as the true villains—plutocrats and political norm breakers—to avoid responsibility: A.W. Lintott (1972): Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: "Imperial expansion in general did of course have divisive economic and political effects...

3. Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire: Government as the Problem in the 1970s and 1980s: Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: "The post-[World] War [II] period began in an atmosphere of doubt and fear...

4. Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A quintet of notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...

5. Without short selling, the current price of a speculative asset is the expected maximum valuation that will ever be given it by the non-forward looking. When the valuations by the non-forward looking become extrapolative, Katie bar the door!: Noah Smith: Lessons on Bubbles From Bitcoin: "Until there is a way to bet against an asset, its price will be set by the most upbeat buyer...

6. Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump’s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...

7. "If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...

8. Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...

9. To a large extent the power of NIMBYism springs from the right-wing tax revolt of the 1980s: Issi Romem: America's New Metropolitan Landscape: Pockets of Dense Construction in a Dormant Suburban Interior: "City planners tend to favor concentrating residential development in dense hubs because they lend themselves to service by public transit, which helps reduce the impact of new residents on emissions and traffic congestion...

10. We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...

Keynes's General Theory Contains Oddly Few Mentions of Fiscal Policy: Delong Morning Coffee Podcast

In Keynes’s General Theory the question of why “it seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself…” is left hanging. The question of how a “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment“ is to be implemented is left hanging as well. There are remarkably a few references to “fiscal policy” in any form. So will somebody please explain to me why “fiscal policy” plays such a small part in the General Theory, while playing such a large part in mindshare perceptions of “Keynesianism”?...

Keynes's General Theory Contains Oddly Few Mentions of "Fiscal Policy"

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Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/keyness-general-theory.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/keyness-general-theory-contains.html

RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

Project Jupyter: JupyterLab is Ready for Users: "We are proud to announce the beta release series of JupyterLab, the next-generation web-based interface for Project Jupyter. tl;dr: JupyterLab is ready for daily use (installation, documentation, try it with Binder)..."

#webtech #acrossthewidemissouri

The Tech Boom and the Fate of Democracy: Ars Technica Live: Definitely Not My Morning Coffee

Definitely Not My Morning Coffee: Ars Technica Live: Annalee Newitz and Brad DeLong: The Tech Boom and the Fate of Democracy "Ars Technica Live #21... Filmed by Chris Schodt, produced by Justin Wolfson...

Annalee writes: "Last week, we had lots of questions about the fate of democracy in a world where the Internet feeds us propaganda faster than we can fact check it...

Trump's Tariffs: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast

1e07f4c60c.mp3

Last Wednesday night at Ars Technica LIVE! at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland—located beneath where the eight-lane Interstate 580 crosses the ten-lane California Highway 24—there were three demands from the People of the Internet Appearing in Meatspace for a return of the Morning Coffee podcast.

So why not?

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Trump's Tariffs: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast:

Why don’t Republican plutocrats, and the senators and representatives they have bought, recognize that plutocrats are not the allies of kleptocrats but rather the prey of kleptocracts?

Trump's Tariffs

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RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://help.micro.blog/2018/microcasting/ http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/15/trumps-tariffs-delong.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/04/trumps-tariffs.html

Joseph Schumpeter’s Liquidationist Errors: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast

Last Wednesday night at Ars Technica LIVE! at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland—located beneath where the eight-lane Interstate 580 crosses the ten-lane California Highway 24—there were three demands from the People of the Internet Appearing in Meatspace for a return of the Morning Coffee podcast.

So why not?

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Joseph Schumpeter’s Liquidationist Errors: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast:

Joseph Schumpeter was wrong in his claim the depressions were things to be suffered rather than cured. But how much smarter Schumpeter was than our modern day austerians!!

Joseph Schumpeter’s Liquidationist Errors

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RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml. The easiest way to create podcasts appears to be to wander around the campus dictating things to Wavelength which then automatically posts them to the very interesting micro.blog: https://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/14/joseph-schumpeters-liquidationist.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/04/joseph-schumpeter-on-liquidationism-hoisted-from-the-archives.html

Globalization: What Did Krugman Miss?: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast

Wednesday night at Ars Technica LIVE! at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland—located beneath where the eight-lane Interstate 580 crosses the ten-lane California Highway 24—there were three demands from the People of the Internet Appearing in Meatspace for a return of the Morning Coffee podcast.

So why not?

---

Globalization: What Did Krugman Miss?: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast:

Paul Krugman has a very nice short “framework for thinking about globalization and the world” piece derived from a talk he gave at the IMF last fall.

But…

Globalization: What Did Krugman Miss?: DeLong Morning Coffee Podcast

Time for a Linkdump!

It has been much, much, much too long since I did one of these...

A half dozen cream of the crop

1. Paul Krugman: "I've always said that white nationalism was the essence of Trumpism. According to this survey, it's more specific: white Christian nationalism. To which the only possible response is, oy vey..."

2. Kevin Drum: It's A Total Mystery Why There's A Lack of Class And Racial Diversity In Journalism: "All you need is one little sifting device-like unpaid internships requiring that people are funded by the Bank of Parental Units-and the entire pool of potential applicants is skewed.... This is just an obvious one that publications actually have control over..."

3. (2011): : The Government Needs to Lend to Banks Freely But at a Penalty Rate Blogging

4. David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson: The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States: "Rising Chinese import competition... cause[s] higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages... explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment..."

5. MIT Tech Review: Tencent is putting a robot research lab in China’s manufacturing heartland: "Tencent, the tech titan behind China's biggest social networking and chat platform, WeChat, is about to bring its AI research to life by opening a robotics lab in China's center of manufacturing, Shenzhen..."

6. Matthew Yglesias: Republicans are reaping the whirlwind: "They’ve synthesized the worst of Trump and the worst of the GOP establishment..."

Ask the Internet: Was the phrase "The Queen of Air and Darkness" really coined by A.E. Houseman in 1922? I can find no earlier references...

Creating Your Own Private Internet Intellectual Elysium

Absolutely brilliant from Henry Farrell: If being muted by Jonathan Chait were to regularly produce such good thought, Chait should mute everybody immediately!:

For Your Procrastination: Haven't Gathered Up One of These in a While...

Must-Read:

• Robert Waldmann: A Comment on the Return of “It’s Baaaack”: "Twenty years ago, Paul Krugman warned that the liquidity trap was not just an issue in the economic history of the 30s...

• Paul Krugman: It’s Baaack, Twenty Years Later: "In early 1998 I set out to reassure myself... to show that if Japan was having troubles, it was simply because the Bank of Japan wasn’t trying hard enough...

• Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links for 02-19-18

• Ezra Klein: Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and how democracies die: "Demagogues and authoritarians do not destroy democracies. It’s established political parties...

• Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes: Wittes and Rauch: Boycott the Republican Party: "If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees...

• Paul Krugman: The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight: "Puerto Rico[’s]... residents, almost a third of whom are still without power...

Live from Rant Central: Charlie Stross has had it with you people—those of you people who abandon worldbuilding and the exploration of possible human civilizations different from ours in the future direction for spectacle, and warmed over Napoleonic or WWII stories in fancy future dress: Charlie Stross: Why I barely read SF these days: "Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning...

Jupyter Notebook Programming Dos and Don'ts: A Running List

What else should I add to this?

Programming Dos and Don'ts: A Running List...

