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

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

1. 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

2. CPPC: 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

3. 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... The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine http://amzn.to/2vYkkXk

4. Eric Loomis: Evil, Meet Evil: "the time in 1968 that George Wallace appeared on William F. Buckley’s TV show. Root for injuries..." http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/09/evil-meet-evil

5. Matthew Yglesias: @mattyglesias on Twitter:: "Rand Paul fighting for Kentucky’s Medicaid funding while pretending to be an ideological purist is a fascinating dynamic...." https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/908689977147568128

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Highlighted | Teaching | Reading, Videos, etc.

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

Links and Such for the Week of August 28, 2017

Must-Reads:

• 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
• 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
• Brad Setser: G-3 Coordination Failures of the Past Eight Years?: "I want to look back... [at the] coordination failures over the past eight years... https://www.cfr.org/blog/g-3-coordination-failures-past-eight-years-riff-coure-and-brainard
• W.E.B. DuBois: On Robert E. Lee: "It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born... http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/30/w-e-b-dubois-on-robert-e-lee/
• W.E.B. DuBois: On Confederate Monuments: "In the South, particular, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain... http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/

Procrastination on August 25, 2017

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

• Gin and Tacos: RESOURCE HARVESTING: "Before entering politics, it would be hard to imagine Donald Trump spending much time in places like Youngstown, OH or Huntington, WV... http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/08/23/resource-harvesting/
• Brad Setser: G-3 Coordination Failures of the Past Eight Years?: "I want to look back... [at the] coordination failures over the past eight years... https://www.cfr.org/blog/g-3-coordination-failures-past-eight-years-riff-coure-and-brainard
• Jason del Rey: Amazon will lower Whole Foods prices right away and Prime members will get special discounts: "Amazon is wasting no time putting its stamp on Whole Foods... https://www.recode.net/2017/8/24/16198716/amazon-whole-foods-lower-prices-prime-discounts-benefits
• W.E.B. DuBois: On Robert E. Lee: "It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born... http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/30/w-e-b-dubois-on-robert-e-lee/
• W.E.B. DuBois: On Confederate Monuments: "In the South, particular, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain... http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/
• Neil Cummins: Lifespans of the European Elite, 800–1800: 115,650 European nobles from 800 to 1800... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/lifespans-of-the-european-elite-8001800/BE252C4B25C4AAC29ED62D591A1675AC
• Neel Kashkari: Fed official: Businesses should raise wages before complaining of worker shortage: "Common refrain... we have jobs available, but simply can’t find qualified workers to fill them... http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-official-businesses-should-raise-wages-before-complaining-of-worker-shortage-2017-8
• Jacques Bughin and Eric Hazan: The new spring of artificial intelligence: "The Industrial Revolution was about machines enhancing human muscle power. The AI revolution is about machines enhancing human brain power... http://voxeu.org/article/new-spring-artificial-intelligence-few-early-economics
• Maurice Obstfeld, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Mahvash S. Qureshi: Trilemma redux: Evidence from emerging market economies: "The synchronous rise and fall of cross-border capital flows, domestic credit, and asset prices... http://voxeu.org/article/trilemma-redux-evidence-emerging-market-economies
• Matthew Yglesias: Steve Bannon’s “economic nationalism” is total nonsense: "'Economic nationalism' has grave flaws as an ideology beyond Trump’s racism, lack of policy knowledge, and personal indiscipline... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/21/16165348/steve-bannon-economic-nationalism

Live from the EJMR Supporter Cesspool: And, yes, we are looking at you George Borjas. You could be saying: "Hey! Guys at EJMW! A lot of you are real dicks! Don't be!"

Instead, you say something very different.

Links for the Week of August 20, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Jacob T. Levy: Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom
• Justin Wolfers: Evidence of a Toxic Environment for Women in Economics: "Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/upshot/evidence-of-a-toxic-environment-for-women-in-economics.html

Data Management, Analysis, and Presentation Skills Are to the 21st Century What Writing in a Chancery Hand Was to the 13th: Hoisted from Various Archives

Cosma Shalizi reminds me of the internet "data scientists are (good and empirically oriented) statisticians" discussion of 2011-12.

Let me say three things:

1. You should never use Excel to handle your data.

2. I don't know whether it is depressing or exhilarating to recognize that, for me as for Cosma, how often my reaction these days is: "I already wrote something incisive and very much worth reading about that—now to find it in my weblog archives..."

3. Increasingly, data management, analysis, and presentation are things that many more people need for their jobs than statistics departments can reasonably expect to funnel through their major programs. It's like in the middle ages: the number of people who needed to have a good, clear, legible-penmanship chancery hand vastly exceeded the number of professional calligraphers and illustrators. Data management, analysis, and presentation skills are, increasingly, the legible-penmanship chancery hand of the twenty-first century.

