What does the global distributed hive-mind consciousness of the internet think is worth reading by and about Brad DeLong? Let me peek and see...
Time to Pound My Head Against the Wall Once Again: June 07, 2003: The Economist's Lexington correpondent devotes a full page to Hillary Rodham Clinton (with a time out for slams at Sidney Blumenthal for being a "brown-noser" and Paul Krugman for being "shrill")....
Read the column--it's a long column. Reflect upon several facts. First, almost all of the column is "inside political baseball" of little use to anyone who is not a serious political junkie. Second, "Lexington" doesn't like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bill Clinton or Paul Krugman or Sid Blumenthal--but doesn't bother to say why. Third, there is nothing in the column to give the reader any information about whether Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president, or about whether "Lexington" thinks Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president.
Is there anything else that readers--most of whom are Americans, most of whom vote--more need to learn than whether Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president? No, there isn't. So why does "Lexington" spend so much time on insider political baseball and trying to settel scores? Why doesn't he do something useful with his space--like tell us whether he thinks Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a better president than George W. Bush (almost surely [Lexington must think]) or would make a good president (almost surely not [Lexington must think])?...
J. Bradford DeLong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: J. Bradford DeLong (b. June 24, 1960, Boston) is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton Administration. He writes a popular blog, ([1]) Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal, which covers political, technical, and economic issues as well as criticism of their coverage in the media. He is also the author of a textbook, Macroeconomics, the second edition of which he coauthored with Marty Olney. DeLong is an editor of ([2]) The Economists' Voice, and has in the past been co-editor of the widely-read Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
As part of the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, he worked on the 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on the unsuccessful health care reform effort, and on other policies. DeLong is both a liberal in the modern American political sense and a free trade neo-liberal. He is part of an increasingly influential group of center-left bloggers who include Kevin Drum (formerly "CalPundit") and Matt Yglesias of The American Prospect...
Brad DeLong's Website: Dogs vs. Cats, Treasury vs. State, Economists vs. Diplomats: February 28, 2005: Once again today I had my nose rubbed in a fact of life...
When economists talk about international trade and finance, they talk--first and most importantly--about building institutions to allow for mutually-beneficial acts of economic exchange. They talk about diminishing barriers and increasing confidence. They talk about playing positive-sum games with people in other countries that increase wealth, trust, and confidence and that ultimately align interests: the larger is the surplus from international trade and finance, the bigger is that stake that everyone has in continuing the free-trade-and-finance game.
When diplomats talk about international trade and finance, they talk about them as carrots and sticks: we give people we want to reward access to our markets; we punish people who we want to punish by slapping on trade embargos. "Economic diplomacy" is like bombing, only less so. And arguments that it is much more important to build large and profitable positive-sum games that align interests than to win zero- (or negative!) sum games that lead to the domination of one government's conception of its momentary interest over another's? They blow right past the diplomats, the State Department people as if they were just gentle breezes...
Torture and Rumors of Torture: June 10, 2004: Torture and rumors of torture. In my email inbox this morning...
If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened." UPDATED: I failed to note that the taker of these notes is the excellent Rick Pearlstein, whose book about Goldwater is in my to-read pile...
A man who hated government | Salon News: Nov. 17, 2006: "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed 19th century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his "Essay on Coleridge." "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."
For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the 20th century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nobel Prize winner, founder of the conservative "Chicago School" of economics and advisor to Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan, was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer. His wits were sharp, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument...
The odds of economic meltdown | Salon.com : Aug. 3, 2006: Forecasting recessions is a fool's game. If there is enough solid economic information to make it appear highly likely that a recession is coming -- that production, employment and consumer demand will actually fall -- then it is highly likely that there already is a recession. Businesses are not stupid, and they don't have to wait for economists to tell them what they already know. By the time a gloomy forecast has been issued they've probably already noticed a drop in consumer demand and responded by firing workers and reducing production.
So: Never say that a recession is coming. Say only that a recession is here, or that there might be a recession on the way. Which, in fact, is what I'm saying today. As of the beginning of August 2006, a recession is not here, and I'm not going to violate my own rule by saying one is coming. But there is a good chance -- for the first time since 2003 -- that there might be a recession in progress six months from now...
Friedman completed Keynes: Nov. 29, 2006: The most famous and influential American economist of the past century died in November. Milton Friedman was not the most famous and influential economist in the world — that honour belongs to John Maynard Keynes. But Milton Friedman ran a close second.