Procrastination: January 11, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Michael J. Boskin: Another Look at Tax Reform and Economic Growth: "Barro and I have clearly come to a different conclusion than Summers and Furman have about the bill...
• Ezra Klein: Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” is a damning portrait of an unfit president: "It would be easy enough for Trump to run a presidency that left him better-liked...
• Paul Krugman Notes on Farrell and Quiggin: "I’m not sure how many readers will realize the extent to which anti-Keynesian economic arguments, as opposed to those that Keynesians made, were invented on the fly...
• Matthew Yglesias: Trump’s North Korea tweet was based on a cable news segment: "Matt Gertz... undertaking the valuable investigative work of figuring out which Fox News segment had set Trump off...
• Jonathan Kirshner (January 15, 2017): America, America: "Consider what it took in Germany to bring about a Hitler...
• Paul Krugman: The Gambler’s Ruin of Small Cities: "Once... towns and small cities... served as central places serving a mainly rural population engaged in agriculture and other natural resource-based activities...

Should-Read: The very sharp Matthew Yglesias is extremely frightened about the future of America. I am not so frightened of Trump—I think that even if Republicans holding on to both houses of Congress we will get checks and balances working either through Amendment 25 or through the Justice Department and the New York Attorney General. The thing that scares me more is the next Trump, the competent Trump, the fascist playing on ethno-cultural resentments and fueled by plutocracy. As Karl Marx wrote in his appallingly sexist way of what he saw as a similar episode with the rise of Napoleon III back in 1850: "It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them..." The very sharp Charlie Stross proposes that advertising-supported internet and cable have hacked our brains in the pursuit of, as Zeynep Tufekci puts it, "a dystopia to get people to click on ads", and that we are hosed. I find myself searching for analogous hackings by print post-Gutenberg, by pamphlet and folio in the Enlightenment, by the first mass media in the age of adult male suffrage, and by radio in the age of Nuremberg rallies and fireside chats—and how the public sphere developed defense mechanisms. But I do not have any answers here: Matthew Yglesias: 2018 is the year that will decide if Trumpocracy replaces American democracy: "Loyalty to Donald Trump is the new principle of Republican Party politics...

Links and Such/Procrastination for November 25, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Paul Krugman (2009): The Obama Gaps: "The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job...
• Martin Wolf: A Republican tax plan built for plutocrats: "How does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy?...
• Matthew Yglesias: If the GOP tax plan is so good, why do they lie so much about it?: "Democratic programs may or may not be... good idea[s], [but] the bills they write that they say will expand the provision of social services in the United States really do expand the provision of social services...
• Martin Sandbu: Who should govern the euro?: "I have long argued against further centralisation of fiscal and structural policies, and proposed that some autonomy should instead be returned to the national level...
• Greg Leiserson: The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "First, the Tax Foundation appears to incorrectly model the interaction between federal and state corporate income taxes...
• Brink Lindsey: Further thoughts on libertarian anti-democracy: "Further thoughts by Will on libertarian anti-democracy’s effect on the GOP...
• Paul Krugman: Leprechaun Economics, With Numbers: "8% is a reasonable number for after-tax required return...
• Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and The Trade Deficit: "TF provides very little detail on their model, which is itself a flashing red light: transparency is essential...
• Chye-Ching Huang: @dashching on Twitter: "A Tax Foundation dynamic score that no-one should pay any attention to an indication of what this bill would do for growth...
• Noah Smith: On Twitter @noahpinion: "Nasty tweets are like nasty blog comments...
• Peter Beinart: Reflections of an Affirmative-Action Baby: "In 1991... Stephen Carter wrote... Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.... Little did I realize that the book’s title applied to me...
• Claudia Goldin: How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple): "Billie Jean King... the United States Open... 1972... $10,000. Ilie Năstase, her male counterpart, won $25,000...
• Julius Martov (1920): The state and the socialist revolution": "Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions...
• Barry Eichengreen: Trade Policy and Growth: "Nothing one can say in this area is uncontroversial...
• David Kamin: Fixing the Loophole in the House Limit on Deductibility of State and Local Income Taxes: "First, under the legislation...
• Paul Krugman: Discredited ideas
• Jason Furman: @jasonfurman on Twitter: Lack of Treasury Dynamic Analysis: "The lack of a Treasury career staff analysis of the growth and dynamic effects of the bill tells you a lot about what such an analysis would show..."
• Roger Farmer: How to Fix the Curse of the Five: "I recently came across this video link to a session held at the 2017 ASSA meetings on the ‘Curse of the Top Five’...

Links and Such/Procrastination for November 5, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Sustainable Development Goals: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate
• Keeping US Policymaking Honest: Fresh at Project Syndicate
• "Stockmanism" or "Magic Asteriskism" Is Bad Economics. Period
• When Globalization is Public Enemy Number One: At the Milken Review
• Ryan Avent (2011): Best Budget Ever: "PAUL RYAN has officially revealed the House Republicans' budget proposal...
• David Kamin: How a Tax Cut Turns Into a Tax Increase: "In rolling out their plan, House Republicans focused on an example family...
• Martin Wolf: The challenge of Xi Jinping’s Leninist autocracy: "Xi Jinping['s]... claims... are bold: 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics has crossed the threshold into a new era,'...
• Jason Furman and Greg Leiserson: The real cost of the Republican tax cuts: "The House Republican plan will itself be incomplete...
• Jason Furman: @jasonfurman on Twitter: "THREAD. New results from Penn-Wharton Budget Model show wage effects of corporate tax changes... Tim Alberta: John Boehner Unchained: "After railing against the defund strategy, however, Boehner surveyed his conference and realized...

Procrastination/Links and Such for October 30, 2017

Must-Reads:

• What Is a "Static" Revenue Analysis?
• Basic Econ 1-Level Tax Incidence Primer: Owen Zidar Requests MOAR Tax Incidence Model Blogging
• A Question I Did Have Time to Ask Alice Rivlin
• Another Question I Didn't Have Time to Ask Ask Alice Rivlin: Possibilities for Technocracy
• A Question I Will Not Have Time to Ask Alice Rivlin This Afternoon...
• Q & A: Should We Focus Our Attention on a Revitalized Public Sector and Social Insurance System?: INET Edinburgh
• Alan Auerbach: Five Questions for Congress on Tax Reform: "Congressional leaders say they’re working on a corporate tax reform...
• Will Wilkinson: Public Policy after Utopia: "That all our evidence about how social systems actually work comes from formerly or presently existing systems is a huge problem for anyone committed to a radically revisionary ideal of the morally best society...
• Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan: The DeLong-Shiller Redux: "2014, Robert Shiller and Brad DeLong.... [Shiller] claims if the value of this [CAPE] ratio is above 25, a major market drop is probably brewing...

Links and Such for the Week of October 22, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Some Misleading Geometry on Corporate Taxes (Wonkish): "There’s a fairly simple geometric way to see where the optimistic view that cutting corporate taxes is great for wages comes from...
• Jason Furman: Wage Increases Under the Unified Framework: Some talk lately of Ramsey models and their implications for wage increases under the Unified Framework (warning: irrelevant nerdy thread)...
• Noah Smith: Taylor and His Rule Are Not What the Fed Needsg: "How much should the Fed worry about inflation versus unemployment?...
• Ryan Avent: How should recessions be fought when interest rates are low?: "ONE day... bad news will blow in... a new recession will begin...
• Zeynep Tufekci: On Twitter: "Facebook and Google helped them better target fear-mongering videos: "Facebook and Google helped them better target fear-mongering videos showing 'France and Germany overrun by sharia law'—to get the ad money...
• Melissa S. Kearney: How Should Governments Address Inequality?: "Putting Piketty Into Practice...
• Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladston, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu: Do Americans want to tax capital? Evidence from online surveys: "We provide, to our knowledge, the first investigation of individuals’ preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth...
• Danny Quah: When Open Societies Fail: "Why is Wikipedia mostly OK, but so many comments at the end of newspaper articles make you weep for humanity’s future – when both are open for everyone to write?...