Procrastination on August 17, 2017

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

• Jesse Rothstein: Inequality of educational opportunity? Schools as mediators of the intergenerational transmission of income: "Chetty et al. (2014) show that children from low-income families achieve much better adult outcomes... in some places than in others... http://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/inequality-of-educational-opportunity-schools-as-mediators-of-the-intergenerational-transmission-of-income/
• Will Dobbie and Jae Song: Targeted debt relief and the origins of financial distress: Experimental evidence from distressed credit card borrowers: "We identify the separate effects of the payment reductions and debt write-downs using variation from both the experiment and cross-sectional differences... http://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/targeted-debt-relief-and-financial-distress/
• Drew Conway: The Data Science Venn Diagram http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...
• Fardels Bear: Was James Buchanan a Racist? Libertarians and Historical Research: "Today’s libertarians face a similar problem that Morley faced half a decade ago... https://altrightorigins.com/2017/07/13/was-james-buchanan-a-racist-libertarians-and-historical-research/
• Sarah Kliff: Top Democratic, Republican health experts agree on this plan to fix Obamacare: "'This package is no one’s conception of what is perfect health reform', says Ron Pollack... of... Families USA, an ardent defender of the ACA... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/9/16119244/bipartisan-plan-fix-obamacare
• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Jolting news this week!” edition: "Estimates of the potential growth rate of U.S. gross domestic product have declined... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-jolting-news-this-week-edition/
• Barry Eichengreen: Hyperglobalization Is Over, But Globalization Is Still with Us: "Hyperglobalization is over... international trade... growing faster than the world economy... has drawn to a close... https://neo.ubs.com/shared/d1JfrUS5WO79UD/9e9d7589-d888-4435-98fc-4792ff141323.pdf
• Chris Dillow: Stumbling and Mumbling: Reinventing the wheel: "In both the UK and US, wage inflation has stayed low despite apparently low unemployment–to the puzzlement of believers in the Philips curve... http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/07/reinventing-the-wheel.html
• Guillermo Gallacher: Manufacturing employment, trade and structural change: "Calls for a return of manufacturing jobs... how feasible is such a goal in light of structural changes in the U.S. economy?... http://equitablegrowth.org/person/guillermo-gallacher/
• Daniel Davies: From a logical point of view...: "I have now read that 'google manifesto'... out of a desire to forestall people saying 'but have you ACTUALLY READ IT?'... http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/11/from-a-logical-point-of-view/
• Economist: Who will be the next chair of the Federal Reserve?: "The interest-rate opinions of the favourite to succeed her are less clear. Mr Cohn... https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21726081-gary-cohn-leading-candidate-replace-janet-yellen-who-will-be-next
• Fabio Ghironi: Macro Needs Micro: "An emerging consensus on the future of macroeconomics views the incorporation of a role for financial intermediation, labor market frictions, and household heterogeneity in the presence of uninsurable unemployment risk as key needed extensions to the benchmark macro framework... http://faculty.washington.edu/ghiro/GhiroFuture.pdf
• Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America http://amzn.to/2voi3qD: "As 1956 drew to a close, Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., the president of the University of Virginia, feared...

Should-Read: Drew Conway: The Data Science Venn Diagram http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...

Note to Self: "Data Science" as an Ephemeral Term:There was a time—perhaps a century, maybe a bit more, certainly not much less—ago, when the high-tech bleeding edge electricity sector was an important but discrete part of the "economy".

Note to Self: I am told that what we are doing here is something called "data science"...

Note to Self: Data Science Reading List:

• John Tukey: The Future of Data Analysis: "Large parts of data analysis are inferential... but only parts.... Large parts... are incisive.... Some parts... are allocative... dude its in the distribution of effort..." http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aoms/1177704711

Note to Self: View jupyter notebook from dropbox (or other) links:

• Dropbox: change: "https://www.dropbox.com/" to: "http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/dl.dropbox.com/"; then load the url...
• Else: change: "https://" to "http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/"; then load the url...

Note to Self: Project Jupyter: Jupyter Notebook Viewer: "A simple way to share Jupyter Notebooks..." http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/ note: change: "https://www.dropbox.com/" to "http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/dl.dropbox.com/"...

Links for the Week of August 13, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Peter Conti-Brown: Health Care, the Congressional Budget Office, and “Audit the Fed”: "One of the most intriguing institutional players... was the Congressional Budget Office... http://yalejreg.com/nc/health-care-the-congressional-budget-office-and-audit-the-fed/
• Martin Sandbu: Ten years on: Anatomy of the global financial meltdown: "August 9 2007 was the day when BNP Paribas, the French bank, froze three investment funds... https://www.ft.com/content/a7547254-7c37-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928
• Paul Romer (2016): The Trouble With Macroeconomics: "For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards... https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
• Jared Bernstein: ‘Why Did Nobody Notice It?’: "Paul Romer... gave a lecture... 'The Trouble with Macroeconomics'... tore contemporary macro a new one... http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/why-did-nobody-notice-it/
• Narayana Kocherlakota: The Neglected Lessons of a Lost Decade: "In some ways... 2007 to 2009 did more economic damage than the Great Depression of the 1930s... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/the-neglected-lessons-of-a-lost-decade
• Ogged: Google Anti-Diversity Memo: "I tried to read the Google anti-diversity memo, I really did. I even powered through the part where he said that deprecating products too quickly is an example of a leftist failing, but I just couldn't do it. If you'd like to discuss how you, too, couldn't make it through the whole thing, this is the thread for you..." http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2017_08_06.html#016132
• Jonathan Portes: The New York Times, Brexit, and the balance of bulls---: "Two articles published recently by the New York Times... on Brexit... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/brexit-opinions-remain-brexiteer-bull-bs-leave-eu-new-york-times-jenni-russell-daniel-hannan-a7880401.html
• C. Fred Bergsten and Monica de Bolle, eds.: A Path Forward for NAFTA: "The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ranks at the top of anyone’s list of the most controversial trade deals of all time... https://piie.com/system/files/documents/piieb17-2.pdf

