Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

From his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour.

From Amazon's page on the book:

Declan Trott:

‘The extent of the market’ is limited not just by transport but by trust: [T]here is also a feeling that some of the [recent] best-sellers have trivialised economics, titillating the reader with sex and drugs while neglecting the more important insights of the discipline. Nobody could accuse Partha Dasgupta of deepening this rut. In this Very Short Introduction, he has taken as his theme the original mystery of economics: the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. And he motivates the study not with unadorned GDP statistics but by comparing the lives of two young girls: Becky, who lives in an affluent American suburb, and Desta, the daughter of Ethiopian farmers. Why do two children, born so much alike, live such different lives?

Prologue

• How different do you think the lives of Becky and Desta are now and are likely to be?
• How would you go about explaining why the lives of Becky and Desta are and are likely to be different?
• How would an economist go about explaining why the lives of Becky and Desta are and are likely to be different?
• What are the costs and benefits of thinking like an economist?
• What kind of person would start an analysis by asking: "What are the costs and benefits of thinking like an economist?"

From: Brad DeLong delong@econ.berkeley.edu
To: UCB Econ 2 Spring 2014 students
Subject: The Prologue to Partha Dasgupta's "Economics: A Very Short Introduction"

Read it:

Prologue

Becky's world

Becky, who is 10 years old, lives with her parents and an older brother Sam in a suburban town in America's Midwest. Becky's father works in a firm specializing in property law. Depending on the firm's profits, his annual income varies somewhat, but is rarely below 145,000 US dollars ($145,000). Becky's parents met at college. For a few years her mother worked in publishing, but when Sam was born she decided to concentrate on raising a family. Now that both Becky and Sam attend school, she does voluntary work in local education. The family live in a two-storey house. It has four bedrooms, two bathrooms upstairs and a toilet downstairs, a large drawing-cum-dining room, a modern kitchen, and a family room in the basement. There is a plot of land at the rear - the backyard - which the family use for leisure activities.

Michael O'Haere: Peer Evaluation of Class Participation:

I… take as given that the correct criterion for this part of a grade is student’s contribution to the learning of others.  The problem this criterion presents is that it cannot be observed outside the heads of those doing the learning…. On the principle that I have the right to demand information (like answers on exams) that I need to make a fair performance evaluation, I demand information about their learning from others…. As Lauren Resnick pithily observed, “in school, collaboration is cheating; in the workplace, it’s essential”.  When I write letters of recommendation, I often have occasion to include the following text, and I think it has a good effect:

Student X took my course Y in semester Z [paper, projects, yada yada]…. In this course, class participation counts for 00% of the grade [varies from 25% to 40%] and is assessed by the other students in a confidential survey. Wallflowers, unprepared students, and air hogs tend to do poorly on this element. X received a CP grade [of  G/in the top 00% of the class], and I consider this an indicator of real leadership potential.

Philip B. Stark & Richard Freishtat: What Evaluations Measure: Part II:

• Student teaching evaluation scores are highly correlated with students’ grade expectations
• Effectiveness scores and enjoyment scores are related
• Students’ ratings of instructors can be predicted from the students’ reaction to 30 seconds of silent video of the instructor: first impressions may dictate end-of-course evaluation scores, and physical attractiveness matters
• The genders and ethnicities of the instructor and student matter, as does the age of the instructor….
• Controlled, randomized experiments are the gold standard…. The only controlled randomized experiments on student teaching evaluations have found that student evaluations of teaching effectiveness are negatively associated with direct measures of effectiveness….
• The survey questions apparently most influenced by extraneous factors are exactly of the form we ask on campus: overall teaching effectiveness….

It’s time for Berkeley to revisit the wisdom of asking students to rate the overall teaching effectiveness of instructors, of considering those ratings to be a measure of actual teaching effectiveness, of reporting the ratings numerically and computing and comparing averages, and of relying on those averages for high-stakes decisions such as merit cases and promotions.

In the third installment of this blog, we discuss a pilot conducted in the Department of Statistics in 2012–2013 to augment student teaching evaluations with other sources of information. The additional sources still do not measure effectiveness directly, but they complement student teaching evaluations and provide formative feedback and touchstones.  We believe that the combination paints a more complete picture of teaching and will promote better teaching in the long run.

Michael O'Hare: Malpractice with chalk on our sleeves:

My colleague Philip Stark, in our statistics department, is on the job…. Student evaluations of teaching (SET’s) have many important advantages as a quality assurance mechanism.  First, they are extremely cheap…. Second, they  completely protect faculty from engaging with each other about pedagogy…. Third, it has never been shown conclusively that outsourcing teaching quality assurance in this way has damaged any core values, neither research productivity nor the record of the football team.  Nor parking, I guess….