Procrastination for October 18, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Issi Romem: Paying For Dirt: Where Have Home Values Detached From Construction Costs?: "In the expensive U.S. coastal metros, home prices have detached from construction costs...
• Melissa S. Kearney: How Should Governments Address Inequality?: "Putting Piketty Into Practice...
• Ben Thompson: Netflix’s Earnings, Netflix’s Price Raise, Additional Netflix Notes: "Netflix has a completely orthogonal strategy: content is only valuable if it is evergreen...
• CPPC: Senator Amy Klobuchar: Drug Price Bills Will Likely Advance As Amendments to Larger Bills: "Senator Klobuchar began with... 1 out of 4 Americans have either cut their prescription drugs in half...
• Ryan Hagemann: The Coming Age of Genetic Modification: "Shoukhrat Mitalipov and a team of researchers at Oregon Health and Science University announced they had successfully altered human embryos with a mutation of the MYBPC3 gene...
• Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladston, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu: Do Americans want to tax capital? Evidence from online surveys: "We provide, to our knowledge, the first investigation of individuals’ preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth...
• Simon Wren-Lewis: The lesson monetary policy needs to learn: "The main problem with monetary policy...
• Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans... still exhibit large health disparities...
• Should Not Read: THE WHITE HOUSE: Office of the Press Secretary: Embargoed For Release Until 5:00 a.m. EDT, October 16, 2017: ON-THE-RECORD PRESS CALL BY COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS CHAIRMAN KEVIN HASSETT ON UPCOMING CEA REPORT
• Larry Summers: Hassett’s flawed analysis of the Trump tax plan: "Kevin Hassett... accuses me of an ad-hominem attack...
• What were they thinking of, signing this? Wasn't Kevin Hassett's behavior since 100% predictable? Letter in Support of the Nomination of Kevin Hassett to be Chairman of the Council of Economic…: "Alan J. Auerbach... Martin N. Baily... Dean Baker...
• CPPC: Victory in California! Drug Price Transparency Bill Becomes Law: "California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 17, a drug price transparency bill, into law...
• Carolyn Sissoko: On the Value of an “Aggressive” Academic Culture [Updated]: "This morning’s procrastination included a few tweets and blogposts on the 'women in economics' debate, and the twist the discussion is taking concerns me... https://syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2017/09/11/on-the-value-of-an-aggressive-academic-culture/
• Jay Shambaugh et al.: Thirteen Facts About Wage Growth: "Economic and policy changes are both important for the division of economic gains... http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/thirteen_facts_wage_growth.pdf
• Danny Quah: When Open Societies Fail: "Why is Wikipedia mostly OK, but so many comments at the end of newspaper articles make you weep for humanity’s future – when both are open for everyone to write?...
• David Anderson: State Approaches to Handling CSR Uncertainty for 2018 Premiums – Balloon Juice: "The 2018 ACA Marketplace that begins on November 1, 2017...
• Paul Krugman: Subsidies, Spite, and Supply Chains: "I’ve been fairly complacent about NAFTA’s fate...

Links and Such for the Week of October 15, 2017

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

Procrastination for October 15, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• @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...
• Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers: Rethinking macro stabilization Back to the future: "Lessons from past crises...
• 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...

Procrastinating on October 12, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: August 2017 Report Edition: "The quits rate continued its trend of not moving much in August...
• Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans... still exhibit large health disparities...
• Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo: Wealth distribution and social mobility in the US: A quantitative approach: "We concentrate on... i) skewed and persistent distribution of earnings...
• Karl Smith: Pax Sinica: What Is To Be done?: "Tyler Cowen reminds me of an issue I used to think a lot about...
• Tim Duy: Kevin Warsh, Very Serious Person: "Scott Sumner is perplexed by... Kevin Warsh['s in 2010]...
• 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/
• 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...

Procrastinating on October 10, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• 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...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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?...
• 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
• Vivienne Ming: Applied Neuroscience and Ramping Up Human Potential https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUHXoPS0fm8
• Mary E. Burfisher, Sherman Robinson, and Karen Thierfelder: : The Impact of NAFTA on the United States: "The mainstream forecasts during the NAFTA debate were basically correct..." http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.15.1.125
• James Kwak: The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party: "A central shortcoming of the party is that, on economic issues, it has nothing to say to people trapped on the wrong side of our country’s growing inequality divide... https://baselinescenario.com/2017/06/15/telling-a-better-story-a-new-economic-vision-for-the-democratic-party/

Links and Such for the Week of October 8, 2017

Must-Read:

• Paul Krugman: The Transfer Problem and Tax Incidence: "I’ve spent three decades pointing out the fallacy of the doctrine of immaculate transfer...
• Tyler Cowen: The Fed Needs a Savvy Politician as Its Chair: "The next time major economic volatility comes around, Fed decisions will be scrutinized and politicized like never before... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-05/the-fed-needs-a-savvy-politician-as-its-chair
• Peter Suderman: There isn't a political home for people on the right who care about policy: "A recurring theme of 2017 is how frustrated right of center folks who care about policy are with Republicans... https://twitter.com/petersuderman/status/913488456067747840
• Pedro Nicolaci de Costa: Trump sees Fed chair nomination as a reality show: "Neil Dutta, head of US economics at the research firm RenaissanceMacro, had this to say about the possible appointment of Warsh... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-fed-chair-nomination-a-reality-show-2017-9
• Nate Silver: The Media Needs To Stop Rationalizing President Trump’s Behavior: "San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz... it’s hard to see what possible political benefit Trump could get from criticizing Cruz... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-needs-to-stop-rationalizing-president-trumps-behavior/

Procrastination for October 7, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Bridget Ansel: Weekend Reading: “occupational segregation” edition: "Even as income inequality spiraled over the past fifty years, America’s child-poverty rate was cut in half...
• Equitable Growth: Equitable Growth’s Jobs Day Graphs: September 2017 Report Edition: "The prime employment rate hit a new high for this expansion, rising to 78.9 percent in September...
• Joan Williams: Equitable Growth in Conversation: "Elites have what are called entrepreneurial networks—wide circles of acquaintances that are often national, or even global... http://equitablegrowth.org/in-conversation/equitable-growth-in-conversation-joan-williams/
• Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung: East Asian Financial and Economic Development: "Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the 1930s... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23845
• Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman: : "The equivalent of 10% of [annual] world GDP is held in tax havens globally...
• Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence H. Summers: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy: "The Peterson Institute will hold a conference on 'Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy'...
• Paul Krugman: The Transfer Problem and Tax Incidence: "I’ve spent three decades pointing out the fallacy of the doctrine of immaculate transfer...
• Peter Leyden: California Is the Future/span>: "Ground Zero: San Francisco...
• In-Koo Cho and Kenneth Kasa: Model Averaging and Persistent Disagreement: "Two agents construct models of an endogenous price process...
• Bob Margo: The integration of economic history into economics: "Many have noticed this long-term integration of economic history into economics...
• Peter Leyden et al.: Future of Work http://reinvent.net/events/event/future-of-work-kickoff-event/ | http://reinvent.net/events/event/future-of-work-kickoff-event-23-panel/ | http://reinvent.net/events/event/future-of-work-kickoff-event-33-panel-2-qa/ | http://reinvent.net/events/event/future-of-work-kickoff-event-44-breakout-sessions-conclusion/: "I'm Pete Leydon, and I am the founder of Reinvent...