Procrastination on August 10, 2017

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

• Barry Eichengreen: Revenge of the Experts: "The Brexit debate is an endless source of mirth for anyone with a dark sense of humor... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economists-right-about-brexit-impact-by-barry-eichengreen-2017-08
• Dean Baker: Opposition to Trade Deals: Brad DeLong's "Socialism of Fools" Might Look Like Common Sense to Those Outside the Fraternity: "First, Brad is well aware that the economy has operated well below full employment... http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/opposition-to-trade-deals-brad-delong-s-socialism-of-fools-might-look-like-common-sense-to-those-outside-the-fraternity
• PGL: The Output Gap per the Gerald Friedman Defenders: "Menzie Chinn back on February 20, 2016 had some fun with the defenders of that awful paper by Gerald Friedman... http://econospeak.blogspot.com.br/2017/08/the-output-gap-per-gerald-friedman.html
• Peter Conti-Brown: Health Care, the Congressional Budget Office, and “Audit the Fed”: "One of the most intriguing institutional players... was the Congressional Budget Office... http://yalejreg.com/nc/health-care-the-congressional-budget-office-and-audit-the-fed/
• Fardels Bear: Was James Buchanan a Racist? Libertarians and Historical Research: "'Eschewing overt racial appeals, but not at all concerned with the impact of black citizens, they framed the South’s fight as resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states’ rights and economic liberty'" (MacLean, p. 50)... https://altrightorigins.com/2017/07/13/was-james-buchanan-a-racist-libertarians-and-historical-research/
• Ben Friedman: HAS ECONOMICS FAILED US?: The Search for New Assumptions: "Democracy doesn’t always deliver what the technical experts recommend...http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/the-search-for-new-assumptions/
• Martin Sandbu: Ten years on: Anatomy of the global financial meltdown: "August 9 2007 was the day when BNP Paribas, the French bank, froze three investment funds... https://www.ft.com/content/a7547254-7c37-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928

Procrastination on August 8, 2017

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

• Weekend Reading: James M. Buchanan (1970): The “Social” Efficiency of Education http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-james-m-buchanan-1970-the-social-efficiency-of-education/
• Nick Bunker: Measuring potential GDP in the United States, and the case for emphasizing demand in monetary policy: "Olivier Coibion... Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Mauricio Ulate... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/measuring-potential-gdp-in-the-united-states-and-the-case-for-emphasizing-demand-in-monetary-policy/
• Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: June 2017 Report Edition: "The quits rate continues to hover in the same range as it has for months... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/jolts-day-graphs-june-2017-report-edition/
• Paul Romer (2016): The Trouble With Macroeconomics: "For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards... https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
• Jared Bernstein: ‘Why Did Nobody Notice It?’: "Paul Romer... gave a lecture... 'The Trouble with Macroeconomics'... tore contemporary macro a new one... http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/why-did-nobody-notice-it/
• Narayana Kocherlakota: The Neglected Lessons of a Lost Decade: "In some ways... 2007 to 2009 did more economic damage than the Great Depression of the 1930s... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/the-neglected-lessons-of-a-lost-decade
• Ogged: Google Anti-Diversity Memo: "I tried to read the Google anti-diversity memo, I really did. I even powered through the part where he said that deprecating products too quickly is an example of a leftist failing, but I just couldn't do it. If you'd like to discuss how you, too, couldn't make it through the whole thing, this is the thread for you..." http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2017_08_06.html#016132
• Jonathan Portes: The New York Times, Brexit, and the balance of bulls---: "Two articles published recently by the New York Times... on Brexit... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/brexit-opinions-remain-brexiteer-bull-bs-leave-eu-new-york-times-jenni-russell-daniel-hannan-a7880401.html
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Maternal Mortality http://www.marciarille.com/2017/06/maternal-mortality.html
• Kevin Drum: The Mystery of the Tight Labor Market: "Nearly all the data points to a tight labor market with the exception of the single most important bit of data: wages... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-mystery-of-the-tight-labor-market/
• Duncan Black: Little Lessons: "I like to think I am wiser than I once was (about some things, at least)... http://www.eschatonblog.com/2017/08/little-lessons.html
• C. Fred Bergsten and Monica de Bolle, eds.: A Path Forward for NAFTA: "The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ranks at the top of anyone’s list of the most controversial trade deals of all time... https://piie.com/system/files/documents/piieb17-2.pdf
• Paul Krugman: Structural Unemployment: Yes, It Was Humbug: "Ancient history... but five years ago there was a remarkable Beltway consensus that high unemployment was structural... https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/structural-unemployment-yes-it-was-humbug/?_r=0

One Year Ago at Grasping Reality: August 6, 2016

• Weekend Reading: Trump's Chief Economic Advisor David Malpass Back in 2008! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/weekend-reading-trumps-chief-economic-advisor-david-malpass-back-in-2008.html: David Malpass: "Don't Panic About the Credit Market.... Neither the economy nor job growth has been dependent on housing.... Concerns about high inventories of unsold homes are exaggerated.... Nor has consumer spending been dependent on "cashing in" on the housing boom..."
• Liveblogging World War I: August 6, 1916: Escape http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/liveblogging-world-war-i-august-6-1916-escape.html
• For the Weekend... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/for-the-weekend-2.html: Jose Carreras, Katia Ricciarelli, John Paul Bogart, et al.: Non Piangere Liu...

Ten Years and Eight Days Ago at Grasping Reality: July 29, 2007

Worth Highlighting:

• New Graduate Student Orientation: Li Hungchang and "Self-Strengthening", and Other Topics http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/new-graduate-st.html: Trying to say the name of the late nineteenth-century Qing statesman "Li Hungchang." There was animated discussion as to what I was trying to say--I suppose I sounded as though I was speaking half-Cantonese, half-duck.... There is as much horror inside as outside the Brookings building that Ken Pollack is still the public face of Brookings Institution foreign policy studies...