Do good SET’s indicate more learning by students? On the Berkeley Teaching Blog, along with the director of our Teaching and Learning Center, Richard Freishtat, Philip has posted the first and the second of three analyses of what we know about this, and his findings are devastating… to the claim that we are managing the resources society has given us in the way we say we are, for excellence in research and teaching. (If you are a student at Cal, or a taxpayer in California, you should be in the streets with pitchforks and torches.  If you are our new chancellor (or our new president),  fixing this should be your Job One….

Sadhbh Walshe: The Koch brothers' beer offensive against Obamacare loses its fizz:

What's a family values conservative to do when every effort to protect millions of Americans from the scourge of affordable healthcare fails? Break out the beer, of course. The latest campaign to kill off Obamacare in its infancy is now playing out on college campuses where a conservative group known as Generation Opportunity (GO), who are funded in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, is using the lure of free beer and "opt out" beer koozies to persuade young students not to buy health insurance--or, at least, not to buy it from the Obamacare exchanges.

Kathleen Parker: The crux of Ted Cruz:

Much can happen between now and the midterm elections next year, when Republicans hope to hold the House and gain the Senate — and Democrats intend to hold the Senate and recover the House. Each respective goal is equally possible depending on the same single significant determinant: whether Ted Cruz stops talking. While that thought settles in, we pause to note that, right now, the idea that Republicans could convince anyone that they should be allowed to deliver milk, much less hold the nation’s purse strings, seems remote…

Every time we think the New Republic cannot decline any further, it proves us wrong.

The politest thing that can be said is that your news, editorial, and personnel judgment is deep down the toilet:

Michael Kinsley (October 10, 2013): Obama Should Just Give in to the Republicans:

President Obama should give in. Yes, this mess is all the Republicans’ fault. Yes, it’s outrageous that they can hold the government hostage in order to reargue a law that’s been voted on, signed, enacted, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Yes, it’s a terrible precedent. Nevertheless, he should give in. He should speak to the nation and say, “I cannot in good conscience put you and this country through the traumatic consequences of a default. The Republicans apparently don’t feel that way…. They don’t care…. The sad truth is that if you don’t care about any of that, it gives you tremendous power over those who do. Perhaps unfortunately, I do care. And I believe the stakes are too high to let this become a testosterone contest…."

I'm Daisy Coleman, The Teenager At The Center Of The Maryville Rape Media Storm, And This Is What Really Happened

Kay: Judge Posner’s admission, Round Two:

We talked about Judge Posner’s admission that he made a mistake in the Indiana voter ID case…. Posner blamed the advocate in the case for not presenting enough information. The lawyer who argued the case wrote this in response:

As the lawyer who argued the constitutional challenge to the Indiana Voter ID law in the Supreme Court in 2008, I was both fascinated and pleased to hear that Judge Richard Posner--the author of the Seventh Circuit majority opinion affirmed by the Supreme Courtin Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board--has now publicly stated that he was wrong. It is refreshing, if not unprecedented, for a jurist to admit error on such a major case.

I was a little less pleased to see that he attempted to excuse his error by blaming the parties for not providing sufficient information to the court. As he put it in an interview quoted in the New York Times, weren’t given the information that would enable that balance to be struck between preventing fraud and protecting voters’ rights.”

Really? The information provided was enough for the late Judge Terence Evans, dissenting from Judge Posner’s decision, to say quite accurately:

Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by folks believed to skew Democratic.

There had never been a single known incident of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the history of Indiana and there have been precious few nationally--yet the Indiana law targeted only in-person voting. The law was passed immediately after Republicans took complete control of the legislature and governorship of the State of Indiana. Every Republican legislator supported the law, while every Democratic legislator opposed it. Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, the primary supporter of the bill, himself stated that there are certain “groups of voters for whom compliance with [the Voter ID law] may be difficult”… “elderly voters, indigent voters, voters with disabilities, first-time voters, [and] re-enfranchised ex-felons.” Moreover, the district court had conservatively estimated that there were 43,000 voting-age Indianans without a state-issued driver’s license or identification card, and that nearly three-quarters of them were in Marion County…. And by the time of the Seventh Circuit ruling… voter turnout in Marion County in the 2006 midterm general election had fallen…. In 2002 Marion County turnout was only three percentage points lower than turnout in the rest of the state. In 2006, the gap rose to eight percentage points….

The unfortunate approval of the Indiana law that the Seventh Circuit provided cannot fairly be blamed on how the case was litigated.

David Frum: Peter Baker’s ‘Days of Fire’:

An Italian historian once wryly observed that Italy is a country of many secrets but no mysteries. That line may now be applied to the Bush administration in reverse…. If Bush relied heavily on Cheney at the outset of his administration, that was a choice too…. White House management in the first term could be summed up by the formula Dick Cheney > Karl Rove > Andy Card, with Bush a sometimes amused, sometimes frustrated observer of his administration’s internal power struggles.