Procrastination for October 5, 2017...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Politics in the Way of Progress: Live Over at Project Syndicate http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/politics-in-the-way-of-progress-live-over-at-project-syndicate/
• Brink Lindsey and the Road to Utopia http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/brink-lindsey-and-the-road-to-utopia/
• Elizabeth Munnich and Abigail Wozniak: What explains the rising share of U.S. men in registered nursing?: "This paper documents four decades of increasing participation in registered nursing among US men and explores reasons for this change... http://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/rising-share-men-nursing/
• Nick Bunker: Old companies may be slowing down the U.S. economyh: "Titan Alon and David Berger... Robert Dent... and Benjamin Pugsley... labor productivity of firms over their lifecycles... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/old-companies-may-be-slowing-down-the-u-s-economy/
• Karl Smith: Just Say No To Kevin Warsh: "Apparently Kevin Warsh is in a dead heat with Janet Yellen for Fed Chair.  I tried to articulate just how bad this is but the whole thing has me shrill... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/notes/just-say-no-kevin-warsh/
• Victor Chernozhukov et al.: Announcement of new Economics (econ) archive: "An Economics section of the scientific repository arXiv is opening this month... https://arxiv.org/help/econ/announcement
• James Pethokoukis: Why can't the GOP come up with any serious ideas?: "This is proving to be a monumental week in the 163-year history of the Republican Party. And so far, it isn’t going very well... http://www.aei.org/publication/why-cant-the-gop-come-up-with-any-serious-ideas/
• Jong-Wha Lee: South Korea’s Looming Crisis: "More problematic, however, are South Korea’s low labor-market efficiency and weak institutions... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/south-korea-nuclear-threat-economic-crisis-by-lee-jong-wha-2017-10
• Tyler Cowen: The Fed Needs a Savvy Politician as Its Chair: "The next time major economic volatility comes around, Fed decisions will be scrutinized and politicized like never before... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-05/the-fed-needs-a-savvy-politician-as-its-chair
• Alice Wu: Labor Lunch: Gender Stereotyping Academia: Evidence from Economics Job Market Rumors Forum: "Thursday, October 05, 2017 | 12-1 p.m. | 648 Evans Hall... http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/econ.html?event_ID=111181 https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4i8900wgwn0gcr/Wu_EJMR_paper_09_2017.pdf?dl=0
• Ben Thompson: Google’s Search for the Sweet Spot: "What was most striking... was Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s opening... https://stratechery.com/2017/googles-search-for-the-sweet-spot/
• Paul Krugman: Shifts Get Real: Understanding the GOP's Policy Quagmire: "There are crucial links between the health care faceplant and the bad news (for the GOP) on taxes — links both causal and... cultural... https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/shifts-get-real-understanding-the-gops-policy-quagmire/?_r=0
• Cosma Shalizi (1994): Review of: John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism: "What to do the week after the Revolution has always been a poser for socialists... http://bactra.org/reviews/future-for-socialism/
• Peter Suderman: There isn't a political home for people on the right who care about policy: "A recurring theme of 2017 is how frustrated right of center folks who care about policy are with Republicans... https://twitter.com/petersuderman/status/913488456067747840
• MIT: Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science (Course 6-14): "Required Subjects: Mathematics: 18.06 Linear Algebra... http://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-economics-data-science-course-6-14/
• Karl Smith: THE BIG SIX'S TAX REFORM FRAMEWORK: THE GOOD AND THE BAD: "For individual taxpayers, we see a meaningful effort to curb and slowly eliminate the myriad of deductions and loopholes that plague the tax code... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/big-sixs-tax-reform-framework-good-bad/
• Michael Geruso and Timothy Layton: Selection in Health Insurance Markets and Its Policy Remedies: "We begin by outlining some important but often misunderstood differences between two types of conceptual frameworks... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23876

Procrastination for October 1, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Pedro Nicolaci de Costa: Trump sees Fed chair nomination as a reality show: "Neil Dutta, head of US economics at the research firm RenaissanceMacro, had this to say about the possible appointment of Warsh... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-fed-chair-nomination-a-reality-show-2017-9
• Nate Silver: The Media Needs To Stop Rationalizing President Trump’s Behavior: "San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz... it’s hard to see what possible political benefit Trump could get from criticizing Cruz... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-needs-to-stop-rationalizing-president-trumps-behavior/
• Adam Jentleson: The Myth of Mitch McConnell, Political Super-Genius: Cynicism is the lifeblood of McConnell’s career... http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/28/myth-mitch-mcconnell-genius-master-senate-215656
• Henry Farrell: Chelsea Manning and Harvard : "Elmendorf describes... [what] I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about [fellowships]... http://crookedtimber.org/2017/09/18/chelsea-manning-and-harvard/
• Ricardo Hausmann: Making the Future Work for Us: "To pessimists, the introduction of... general-purpose technologies – including 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things – threatens the demand for labor... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/technology-future-of-work-by-ricardo-hausmann-2017-09
• Maximillian Kasy: Quantitative Methods in Economics: "Part I: 1. Linear predictors and least squares fit..." https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/kasy/files/1126syllabuskasyfall2017.pdf
• Anton Howes: Why study Economic History?: "What is Economic History? It is about asking some of the biggest and most interesting questions imaginable... https://medium.com/@antonhowes/why-study-economic-history-ef747767be25

Weekend Reading: The Rise of the Thought Leader: David Sessions on Dan Drezner

Weekend Reading: David Sessions: The Rise of the Thought Leader: "How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual... https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual

Links and Such for the Week of October 1, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Ben Thompson: Defining Aggregators: "Value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones... https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
• Josh Barro: Trump, GOP tax plan is looming political disaster: "President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, hours before the announcement of the latest Republican tax proposal, that... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-plan-political-disaster-2017-9
• Kieran Healy (2015): America's Ur-Choropleths: "Choropleth maps... showing various distributions geographically... make it easy to present a geographical distribution to insinuate an explanation... https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/

Procrastination for September 29, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Triennial data release” edition : "The rise in U.S. income inequality is well known by now... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-triennial-data-release-edition/
• Nick Bunker: An update on the state of wealth inequality in the United States: "The Federal Reserve yesterday released the 2016 version of its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/an-update-on-the-state-of-wealth-inequality-in-the-united-states/
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden: "Off the Record": "I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016593.html#4335396
• Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Emil Verner: How do Credit Supply Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Evidence from the United States in the 1980s: "Does an expansion in credit supply affect the economy by increasing productive capacity, or by boosting demand?... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23802
• Jake VanderPlas: Reproducible Data Analysis in Jupyter: "Jupyter notebooks provide a useful environment for interactive exploration of data... http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2017/03/03/reproducible-data-analysis-in-jupyter/
• Carol Christ: Chancellor's Letter to the Berkeley Campus Community on Free Speech: "Dear campus community, The past several weeks have been trying ones for Berkeley...
• William Faulkner (1948): Intruder in the Dust http://amzn.to/2wZt4Ms: "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
• Ben Thompson: Defining Aggregators: "Value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones... https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
• Christopher Jeffery: Fed’s [John] Williams floats co-ordinated shift from 2% targets: "Williams... believes 2% inflation targets adopted by most of the developed world’s central banks will prove to be suboptimal over the next 10 years... https://www.centralbanking.com/central-banks/monetary-policy/operating-framework/3301501/feds-williams-floats-co-ordinated-shift-from-2-targets
• Josh Barro: Trump, GOP tax plan is looming political disaster: "President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, hours before the announcement of the latest Republican tax proposal, that... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-plan-political-disaster-2017-9
• MEMORANDUM FROM: Steven Law. DATE: .September 26, 2017 SUBJECT: Alabama and the New Republican Primary Battlefield: "Although special elections are notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult to extrapolate from... http://delong.typepad.com/rlc.pdf

The 17 Berkeley Classes in Our Largest Lecture Hall This Fall...