• Clueless Delong continues to be clueless: Still fearing a financial crisis brought on by a dollar crash rather than looking at suprime mortgages Risk and the Dollar: Brad Setser Muses http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/risk-and-the-do.html

Procrastination on August 6, 2017

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

• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Watching the labor market flows go” edition: "Liz Hipple summarizes some of the key points from a new report by antitrust expert James Kwoka... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-watching-the-labor-market-flows-go-edition/
• Gérard Roland and David Yang: Cultural change and intergenerational transmission: Some lessons from China’s Cultural Revolution: "The Cultural Revolution... the shutdown of the Chinese university system between 1966 and 1976... http://voxeu.org/article/cultural-change-and-intergenerational-transmission
• Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner: Lifetime Incomes in the United States over Six Decades: "From the cohort that entered the labor market in 1967 to the cohort that entered in 1983... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23371
• Equitable Growth: Jobs Day Graphs: July 2017 Report Edition: "Earlier this morning, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on the U.S. labor market during the month of July... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/equitable-growths-jobs-day-graphs-july-2017-report-edition-2/
• Paul Krugman: Obamacare Rage in Retrospect: "Why did Obamacare survive? The shocking answer: It’s still here because it does so much good... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/opinion/obamacare-rage-in-retrospect.html

Links, etc., for the Week of August 6, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Gérard Roland and David Yang: Cultural change and intergenerational transmission: Some lessons from China’s Cultural Revolution: "The Cultural Revolution... the shutdown of the Chinese university system between 1966 and 1976... http://voxeu.org/article/cultural-change-and-intergenerational-transmission
• Paul Krugman: Obamacare Rage in Retrospect: "Why did Obamacare survive? The shocking answer: It’s still here because it does so much good... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/opinion/obamacare-rage-in-retrospect.html
• Caroline Freund and Christine McDaniel: The U.S. Needs to Invest in Minds, Not Miners: "Otherwise the job market will leave a lot of men behind... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-06/the-u-s-needs-to-invest-in-minds-not-miners
• Joe Pompeo and Hadas Gold: Gerry Baker to staff: Criticism of Wall Street Journal's Trump coverage is 'fake news': "He said there's been 'a lot of nonsense appearing in the media about how unreliable our reporting is'... http://www.politico.com/media/story/2017/02/gerry-baker-defends-wsj-trump-coverage-004931
• **Steve Horwitz: MacLean on Nutter and Buchanan on Universal Education: "Finding examples of misleading, incorrect, and outright butchered quotes and citations in Nancy MacLean’s new book... http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2017/06/maclean-nutter-buchanan-universal-education/
• Andrea Contino: Blog, people: "Jeff Jarvis synthesizes in the following tweet what I posted last week in my entry in Italian, here translated... https://andrea.co/blog/2017/7/31/blog-people
• Kevin Drum: Donald Trump Is Constitutionally Incapable of Telling the Truth: "A few weeks ago, the press got wind of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian attorney... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/donald-trump-is-constitutionally-incapable-of-telling-the-truth/
• Jacqueline Bell (2007): Bear Stearns Hedge Funds File For Bankruptcy
• Paul Krugman: Who Ate Republicans’ Brains?: "Senator Lindsey Graham was entirely correct when he described the final effort at repeal as 'terrible policy and horrible politics', a 'disaster' and a 'fraud'. He voted for it anyway... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/opinion/republicans-trumpcare-obamacare-lies.html
• Chris Dillow: Cronyism, & the demand for redistribution: "Is actually-existing capitalism a fair or a rigged game?... http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/07/cronyism-the-demand-for-redistribution.html

Procrastination on August 4, 2017

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

• Open Letter from 1,470 Economists on Immigration http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/open-letter-from-1470-economists-including-me-on-immigration/
• Yes: The CBO’s Growth Forecasts Are Not Unreasonable… http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/yes-the-cbos-growth-forecasts-are-not-unreasonable/
• Jonathan Chait: Australia’s PM Slowly Realizes Trump Is a Complete Idiot: "Trump in his private negotiations is every bit as mentally limited as he appears to be in public... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/australias-pm-slowly-realizes-trump-is-a-complete-idiot.html
• Duncan Black: Mama I Don't Want To Die: "I was too pessimistic about Obamacare... http://www.eschatonblog.com/2017/07/mama-i-dont-want-to-die.html
• Kevin Drum: Afghanistan Plan Killed Because ‘21’ Closed For Remodeling 30 Years Ago. This Is Not a Joke: "Consensus reality is that the run-down 21 Club closed for two months after it changed ownership... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/afghanistan-plan-killed-because-21-closed-for-remodeling-30-years-ago-this-is-not-a-joke/
• Caroline Freund and Christine McDaniel: The U.S. Needs to Invest in Minds, Not Miners: "Otherwise the job market will leave a lot of men behind... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-06/the-u-s-needs-to-invest-in-minds-not-miners
• Joe Pompeo and Hadas Gold: Gerry Baker to staff: Criticism of Wall Street Journal's Trump coverage is 'fake news': "He said there's been 'a lot of nonsense appearing in the media about how unreliable our reporting is'... http://www.politico.com/media/story/2017/02/gerry-baker-defends-wsj-trump-coverage-004931
• **Steve Horwitz: MacLean on Nutter and Buchanan on Universal Education: "Finding examples of misleading, incorrect, and outright butchered quotes and citations in Nancy MacLean’s new book... http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2017/06/maclean-nutter-buchanan-universal-education/

Procrastination on August 2, 2017

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

• Michael Strain: Stop Bashing the CBO, Republicans: "A word to the wise from a fellow conservative: Expert analysis isn't your problem; bad legislation is... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-01/stop-bashing-the-cbo-republicans
• Steve Waldman: The Conservative Media’s Role in Trumpcare’s Flameout: "The conservative media’s post-mortems on the political collapse of Trumpcare have ignored one culprit... http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/07/29/the-conservative-medias-role-in-trumpcares-flameout/
• Miles Kimball: Contra Randal Quarles: "my criticisms of Randal Quarles' views above are not criticisms directed at Randal personally... https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/7/30/contra-randal-quarles
• Erik Loomis: The Jobless Future is Going to Be Great: "If Democrats are going to start articulating pro-worker policies again as central platform planks, they need to get on board real fast to the problems that automation is already causing... http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/07/jobless-future-going-great
• Andrea Contino: Blog, people: "Jeff Jarvis synthesizes in the following tweet what I posted last week in my entry in Italian, here translated... https://andrea.co/blog/2017/7/31/blog-people
• Kevin Drum: Donald Trump Is Constitutionally Incapable of Telling the Truth: "A few weeks ago, the press got wind of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian attorney... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/donald-trump-is-constitutionally-incapable-of-telling-the-truth/