From one perspective, Friedman was the star pupil of, successor to, and completer of Keynes’s work. Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, set out the framework that nearly all macroeconomists use today. That framework is based on spending and demand, the determinants of the components of spending, the liquidity-preference theory of short-run interest rates, and the requirement that government make strategic but powerful interventions in the economy to keep it on an even keel and avoid extremes of depression and manic excess. As Friedman said, “We are all Keynesians now.” But Keynes’s theory was incomplete: his was a theory of employment, interest, and money. It was not a theory of prices. To Keynes’s framework, Friedman added a theory of prices and inflation, based on the idea of the natural rate of unemployment and the limits of government policy in stabilising the economy around its long-run growth trend...
Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > Missing the story of structural change: May 21, 2004: Economics professor and blogger Brad DeLong says reporters aren’t getting to the bottom of the defining economic story of the past four years: a boom in the productive potential of the economy. First of a series.
Q. In what businesses are people working much harder than they did five years ago, and what’s making them work so much harder? Q. In what businesses are people working much smarter than they did five years ago, and what’s letting them work so much smarter? Q. In what businesses are productivity gains due primarily to people figuring out how to use all the computers they bought in the late 1990s, and how are people using computers and related gear to boost worker productivity? Q. As the price of information technology capital continues to fall, are there any signs of another boom in information technology investments that will greatly boost the productivity of IT-using industries yet further? Q. What new jobs or industries are being created because of the falling price of information technology?...
Sailing into Harm's Way versus the Dangerously Eloquent Jeff Faux | TPMCafe: Feb. 27, 2007: I had written: "Is there a way to interpret Jeff other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible--keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?"
Jeff Faux writes back: "Brad missed the point. There are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries. China is not just a society of poor, barefoot, uneducated peasants. At the top, China is a place of immense wealth.... Why is it that it is the responsibility of $40,000 year American working families to sacrifice their future in order to raise up the living standards of poor Chinese, when commissars turned capitalists ride around Shanghai in a different Rolls every day?..."
I think it's time to put myself seriously in harm's way here...I reply: There aren't many commissars-turned-capitalists. Scratching on the back of my envelope, I find that at current exchange rates, China's GDP per worker--and there are 800 million workers--is $3,000 per year. (In 1990 it was $1,100 of today's dollars per year.) According to Piketty and Qian's guesses, the top 0.1% of China's workers get an average of $30,000 per year at current exchange rates. This elite of some 800,000 do live considerably better in their homes in Shanghai than Americans with $30,000 do--unskilled labor and the services it provides are really cheap in Shanghai because China is still really poor (perhaps at a level equivalent to $100,000 per year if you like being waited on and having a household staff; much less if you don't). Redistribute all the income of the 800,000 commissars-turned-capitalists back to the masses, and you boost median standards of living in China by 1% above current levels...
The American Prospect: Robert Rubin's Contested Legacy: Rubin's Remarkable Achievement: Volume 15, Issue 2. February 1, 2004: In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington By Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Random House, 448 pages, $35.00.
In 1992 the incoming Clinton administration had, broadly speaking, two strategic options for domestic policy. The first was a double-or-nothing "social democracy" strategy. Federal spending at the time was running at 22 percent of gross domestic product, hardly changed from 1980. Contrary to conservative mythology, the Reagan revolution hadn't shrunk the government, but it had changed its shape: As a share of federal spending, domestic expenditures outside of the entitlement programs were down by one-third, while debt interest and military spending were up. Forecasts showed deficits continuing -- indeed, rising -- as far as the eye could see. If policy had stayed unchanged, the federal debt -- which had already risen from 26 percent of GDP in 1980 to 48 percent in 1992 -- would have continued climbing to 72 percent in 2000.
Bill Clinton could have said: Let the deficit problem be the responsibility of some future Republican administration. We'll pursue Democratic priorities while keeping the deficit constant, or maybe even allowing it to grow a bit in relation to the economy. Spend more to give every American good medical care (instead of using health-care reform for cost containment). Raise public investment in roads, bridges and other crumbling infrastructure. Expand social insurance to provide better benefits and retraining for workers who lose their jobs. Provide incentives -- such as a carbon tax -- for industry to rest lightly on the environment.
Some liberals will not forgive Clinton for failing to pursue this approach, but it was politically infeasible. In Congress, the Democrats had an organizational but not an ideological majority. Many centrist Democrats would not support a social-democratic program, as was evident in the spring of 1993, when Clinton's short-term economic stimulus program (which included money for infrastructure) went down to defeat...