The 17 classes in Berkeley's largest lecture hall: Wheeler Auditorium Classes: Fall 2017:

Computer Science, etc.: 9:

• COMPSCI-STAT C8: Foundations of Data Science
• COMPSCI 61A: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• COMPSCI 61B: Data Structures
• COMPSCI 61C: Great Ideas of Computer Architecture (Machine Structures)
• COMPSCI 70: Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory
• COMPSCI 170: Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems
• COMPSCI 186/286: Introduction to Database Systems
• ELENG 16A: Designing Information Devices and Systems I
• ELENG 16B: Designing Information Devices and Systems II

Procrastination for September 26, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Danny Yagan: : Employment hysteresis from the great recession: "This paper uses U.S. local areas as a laboratory to test whether the Great Recession depressed 2015 employment... http://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/employment-hysteresis-great-recession/
• Jessica Fulton: Income inequality and economic mobility remain defined largely by race and ethnicity in the United States/span>: "The Congressional Black Caucus held its Annual Legislative Conference... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/income-inequality-and-economic-mobility-remain-defined-largely-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-united-states/
• Michael Jordan: On Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science: "The rapid growth in the size and scope of datasets in science and technology has created a need for novel foundational perspectives on data analysis that blend the inferential and computational sciences... https://bids.berkeley.edu/resources/videos/computational-thinking-inferential-thinking-and-data-science
• CBPP: Tax Reform Briefs: "Congress is expected to consider legislation to make major changes to the tax code this year. Here is a series of two-page explanations of key issues in tax reform... https://www.cbpp.org/tax-reform-briefs
• Robert C. Feenstra and Akira Sasaharab: The “China Shock”, Exports and U.S. Employment: A Global Input-Output Analysis: "We quantify the impact on U.S. employment from imports and exports during 1995-2011, using the World Input-Output Database... http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/Papers/Feenstra_Sasahara.pdf
• Rachel Gillett and Anaele Pelisson: 12 jobs robots are already taking over: "Talk to any futurist, and they'll tell you that robots are coming for our jobs... http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/jobs-replaced-by-robots-2017-9/
• Kieran Healy (2015): America's Ur-Choropleths: "Choropleth maps... showing various distributions geographically... make it easy to present a geographical distribution to insinuate an explanation... https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/
• Noah Smith: The Racism of the Rust Belt: "Wow. This article about the Rust Belt is amazing... https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/911318880500408320
• Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart: The Fear Factor in Today’s Interest Rates: "The theory of “rare disaster risk” has progressed considerably in recent years, owing to the work of the Harvard economist Robert Barro... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/north-korea-fear-drives-low-interest-rates-by-carmen-reinhart-and-vincent-reinhart-2017-09
• Alan Beattie: As they unwind QE, central banks must come clean about inflation: "The Fed has tightened policy and the BoE is now prefiguring a rise. Neither can point at serious signs of inflationary pressure... https://www.ft.com/content/a5dbddfa-9ebe-11e7-9a86-4d5a475ba4c5
• Blakeley B. McShane et al.: Abandon Statistical Significance: "The status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold... http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/abandon.pdf
• Matt Yglesias: The staggering hypocrisy of Bill Cassidy and Lindsey GrahamVox: "Bill Cassidy... safe seat in Louisiana, could... have spent the past six months... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/19/16330094/cassidy-graham-hypocrisy

Links for the Week of September 24, 2017

Must-Reads:

1. Joshua Gans: Danny Kahneman on AI versus Humans: "At our AI conference last week, Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman was commenting on a paper by Colin Camerer: https://digitopoly.org/2017/09/22/kahneman-on-ai-versus-humans/

2. Ezra Klein: Graham-Cassidy could’ve been the GOP’s best Obamacare replacement: "Instead, Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy wrote the worst plan yet... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/20/16333384/graham-cassidy-obamacare-health-care

3. George Akerlof (1979): The Case against Conservative Macroeconomics: An Inaugural Lecture: "The old classical economics bases its case against the efficacy of fiscal policy on the low interest elasticity of money demand... http://delong.typepad.com/2553741.pdf

4. Josh Bivens and Dean Baker (2016): The Wrong Tool for the Right Job: "Raising interest rates is a poor strategy for managing asset bubbles... http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/bubbles-2016-05.pdf

Procrastination on September 23, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Discussing distributional tables” edition: "The decline in the start-up firms across the U.S. economy is now a well-documented and troubling trend. Ben Casselman reports... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-discussing-distributional-tables-edition/
• Joshua Gans: Danny Kahneman on AI versus Humans: "At our AI conference last week, Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman was commenting on a paper by Colin Camerer: https://digitopoly.org/2017/09/22/kahneman-on-ai-versus-humans/
• John Cole: Damn I Love The Jag and the Jet and the Mansion: "Graham/Cassidy... bad policy... will devastate many GOP states... hurt tens of millions... https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/09/23/damn-i-love-the-jag-and-the-jet-and-the-mansion/
• Nisha Chikhale: Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit is worth exploring in the U.S. tax reform debate : "The Grow American Income Now, or GAIN, Act proposed by Rep. Khanna and Sen. Brown... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/expanding-the-earned-income-tax-credit-is-worth-exploring-in-the-u-s-tax-reform-debate/
• Jacob Levy: Black Liberty Matters: "'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?'... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/black-liberty-matters/
• Matthew Yglesias: : The economy really is broken — but we know how to fix it: "The top 5 percent includes all the members of Congress and all of the donors and lobbyists and business leaders whom members of Congress speak to... https://www.vox.com/2017/9/19/16319416/broken-economy
• Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Revolution of Information Economics: The Past and the Future: "The economics of information has constituted a revolution in economics... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23780
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Eat Out Much?: "With 16 dead and well over 400 documented as infected, it is fair to say San Diego is in the midst of an epidemic of Hepatitis A... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/09/eat-out-much.html
• Jacob Leibenluft et al.: Like Other ACA Repeal Bills, Cassidy-Graham Plan Would Add Millions to Uninsured, Destabilize Individual Market: "Cassidy-Graham Block Grant and Medicaid Per Capita Cap Cut Federal Funding for Most States by 2026... https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/like-other-aca-repeal-bills-cassidy-graham-plan-would-add-millions-to-uninsured
• Pseudoerasmus: The 25 most stimulating economic history books since 2000: "Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective... https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/01/12/9351/

Live from the Data Science Bubble: When Masters in Financial Engineering degrees are being sold by business schools as Data Science degrees, can the Cthulpocalypse be far behind?