Procrastination on July 31, 2017

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

• Liz Hipple: Understanding the importance of antitrust policy for U.S. economic competitiveness and consumer choice: "John E. Kwoka... documents the rise in industry concentration and examines the evidence for one possible explanation... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/understanding-the-importance-of-antitrust-policy-for-u-s-economic-competitiveness-and-consumer-choice/
• Nisha Chikhale: A glance at pay inequities for African American women’s Equal Pay Day: "We’ve updated Equitable Growth’s interactive tool with new data... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/a-glance-at-pay-inequities-for-african-american-womens-equal-pay-day/
• Timothy Noah: @TimothyNoah1 on Twitter: "@rortybomb @jonathanchait: It simply isn't true... https://twitter.com/TimothyNoah1/status/887406956994064384
• Matt Bruenig: The Success Sequence Is About Cultural Beefs Not Poverty: "The Success Sequence is back!... http://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/31/the-success-sequence-is-about-cultural-beefs-not-poverty/
• Paul Krugman: Who Ate Republicans’ Brains?: "Senator Lindsey Graham was entirely correct when he described the final effort at repeal as 'terrible policy and horrible politics', a 'disaster' and a 'fraud'. He voted for it anyway... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/opinion/republicans-trumpcare-obamacare-lies.html
• Robert C. Feenstra and David E. Weinstein: Globalization, Markups, and US Welfare: "We work with symmetric translog preferences... http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/692695
• Chris Dillow: Cronyism, & the demand for redistribution: "Is actually-existing capitalism a fair or a rigged game?... http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/07/cronyism-the-demand-for-redistribution.html
• Cameron Joseph and Tierney Sneed: After Obamacare Repeal Collapse, GOP Weighs Whether To Help State Markets: "Most Republicans have been happy to watch some state-level individual health insurance exchanges sputter... http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/after-obamacare-repeal-collapse-gop-weighs-whether-to-help-state-health-exchange-markets
• Ian Millhiser: What it’s like to watch the Senate debate whether your life is as valuable as a tax cut for Trump: "Every other Saturday morning, I inject $2,269.61 worth of pharmaceuticals into my leg... https://thinkprogress.org/chronic-condition-trumpcare-scares-me-b2192446ea64

Monday Smackdown: Every Time I Try to Get Out, They Pull Me Back In... Clive Crook Edition

So after a pep talk from Noah Smith Saturday night about how it is time to become kinder and gentler—to look for opportunities to praise for being smart people who in the past I have criticized for being really really really dumb—I wake up Monday morning, and I wince because Duncan Black has been reading the once-thoughtful Clive Crook again.

"People is weird... 'let's shoot ourselves in the face just to prove our gun works'..." is really four standard deviations kinder and gentler than this deserves:

Duncan Black: National Humiliation: "People is weird. [Clive Crook:]... http://www.eschatonblog.com/2017/07/national-humiliation.html

Procrastination on July 30, 2017

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

• Bridget Ansel:: : Weekend reading: “#hipsterantitrust edition”: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/weekend-reading-hipsterantitrust-edition/
• Bridget Ansel: Has the momentum around paid leave reached a tipping point in the United States? http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/has-the-momentum-around-paid-leave-reached-a-tipping-point-in-the-united-states/
• Austin Clemens: Will the United States give up on data collection? http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/will-the-united-states-give-up-on-data-collection/
• Andy Slavitt: @ASlavitt on Twitter: "Trump plans to sabotage the ACA this week... https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/891722458855866369
• Simon Johnson: Trump’s Growth Charade by Simon Johnson - Project Syndicate: "Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration frequently talk about getting annual economic growth in the United States back above 3%... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-administration-growth-assumption-by-simon-johnson-2017-07
• Avik Roy: An Autopsy of the GOP Effort to Repeal and Replace Obamacare: "Moderate Republican senators, often representing purple or blue states, were reluctant both philosophically and politically to endorse legislation that increased the number of Americans without health insurance... http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/449943/autopsy-gop-effort-repeal-and-replace-obamacare
• Craig Garthwaite: Why replacing Obamacare is so hard: It’s fundamentally conservative: "As a life-long Republican... I’ve come to an answer that will be hard for many conservatives to swallow... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-replacing-obamacare-is-so-hard-its-fundamentally-conservative/2017/07/10/c5d64634-6351-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html
• Antonio Fatas: On Twitter: "Healthcare is complicated but Greg Mankiw should criticize policy proposals that are incoherent or just lie about their benefits..." https://twitter.com/AntonioFatas/status/890979381719511044
• Josh Barro: John McCain saved Republicans from themselves by killing Obamacare repeal bill: "Lindsey Graham made a demand: He would vote for the terrible healthcare bill being offered before the Senate, a bill he thought would cause health insurance market disaster... http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-vote-health-care-obamacare-bill-2017-7
• Simon Wren-Lewis: UK slowdown is a result of Brexit and austerity: "Those who argued that Brexit would bring a short term slowdown have been proved right: they just got their timing slightly wrong... https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-uk-slowdown-is-result-of-brexit-and.html
• Martin Longman: A Glimpse Back at the Old Senate: "two stories I found last night while researching my Murkowski-Collins defection piece... http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/07/27/a-glimpse-back-at-the-old-senate/
• Neera Tanden and Tophir Spiro: The bipartisan way to strengthen health care: "Provide greater certainty for insurers by guaranteeing continued payments of ACA subsidies, a step that could help reduce average premiums by as much as 19 percent... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bipartisan-way-to-strengthen-health-care/2017/07/18/b2e2b444-6bef-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html
• Dylan Scott: The Obamacare repeal debate is now a completely bonkers game of chicken: "On Thursday evening, mere hours before the Senate is supposed to vote on a health care bill, the United States Capitol is in chaos... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16053268/senate-obamacare-repeal-chaos
• Josh Marshall: Trumpism Distilled: "Scaramucci has managed to become a compressed, crystallized version of all the ridiculousness of Trumpism... http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumpism-distilled
• Mike Bird and Christopher Whittall: The Speech That Transformed European Markets—Five Years Later: "European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.... 'Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro and believe me: It will be enough'... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-speech-that-changed-european-marketsfive-years-later-1501061404
• Martin Feldstein: How Would Health-Care Reform Affect Patient Health?: "People who qualify for Medicaid do receive substantially more care than those without formal insurance... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-health-care-reform-medicaid-cuts-by-martin-feldstein-2017-07
• Kenneth P. Brevoort, Daniel Grodzicki, and Martin Hackmann: Medicaid and Financial Health https://www.fdic.gov/news/conferences/consumersymposium/2016/documents/brevoort_presentation.pdf:
• Joe Rago (2010): The ObamaCare Crossroads: "Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama's de facto nationalization, costs will further explode... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704207504575130321235660474