Procrastination on September 21, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• “Any Community… Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome and Safe…” | Equitable Growth http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe/
• Will Wilkinson: What Drives Opposition to Immigration? In-Group Favoritism, Out-Group Hostility, and Donald Trump: "Friedman contrasts 'xenophobia' and 'nationalism', but I’d like to reframe... (To many of us, xenophobia and nationalism go hand in hand.)... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/drives-opposition-immigration-group-favoritism-group-hostility-donald-trump/
• Josh Barro: : Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill has Alaska Purchase for Lisa Murkowski: "Making things odder: Neither VerBruggen nor I could locate the provision in the bill...
• Ezra Klein: Graham-Cassidy could’ve been the GOP’s best Obamacare replacement: "Instead, Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy wrote the worst plan yet... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/20/16333384/graham-cassidy-obamacare-health-care
• Ben Thompson: THE GDPR AND FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE, INTELLIGENT TRACKING PREVENTION, DATA PORTABILITY AND SOCIAL GRAPHS: "Several folks have suggested that the GDPR’s requirements around data portability... https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-google-intelligent-tracking-prevention-data-portability-and-social-graphs/
• Kristie De Peña: Entrepreneurial Visas: "Some of the most powerful and effective innovators are immigrant entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the unique opportunities the United States offers... https://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EntrepreneurialStartupVisas.pdf
• Liz Hipple: : New federal antitrust legislation recognizes U.S. workers are not only consumers: "The introduction of two new antitrust bills by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, last week... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/new-federal-antitrust-legislation-recognizes-u-s-workers-are-not-only-consumers/
• Jeff Stein: GOP senators are rushing to pass Graham-Cassidy. We asked 9 to explain what it does: "Republican senators are struggling to articulate why they are rushing to pass their last-ditch effort to repeal and replace Obamacare... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/20/16333876/republican-senators-graham-cassidy
• Nick Bunker: Another lesson from the 1930s for the Federal Reserve: "Matthew Jaremski... and Gabriel Mathy... the excess reserves in the 1930s... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/another-lesson-from-the-1930s-for-the-federal-reserve/
• Janet Napolitano et al.: The Future of NAFTA and the State of U.S. Mexico Relations: "September 21 :: U.C. Washington Center :: 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW... California Assembly Passes Bill to Make Drug Prices Transparent: "The California Assembly passed Senate Bill 17... prescription drug price transparency... 66-9... https://www.thecppc.com/single-post/2017/09/13/California-Assembly-Passes-Bill-to-Make-Drug-Prices-Transparent
• Josh Bivens: An evidence-based Fed would hold rates steady in September: "The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets today and tomorrow to determine whether or not to raise interest rates... http://www.epi.org/blog/an-evidence-based-fed-would-hold-rates-steady-in-september/

Procrastination on September 19, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Ann Marie Marciarille: Patent Transfer to Trigger Sovereign Immunity Defense: "It is absolutely fascinating to  read that that Allergan and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe have reportedly made arrangements for transfer of certain patent rights... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/09/patent-transfer-to-trigger-state-action-immunity-defense.html
• George Akerlof (1979): The Case against Conservative Macroeconomics: An Inaugural Lecture: "The old classical economics bases its case against the efficacy of fiscal policy on the low interest elasticity of money demand... http://delong.typepad.com/2553741.pdf
• Santiago Perez: Railroads and the Rural to Urban Transition: Evidence from 19th Century Argentina: "Seminar 211, Economic History: Seminar: Economic History | September 18 | 2-4 p.m. | 597 Evans Hall... http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/econ.html?view=summary&timeframe=range&startdate=2017-08-01&enddate=2017-12-31&filter=Secondary%20Event%20Type&filtersel=1057
• Josh Bivens and Dean Baker (2016): The Wrong Tool for the Right Job: "Raising interest rates is a poor strategy for managing asset bubbles... http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/bubbles-2016-05.pdf
• Jeffrey Friedman: TRUMP VOTERS AND ECONOMIC GRIEVANCES (IT'S THE MEDIA, STUPID): "This economic theory of Trump’s victory is attractive because it tracks many Trump voters’ words... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/trump-voters-economic-grievances-media-stupid/
• Jay Nordlinger: Seeing the Confederacy Clear: On the terrible issue of monuments and all that: "Ed Gillespie... is running for governor of Virginia... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451399/seeing-confederacy-clear-terrible-issue-monuments-and-all
• Charlie Stross (2015): The Present in Deep History: "Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?... http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/09/the-present-in-deep-history.html
• Liz Hipple: Weekend reading: “labor markets and income” edition: "Tax reform is unlikely to benefit workers, argues Kimberly Clausing... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-labor-markets-and-income-edition/
• Jerry Taylor: How to Change Public Opinion: "Political scientists... offer a pretty good road map for those who want to effectively go about “waging and winning the war of ideas”... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/how-to-change-public-opinion/
• David Card and A. Abigail Payne: High School Choices and the Gender Gap in STEM: "Women who graduate from university are less likely than men to specialize in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM)... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23769.pdf

Monday Smackdown Smackdown...

Live from Evans Hall: The purpose of having a "Monday DeLong Smackdown" was twofold: (a) to make me smarter by forcing me to go through and internalize smart critiques of things I had written; and (b) to provide some reward and recognition to those people who would do me a favor by writing a smart critique of something I had written.

It has failed.

Links and Such for the Week of September 18, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Jerry Taylor: How to Change Public Opinion: "Political scientists... offer a pretty good road map for those who want to effectively go about “waging and winning the war of ideas”... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/how-to-change-public-opinion/
• Bin Yu: Three principles for data science: predictability, stability, and computability: "September 12, 2017 :: 4:10pm to 5:00pm :: 190 Doe Library" https://bids.berkeley.edu/events/three-principles-data-science-predictability-stability-and-computability
• Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Fed may pause rate hikes if inflation weakness persists: "The Federal Reserve is embarking on an annual summer ritual: Downgrading its overly optimistic forecasts for economic growth... http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-may-pause-rate-hikes-if-inflation-weakness-persists-2017-7

"$"????

I understand how to use "$" as delimiters for math expressions in Mathjax. For example:

(3)                 ${Y _{t}} = {K _{t}}^\alpha {\left(L _{t}E _{t}\right)}^{1 - \alpha}$

 

But how do I then use "$" to denote, say, $50? The markdown/mathJax processors turn this line into:

But how do I use "$" to denote, say, $50? The markdown/mathJax processors turn this line into:

Do "They" Really Say: "Technological Progress Is Slowing Down"?

Consider the 256 GB memory iPhone X: Implemented in vacuum tubes in 1957, the transistors in an iPhoneX alone would have:

• cost 150 trillion of today's dollars: one and a half times today's global annual product
• taken up a hundred-story square building 300 meters high, and 3 kilometers long and wide
• drawn 150 terawatts of power—30 times the world's current generating capacity

Procrastination on September 14, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: Markups, macroeconomics, and the changing U.S. economy: "Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy experienced changes in key economic metrics that don’t bode well for the welfare of most people... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/markups-macroeconomics-and-the-changing-u-s-economy/
• Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: July 2017 Report Edition | Equitable Growth: "The Beveridge Curve in July looks to be very close to its pre-recession trend: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/jolts-day-graphs-july-2017-report-edition/
• Joseph E. Stiglitz: Where Modern Macroeconomics Went Wrong: "This paper provides a critique of the DSGE models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter-century... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23795
• Matthew Kahn: Does Culture Matter? The Case of Academic Economics: "I stumbled across this very interesting (and depressing) post by Claudia Sahm... http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2017/09/does-culture-matter-case-of-academic.html
• Barbara Biasi and Petra Moser: Effects of Copyrights on Science: Evidence from the WWII Book Republication Program: "In 1942, the American Book Republication Program (BRP) allowed US publishers to reprint exact copies of German-owned science books... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2542879
• Caroline Freund and Dario Sidhu: Manufacturing and the 2016 Election: An Analysis of US Presidential Election Data: "Much of the public discourse and media analysis of the surprise outcome of the 2016 US presidential election has emphasized the role of manufacturing workers... ..." https://piie.com/system/files/documents/wp17-7.pdf
• Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage: "The institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies... http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199247757.001.0001/acprof-9780199247752
• Bin Yu: Three principles for data science: predictability, stability, and computability: "September 12, 2017 :: 4:10pm to 5:00pm :: 190 Doe Library" https://bids.berkeley.edu/events/three-principles-data-science-predictability-stability-and-computability
• Austin Clemens: Previewing tomorrow’s annual income and poverty report: "'Income and Poverty in the United States', on Tuesday... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/previewing-tomorrows-annual-income-and-poverty-report/
• Michael Boskin (March 6, 2009): Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow: "our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123629969453946717
• Diane Coyle: Inequality, revisited: "Recently I’ve been dipping into The Contradictions of Capital in the 21st Century: The Piketty Opportunity, edited by Pat Hudson and Keith Tribe... http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2017/09/inequality-revisited/
• Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Fed may pause rate hikes if inflation weakness persists: "The Federal Reserve is embarking on an annual summer ritual: Downgrading its overly optimistic forecasts for economic growth... http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-may-pause-rate-hikes-if-inflation-weakness-persists-2017-7
• Keven Drum: Here's Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders: "As Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn't show up...
• David Glasner: Milton Friedman Says that the Rate of Interest Is NOT the Price of Money: Don’t Listen to Him!: "Friedman’s repeated claims that the rate of interest is not the price of money... https://uneasymoney.com/2017/09/07/milton-friedman-says-that-the-rate-of-interest-is-not-the-price-of-money-dont-listen-to-him/
• Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem: "The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups... https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.4.221
• Frank Pasquale (2011): Economic Policy for the Worried Wealthy: "Why is the austerity movement so powerful in the US?... https://concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/04/economic-policy-for-the-worried-wealthy.html
• Noah Smith: Realism in macroeconomic modeling: "Ljungqvist and Sargent are trying to solve the Shimer Puzzle... http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/realism-in-macroeconomic-modeling.html
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Men First: "The New York Times had quite an interesting article... on cancer biopsy laboratory error rates... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/06/men-first.html

Links and Such for the Week of September 10, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem: "The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups... https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.4.221
• Frank Pasquale (2011): Economic Policy for the Worried Wealthy: "Why is the austerity movement so powerful in the US?... https://concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/04/economic-policy-for-the-worried-wealthy.html
• Austin Clemens: New report on evidenced-based policymaking boasts recommendations that Congress must take seriously: "The Commission’s report does not address funding levels for existing statistical agencies, but funding for these agencies is not a luxury... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/new-report-on-evidenced-based-policymaking-boasts-recommendations-that-congress-must-take-seriously/
• Cardiff Garcia: Brainard’s framing challenge: "Tim Duy has the right response to Lael Brainard’s speech today... https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/05/2193262/brainards-framing-challenge/
• Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti: How Local Housing Regulations Smother the U.S. Economy: "For most of the 20th century, workers moved to areas where new industries and opportunities were emerging... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulations-us-economy.html
• Forecaster Beven: Hurricane Irma Forecast Discussion: "The hurricane is currently being steered by the subtropical ridge to the north.... After 48 h, a mid- to upper-level trough digging into the eastern United States is expected to create a break in the ridge and allow Irma to turn northward... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCDAT1+shtml/070257.shtml?
• Jennifer Rubin: Ending DACA would be Trump’s most evil act: "the GOP under Trump has defined itself as the white grievance party... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/09/04/trump-ending-daca-would-be-cruelty-wrapped-in-a-web-of-lies/
• Paul Krugman: Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?: "Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/opinion/houston-harvey-infrastructure-development.html
• Brink Lindsey: The End of the Working Class: "The nightmare of the industrial age was that the dependence of technological civilization on brute labor was never-ending... https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/08/30/end-working-class/

Procrastination on September 8, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Austin Clemens: New report on evidenced-based policymaking boasts recommendations that Congress must take seriously: "The Commission’s report does not address funding levels for existing statistical agencies, but funding for these agencies is not a luxury... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/new-report-on-evidenced-based-policymaking-boasts-recommendations-that-congress-must-take-seriously/illing to pay for such efforts...
• Paul Krugman: The Political Failure of Trickle-Down Economics: "We tend to think of the period since Reagan’s election as a conservative era... https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/the-political-failure-of-trickle-down-economics/
• Sam Bowles and Wendy Carlin: A new paradigm for the introductory course in economics: "The contributions of Keynes, Hayek, and Nash–aggregate demand, the central economic role of limited information, and strategic interactions modelled by game theory... http://voxeu.org/article/new-paradigm-introductory-course-economics
• German Gutierrez and Thomas Philippon: Investment-less growth: An empirical investigation: "Business investment remains low despite high profits, low funding costs, and high asset values... https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/investment-less-growth-an-empirical-investigation/
• Teresa Nielson Hayden: Rules for Commenters: "What's striking about this fictional rule set is the issues it doesn't recognize... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016593.html#4335396
• Eve Fairbanks: Can Your Best Friends Be Books?: "I, too, had book friends as a child, and at a time when making real friends could fee
• Yonatan Zunger: What can be Pardoned?: "This [Arpaio] pardon is now being challenged in court as being unconstitutional... https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/what-can-be-pardoned-bd113749898a
• Cardiff Garcia: Brainard’s framing challenge: "Tim Duy has the right response to Lael Brainard’s speech today... https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/05/2193262/brainards-framing-challenge/
• Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti: How Local Housing Regulations Smother the U.S. Economy: "For most of the 20th century, workers moved to areas where new industries and opportunities were emerging... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulations-us-economy.html

Procrastination on September 7, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Forecaster Beven: Hurricane Irma Forecast Discussion: "The hurricane is currently being steered by the subtropical ridge to the north.... After 48 h, a mid- to upper-level trough digging into the eastern United States is expected to create a break in the ridge and allow Irma to turn northward... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCDAT1+shtml/070257.shtml?
• Bridget Ansel: Pay transparency is good for employees but can also benefit businesses: "The Trump administration announced this past week that it is halting the implementation of an Obama-era rule... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/pay-transparency-is-good-for-employees-but-can-also-benefit-businesses/
• Etsy NY: Winning Change for Women and Families: An Evening with Heather Boushey: "Tue, September 12, 2017, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT... https://www.eventbrite.com/e/winning-change-for-women-and-families-an-evening-with-heather-boushey-tickets-36910118157
• David Glasner: In the General Theory Keynes First Trashed and then Restated the Fisher Equation: "I will not offer a detailed explanation here of the basis on which Keynes criticized the Fisher equation in the General Theory... https://uneasymoney.com/2017/09/05/in-the-general-theory-keynes-first-trashed-and-then-restated-the-fisher-equation/
• Robert Lucas: A Professional Memoir: "There was nothing spooky about Mendel’s genetic theories...
• Ricardo Caballero, Alp Simsek: Risk intolerance and the global economy: A new macroeconomic framework: "Interest rates continue to decline across the globe, while returns to capital remain constant or increasing...