Links for the Week of July 30, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Simon Johnson: Trump’s Growth Charade by Simon Johnson - Project Syndicate: "Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration frequently talk about getting annual economic growth in the United States back above 3%... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-administration-growth-assumption-by-simon-johnson-2017-07
• Neera Tanden and Tophir Spiro: The bipartisan way to strengthen health care: "Provide greater certainty for insurers by guaranteeing continued payments of ACA subsidies, a step that could help reduce average premiums by as much as 19 percent... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bipartisan-way-to-strengthen-health-care/2017/07/18/b2e2b444-6bef-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html
• Dylan Scott: The Obamacare repeal debate is now a completely bonkers game of chicken: "On Thursday evening, mere hours before the Senate is supposed to vote on a health care bill, the United States Capitol is in chaos... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16053268/senate-obamacare-repeal-chaos
• Matthew Yglesias: Senate Republicans’ approach to health care is bizarre and appalling: "Nobody can tell exactly what Senate Republicans are doing with Americans’ health care, largely because they keep lying about it... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16040284/senate-republicans-health-care-lies
• Martin Feldstein: How Would Health-Care Reform Affect Patient Health?: "People who qualify for Medicaid do receive substantially more care than those without formal insurance... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-health-care-reform-medicaid-cuts-by-martin-feldstein-2017-07

Ten Years and Four Days Ago at Grasping Reality: July 22-25, 2007

Worth Hoisting and Highlighting: Paul Krugman is wise; Ezra Klein points out that those who claim having health insurance is not important (a) have health insurance, and (b) are not telling the truth; Robert Samuelson of the execrable Washington Post is an embittered, evil, strange man; the execrable Stuart Taylor, Jr., of the Atlantic Group is one as well; and neither Robert Pear of the New York Times nor David Broder of the Washington Post either do now know enough or do not care enough to do their proper jobs:

Blogging!: What Should You Expect to Find Here...

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

Links for the Week of July 24, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Ryan Avent: Making Monetary Policy Great Again: "Obama’s response to the economic crisis... the timidity of his stimulus plan... his failure to provide broad support to struggling homeowners... his premature pivot to deficit cutting... http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/making-monetary-policy-great-again/
• Timothy Garton Ash (2007): The Road from Danzig: "The offense is that [Guenter Grass] should for so many years have made it his stock-in-trade to denounce post-war West Germans’ failure to face up to the Nazi past... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/08/16/the-road-from-danzig/
• Anatole Kaletsky: A “Macroneconomic” Revolution?: "Given the abundance of useful ideas, why have so few of the policies that might have ameliorated economic conditions and alleviated public resentment been implemented since the crisis?... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/replacement-market-fundamentalism-by-anatole-kaletsky-2017-07
• Noah Smith (2011): Noahpinion: The liberty of local bullies: "I have not been surprised by any of the quotes that have recently come to light from Ron Paul's racist newsletters. I grew up in Texas, remember... http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.jp/2011/12/liberty-of-local-bullies.html
• Mark Thoma: Here’s Why We’re Not Prepared for the Next Recession: "When will the next recession hit?... http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2017/07/17/Here-s-Why-We-re-Not-Prepared-Next-Recession
• Nick Bunker: Recessions, recoveries, and racial employment gaps in the United States: "The unemployment gap between black and white workers... can’t be explained by black Americans having lower levels of education or differences in demographics... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/recessions-recoveries-and-racial-employment-gaps-in-the-united-states/
• Maarten de Ridder and Coen Teulings: Endogenous growth and lack of recovery from the Global Crisis: "The crisis [is] a quasi-natural experiment to test the endogenous growth hypothesis... http://voxeu.org/article/endogenous-growth-and-lack-recovery-global-crisis
• Adam Jentleson: @AJentleson on Twitter: "Having spent countless hours listening to McConnell & years working with his office, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on tonight's news... https://twitter.com/AJentleson/status/887147912999960579