Procrastination on September 4, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nisha Chikhale: How would homebuyers respond to a less generous U.S. mortgage interest deduction?: "Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/how-would-homebuyers-respond-to-a-less-generous-u-s-mortgage-interest-deduction/
• Nick Bunker: When the next recession hits, how will fiscal stimulus affect government debt sustainability?: "Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko... investigate how much of an impact a stimulus program would have... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/when-the-next-recession-hits-how-will-fiscal-stimulus-affect-government-debt-sustainability/
• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “One inequality measure to rule them all?” edition: "There is no single best measure of inequality, argues Austin Clemens... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-one-inequality-measure-to-rule-them-all-edition/
• Equitable Growth: Jobs Day Graphs: August 2017 Report Edition: "The 0.3 point drop in the prime-age employment rate to 78.4 percent in August is a troubling sign... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/equitable-growths-jobs-day-graphs-august-2017-report-edition/
• Jennifer Rubin: Ending DACA would be Trump’s most evil act: "the GOP under Trump has defined itself as the white grievance party... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/09/04/trump-ending-daca-would-be-cruelty-wrapped-in-a-web-of-lies/
• Paul Krugman: Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?: "Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/opinion/houston-harvey-infrastructure-development.html
• Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links for 09-04-17: "America needs its unions more than ever  - Larry Summers... http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/09/links-for-09-04-17.html
• Nicole Belle: Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread: "It is a sad statement on the state of cable news today that a smarter conversation on climate change can be had in Teen Vogue than on any one of the shows... http://crooksandliars.com/2017/09/sunday-morning-bobblehead-thread
• Brink Lindsey: The End of the Working Class: "The nightmare of the industrial age was that the dependence of technological civilization on brute labor was never-ending... https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/08/30/end-working-class/
• Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman on Twitter: "Thinking more about why we mess up urban land use. Background: population-weighted density, from Census..." https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/904348528700530688 https://t.co/Up40gCypzw
• Larry Summers: America needs its unions more than ever: "I suspect the most important factor... is that the bargaining power of... workers has decreased... https://www.ft.com/content/180127da-8e59-11e7-9580-c651950d3672
• Robert M. Solow (1985): Economic History and Economics: "Economics is a social science... subject to Damon Runyon's Law that nothing between human beings is more than three to one... http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
• Greg Leiserson: In defense of the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate: "The overwhelming majority of the corporate tax base consists of excess returns... above the risk-free rate such as those due to monopoly pricing power... http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/in-defense-of-the-statutory-u-s-corporate-tax-rate/
• Austin Clemens: No one measure of inequality tells the whole story–income, wealth, and consumption should be considered together: "The Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, releases the results of its annual Consumer Expenditure Survey, or CEX, today... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/no-one-measure-of-inequality-tells-the-whole-story-income-wealth-and-consumption-should-be-considered-together/
• Ben Thompson: Google and The New America Foundation, Google’s Monopoly, Google’s Stupidity: "From the New York Times... https://stratechery.com/2017/google-and-the-new-america-foundation-googles-monopoly-googles-stupidity/
• Charlie Stross: Houston: what are the long-term consequences?: "I'm interested in chewing over... the effect of losing a major city... to a weather event that is already the worst in 800 years... http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-what-are-the-long-term.html
• Noah Smith: There's Something the Matter With Ohio Too: "Like Kansas, the state seems to be making economic and cultural choices that are holding it back... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-29/there-s-something-the-matter-with-ohio-too

Links and Such for the Week of September 3, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Robert M. Solow (1985): Economic History and Economics: "Economics is a social science... subject to Damon Runyon's Law that nothing between human beings is more than three to one... http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
• Ben Thompson: Google and The New America Foundation, Google’s Monopoly, Google’s Stupidity: "From the New York Times... https://stratechery.com/2017/google-and-the-new-america-foundation-googles-monopoly-googles-stupidity/
• Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko: FISCAL STIMULUS AND FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY: "The Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis have left many developed countries with low interest rates and high levels of public debt... https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/sympos/2017/auerbach-gorodnichenko-paper.pdf?la=en
• Samuel Bowles, Alan Kirman, and Rajiv Sethi: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm: "'[The market is] a system of the utilization of knowledge which nobody can possess as a whole... http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.3.215
• Herbert Hovenkamp (2009): THE COASE THEOREM AND ARTHUR CECIL PIGOU: "In 'The Problem of Social Cost', Ronald Coase was highly critical of... Pigou... http://www.arizonalawreview.org/pdf/51-3/51arizlrev633.pdf
• Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Bootstrap: "That these [statistical] origin myths invoke various limits is no accident... https://web.archive.org/web/20100518171527/http://www.americanscientist.org:80/issues/pub/2010/3/the-bootstrap/2

Procrastination on August 30, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko: FISCAL STIMULUS AND FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY: "The Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis have left many developed countries with low interest rates and high levels of public debt... https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/sympos/2017/auerbach-gorodnichenko-paper.pdf?la=en
• Michael Spence: The Global Economy’s New Rule-Maker: "Not too long ago, many pundits doubted that China could make the shift... to a service economy underpinned by domestic demand... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-in-the-global-economy-by-michael-spence-2017-08
• Samuel Bowles, Alan Kirman, and Rajiv Sethi: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm: "'[The market is] a system of the utilization of knowledge which nobody can possess as a whole... http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.3.215
• Randall Akee, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter: Race Matters: Income Shares, Income Inequality, and Income Mobility for All U.S. Races: "Income shares, income inequality, and income immobility measures for all race and ethnic groups in the United States... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23733?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw
• John Quiggin: What’s left of libertarianism?: "Liberaltarianism... the Niskanen Center...Radley Balko, Jacob Levy, Stephen Teles, Jerry Taylor, Will Wilkinson... an important contribution to left-of-centre thinking... http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/13/whats-left-of-libertarianism-2/
• Herbert Hovenkamp (2009): THE COASE THEOREM AND ARTHUR CECIL PIGOU: "In 'The Problem of Social Cost', Ronald Coase was highly critical of... Pigou... http://www.arizonalawreview.org/pdf/51-3/51arizlrev633.pdf
• Peter H. Lindert: The Rise and Future of Progressive Redistribution: "Starting from today’s collection of estimates of fiscal distribution within each of 53 countries, we can begin mapping a history of... redistribution... http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Lindert2017.pdf
• Patti Waldmeir: The gritty truth of life in America’s heartland: "It is hard to see a solution to America’s political crisis until Trump-haters accept that most Trump-lovers are human too... https://www.ft.com/content/b3ec55b0-7dd4-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928
• Ezra Klein (2007): My Honor...Defended!: "I actually watched a bit of [Mickey] Kaus's Bloggingheads... too petulant to be genuinely offensive... http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/my_honordefende.html
• Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Bootstrap: "That these [statistical] origin myths invoke various limits is no accident... https://web.archive.org/web/20100518171527/http://www.americanscientist.org:80/issues/pub/2010/3/the-bootstrap/2

Procrastination on August 28, 2017

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• George W. Evans, Seppo Honkapohja, and Kaushik Mitra: Expectations, Stagnation and Fiscal Policy: "Persistent stagnation and fiscal policy are examined in a New Keynesian model with adaptive learning determining expectations... http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/conferences/conference03040717/expectationspolicy.pdf
• Larry Summers: Mexico isn’t taking Trump’s threats seriously now: "Relative to my last visit to Mexico in March, leaders have moved from being appalled and alarmed by the Trump administration to being appalled and bemused... https://www.ft.com/content/4b33f856-69fa-3e4d-b3bd-cb8a69648a68
• Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Nicolas L. Ziebarth: Credit Relationships and Business Bankruptcy during the Great Depression: "Stickiness makes relationships beneficial to borrowers in times of their own distress but makes them potentially problematic when lenders themselves face hardship... http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20150218
• Michael J. Boskin: Can Trump Turn His Presidency Around?: "Bill Clinton’s administration began with a lack of discipline... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/can-trump-turn-his-presidency-around-by-michael-boskin-2017-08
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Japan and the burden of government debt: "There is currently a very good reason to write about the Japanese economy... https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/japan-and-burden-of-government-debt.html