Procrastination on July 22, 2017

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

• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Boosting the competition” edition: "Since 2000 the concentration of businesses in the United States has increased and the amount of business investment relative to profits has declined... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-boosting-the-competition-edition/
• Jonathan Baker: Market power in the U.S. economy today: "The U.S. economy has a 'market power' problem, notwithstanding our strong and extensive antitrust institutions... http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/market-power-in-the-u-s-economy-today/
• Doug Elmendorf et al.: Letter from Former CBO Directors on the Importance of CBO’s Role in the Legislative Process: "The undersigned represent every former Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)... https://medium.com/@douglas.elmendorf/letter-from-former-cbo-directors-on-the-importance-of-cbos-role-in-the-legislative-process-278863b7e1c6
• Ryan Avent: Making Monetary Policy Great Again: "Obama’s response to the economic crisis... the timidity of his stimulus plan... his failure to provide broad support to struggling homeowners... his premature pivot to deficit cutting... http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/making-monetary-policy-great-again/
• Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Ex-Bank of England official says Fed has wrong idea on jobs, inflation: "The Fed's misleading view of the job market reflects 'a huge intellectual failure'... http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-bank-of-england-official-says-fed-has-wrong-idea-on-jobs-inflation-2017-7
• Cosma Shalizi (2006): Accents, Heritability, Measured IQ, the Flynn Effect, and Intelligence: ">Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley-and-Madison hat for a moment?... http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2007/07/cosma-shalizi-a.html
• Timothy Garton Ash (2007): The Road from Danzig: "The offense is that [Guenter Grass] should for so many years have made it his stock-in-trade to denounce post-war West Germans’ failure to face up to the Nazi past... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/08/16/the-road-from-danzig/
• Anatole Kaletsky: A “Macroneconomic” Revolution?: "Given the abundance of useful ideas, why have so few of the policies that might have ameliorated economic conditions and alleviated public resentment been implemented since the crisis?... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/replacement-market-fundamentalism-by-anatole-kaletsky-2017-07
• Mark Thoma: Here’s Why We’re Not Prepared for the Next Recession: "When will the next recession hit?... http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2017/07/17/Here-s-Why-We-re-Not-Prepared-Next-Recession
• Christina Romer and David Romer (2009): Do Tax Cuts Starve the Beast? The Effect of Tax Changes on Government Spending: "The hypothesis that decreases in taxes reduce future government spending is often cited as a reason for cutting taxes... https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/do-tax-cuts-starve-the-beast-the-effect-of-tax-changes-on-government-spending/
• Nick Bunker: Is declining competition causing slow U.S. business investment growth?: "Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon... the divergence between investment and profits... employ a so-called natural experiment where the entrance of competition from China changed investment decisions... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/is-declining-competition-causing-slow-u-s-business-investment-growth/
• Nick Bunker: Recessions, recoveries, and racial employment gaps in the United States: "The unemployment gap between black and white workers... can’t be explained by black Americans having lower levels of education or differences in demographics... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/recessions-recoveries-and-racial-employment-gaps-in-the-united-states/
• Maarten de Ridder and Coen Teulings: Endogenous growth and lack of recovery from the Global Crisis: "The crisis [is] a quasi-natural experiment to test the endogenous growth hypothesis... http://voxeu.org/article/endogenous-growth-and-lack-recovery-global-crisis
• Christian Odendahl: The Hartz Myth: "Germany’s labour market and welfare reforms of the early 2000s have gained an outsized importance over time... http://www.cer.eu/sites/default/files/pbrief_german_labour_10.7.17.pdf
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Those Pesky Pre-Dispute Arbitration Agreements for Skilled Nursing Facilities: "Assisting a parent or loved one in seeking skilled nursing facility admission is no joke... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/05/those-pesky-pre-dispute-arbitration-agreements-for-skilled-nursing-facilities.html
• Adam Jentleson: @AJentleson on Twitter: "Having spent countless hours listening to McConnell & years working with his office, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on tonight's news... https://twitter.com/AJentleson/status/887147912999960579
• Jonathan Cohn, Paige Lavender, and Chris D’Angelo: Senate Republicans Just Killed Their Health Care Bill Again: "But it could come back in another form. Like a zombie... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jerry-moran-mike-lee-senate-health-care_us_596d594ce4b0e983c05877f4
• Nancy Folbre: Why current definitions of family income are misleading, and why this matters for measures of inequality: "Researchers studying income distribution in the United States seem reluctant to acknowledge the family as an important unit of production and distribution... http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/why-current-definitions-of-family-income-are-misleading-and-why-this-matters-for-measures-of-inequality/

Links for the Week of July 18, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Ann Marie Marciarille: More Than One Way to Say "No": "When I teach my students about the concept of guaranteed issue in health insurance I always make it clear that without some constraints on individual underwriting it  can mean very little... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/07/more-than-one-way-to-say-no.html
• Adam Ozimek: There Is No U.S. Wage Growth Mystery: "Economists... puzzled over U.S. wage growth... wondering why it has been so slow despite a labor market that is allegedly back to or close to full employment... https://www.economy.com/dismal/analysis/datapoints/296127/There-Is-No-US-Wage-Growth-Mystery/
• Dani Rodrik: Economics of the populist backlash: The populist backlash to globalisation should not have come as a surprise, in light of economic history and economic theory... http://voxeu.org/article/economics-populist-backlash
• Matthew Yglesias: On Twitter: "Nostalgia-drenched anti-intellectual populism can be a cause rather than a consequence of community economic decline" https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/884438584467521537
• Paul Krugman: When Was The Golden Age Of Conservative Intellectuals?: "Bret Stephens’s... [on] the intellectual decline of conservatism... the modern degeneracy... https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/when-was-the-golden-age-of-conservative-intellectuals/?smid=tw-share&_r=0
• Larry Summers: Donald Trump’s alarming G20 performance: "the content of the [of the G-20] communiqué [is] a confirmation of the breakdown of international order that many have feared since the election of Donald Trump... https://www.ft.com/content/ea2849ea-6335-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1

Procrastination on July 17, 2017

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

• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Let’s make this post more democratically accountable” edition: "The newest set of releases in the Equitable Growth Working Paper series... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-lets-make-this-post-more-democratically-accountable-edition/
• John Maynard Keynes (1924): Obituary for Alfred Marshall: "The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order... https://todayinsci.com/K/Keynes_John/KeynesJohn-Quotations.htm
• Robert Caro: Means of Ascent: Carpetbaggers and Scalawags: [Richard Coke] a Confederate veteran who in 1873 wrested the government of Texas from the Carpetbaggeres and freed the state from the injustices of Reconstruction..." http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/carpetbaggers-a.html
• John Maynard Keynes (1938): On Tinbergen. To Harrod http://economia.unipv.it/harrod/edition/editionstuff/rfh.34a.htm: "My dear Roy...
• Paul Krugman: Formerly True Theories (Wonkish and Self-Indulgent): "Are there other examples? The self-correcting economy... https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2017/07/10/formerly-true-theories-wonkish-and-self-indulgent/
• Robert Solow: Improving the measurement and understanding of economic inequality in the United States: "There has long been interest in extending and improving the National Income and Product Accounts... http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/improving-the-measurement-and-understanding-of-economic-inequality-in-the-united-states/
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Let's Make a Deal and the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017: A Car or A Goat?: "I am as mesmerized as anyone else by the repeated iterations of the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/07/lets-make-a-deal-and-the-better-care-reconciliation-act-of-2017-a-car-or-a-goat.html
• Helene Rey: The Global Financial System, the Real Rate of Interest and a Long History of Boom-Bust Cycles: "Financial cycles strongly determine real short-term interest rates... http://www.bis.org/events/agm2017/sp170625_lecture.pdf
• Ann Marie Marciarille: More Than One Way to Say "No": "When I teach my students about the concept of guaranteed issue in health insurance I always make it clear that without some constraints on individual underwriting it  can mean very little... http://www.marciarille.com/2017/07/more-than-one-way-to-say-no.html
• Adam Ozimek: There Is No U.S. Wage Growth Mystery: "Economists... puzzled over U.S. wage growth... wondering why it has been so slow despite a labor market that is allegedly back to or close to full employment... https://www.economy.com/dismal/analysis/datapoints/296127/There-Is-No-US-Wage-Growth-Mystery/

It Was December 28, 1996, That the Wayback Machine First Crawled My Website

This is the state of my website when that happened:

Brad De Long's Website https://web.archive.org/web/19961218222950/http://econ161.berkeley.edu:80/ http://delong.typepad.com/1996-12-18-brad-de-longs-website.pdf

Pages up as of that crawling included:

Assignment Desk: Website (Re)design and The Road to Xanadu

Note: I will collect stuff relevant to this assignment desk here: http://www.bradford-delong.com/stream-the-road-to-xanaduthe-invisible-college.html

Assignment Desk: http://www.bradford-delong.com/assignment-desk.html

+ + + +

I am looking for somebody to write something to tell me what I should think—these days about website (re)design, and the assorted and related topics that I think of as "The Road to Xanadu" and "The Invisible College".

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any organization with a website that has not been redesigned in two years will find itself thinking about starting yet another website redesign process. Hence my throat clearing for http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/what-you-need-to-read-today-reading-reihan-salams-why-i-signed-up-for-obamacare-hoisted-from-my-archives.html yesterday and my hoisting of http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/should-read-well-its-been-two-more-years-ezra-klein-2015-i-have-sat-down-a-couple-of-times-to-write-up-what.html today...

Procrastination on July 14, 2017

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

• Ezra Klein (2015): "I have sat down a couple of times to write up what's worked and what's failed at Vox... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/a-very-brief-sokratic-dialogue-on-website-redesign.html
• Austin Frakt: Don’t Assume That Private Insurance Is Better Than Medicaid: "The RAND study... shows... people are terrible discriminators of what care is needed and what’s not... http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/dont-assume-that-private-insurance-is-better-than-medicaid/
• Martin Wolf: Britain is incapable of managing Brexit and calamity will follow: "The UK once had a deserved reputation for pragmatic and stable politics... https://www.ft.com/content/bf0025aa-6720-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614
• Jeff Mackie-Mason: Scholarly Publishing Landscape: "We are optimistic about our ability to collaborate and partner to achieve a sustainable open publishing universe... http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarly-communication/publishing/landscape
• IGM Forum: Inflation Target http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/inflation-target:

Should-Read: Well? It's been two more years!

Ezra Klein (2015): "I have sat down a couple of times to write up what's worked and what's failed at Vox... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/a-very-brief-sokratic-dialogue-on-website-redesign.html

Procrastinating on July 13, 2017

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

• Nick Bunker: Are economic boom-and-bust cycles stronger when capital is more available? http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/are-economic-boom-and-bust-cycles-stronger-when-capital-is-more-available/
• Jacob Levy: The Sovereign Myth: "The sense of control that is often attributed to voters in the olden days was really a sense of satisfaction with outcomes... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereign-myth/
• Salvatore Morelli: Is growing inequality hurting our economies?: "The recent 2007–2008 collapse of the global financial system naturally acted as a catalyst for growing concerns around the increasing dispersion of economic resources within most advanced economies... http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/is-growing-inequality-hurting-our-economies/
• Martin Sandbu: Globalisation goes on without those who want to get off: "The EU, Japan and Canada keep the economic openness show on the road... https://www.ft.com/content/97582468-5fc7-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1
• Koichi Hamada: The Rebirth of the TPP: "Jagdish Bhagwati said... 'the TPP was a bit like allowing people to play golf in a club, but only if they also attended a particular church'... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/tpp-revival-japan-us-by-koichi-hamada-2017-06
• Stefan Klasen et al.: Inequality - worldwide trends and current debates: "Income inequality has been rising in many developing countries since the 1980s..." https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/142156/1/86139593X.pdf
• Doug Campbell: Douglas L. Campbell: In the Idiocy of Kevin Warsh: More Evidence for the 'Self-Induced Paralysis' Thesis: "I believe it is clear that the main reason the economy has been growing slowly since the financial crisis is overly tight monetary policy... http://douglaslcampbell.blogspot.ru/2017/07/in-idiocy-of-kevin-warsh-more-evidence.html