Joe Pompeo: Wall Street Journal Reporters Sabotaged By Bosses On News Corp Phone Hacking Story:

During the height of News Corp.’s phone-hacking drama in 2011, journalists at the company’s blue-chip American broadsheet grappled with efforts from higher-ups to muzzle their coverage of the scandal, according to a new book by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Reporters and editors at The Wall Street Journal who were assigned to cover allegations of phone-hacking and other illegal activity at News International, News Corp’s British newspaper division, “told colleagues of stories that were blocked, stripped of damning detail or context, or just held up in bureaucratic purgatory,” Folkenflik reports in Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires…

• Closing in on a $4 Trillion Federal Reserve Balance Sheet…
• Prairie Weather: Despair
• Michael Bordo and Harold James: EZ crisis and historical trilemmas
• Jia Lynn Yang and Tom Hamburger: Business groups stand by Boehner, plot against tea party
• Kansas Republican Ex-Attorney General Philip Kline Flees State?
• Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky: Health Website Woes Widen as Insurers Get Wrong Data
• Igor Bobic: McConnell Rules Out Future Government Shutdowns

And:

1. "Alec MacGillis attends a Fix the Debt event, and is awed to find everyone still saying the same old things: 'Fix the Debt officials spoke as if they have had no role in bringing us to this point – as if, to the contrary, we arrived at this point precisely because we were not listening to them. Compared to them, the second-guessing Republicans on the Hill Wednesday were models of candor and self-awareness'": Paul Krugman: Extortionist Fellow-Travelers
2. "[In] Connecticut… Kevin Counihan… told me last week that "the system has been working well and consistently since Tuesday afternoon on October 1. We were down from 12:30 until 2 that day, for a fix, but we’ve had no problems since. We are able to process applications through enrollment and we don’t have issues with wait time.' As a result, Obamacare in these places seems to be working more or less like it's supposed to work. Consumers are getting opportunities they never had before—to shop for insurance plans, each one with clearly defined benefits that make true comparisons possible, and to receive substantial financial assistance that provides many with thousands of dollars a year in assistance. And, from the looks of things, people are taking advantage of it. The Advisory Board, which is tracking state figures, says that about 180,000 have completed applications for insurance and, of those, 50,000 have enrolled": Jonathan Cohn: Obamacare Implementation: What the Feds Got Wrong, States Got Right
3. "With the addition of wildcard search-term capabilities, Google's fabulous language-analysis tool gets even more powerful": Ben Zimmer: Google's Ngram Viewer Goes Wild
4. "Along with Shelby County, Adarand is the case that really gives away the show. You can make an 'originalist' argument against the constitutionality of affirmative action at the state level, but it’s the kind of 'originalist' argument that strips 'originalism' of any meaningful content…. The idea that the 5th Amendment was originally understood as prohibiting any racial classifications by the federal government is that rare case where originalism produces a determinate answer: it obviously wasn’t…. Shelby County doesn’t mark the death of originalism; it represents what originalism, as practiced by its foremost advocates, has always meant": Scott Lemieux: Inevitably Selective “Originalism”

Prairie Weather: Despair:

Which reminds this Texas of what the group that became the tea party in our area--before they had a label--was most concerned about:  big, big business.  Corporate ownership of our politics.  Which  was why, originally, many on the political left and center were at least interested in the observations of what later became the bought-and-paid-for tea party.  There had been at one time a meeting of minds among people of two different cultures.

Michael Bordo and Harold James: EZ crisis and historical trilemmas:

Supranational commitments however do not change the problems posed by the adjustment requirement, and the asymmetric character of crisis adjustment is more apparent in the modern era (and in the interwar experience) than it was under the classic gold standard. A design that intentionally excluded a contingent clause made the system at first apparently more robust, but aggravated the eventual adjustment issue. That is why the initial crisis may not have been so acute as some of the gold standard sudden stops, but the recovery or bounce back is painfully slow and protracted. The instability is increased by the heightened complexity and length of credit chains, and by the fact of the mediation of credits through small country banking centres.

Jia Lynn Yang and Tom Hamburger: Business groups stand by Boehner, plot against tea party:

Now that the shutdown and debt-ceiling fight have exposed a rift in the Republican Party, lines are being drawn in the battle for control: On one side, there is Boehner and his circle of powerful business allies. On the other, tea party lawmakers and activist groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth. “I don’t know of anybody in the business community who takes the side of the Taliban minority,” said Dirk Van Dongen, longtime chief lobbyist for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has known Boehner since the lawmaker’s first election. In the hallways of the country’s leading trade associations, there is talk about taking on tea party Republicans in at least three states.

Eric Lach: Kansas Supreme Court Suspends Ex-Attorney General Over Abortion Investigation:

The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday indefinitely suspended former Attorney General Phillip Kline (R), who investigated abortion doctor George Tiller, from the practice of law in the state. The court cited "clear and convincing evidence" that Kline committed 11 violations of attorney conduct rules while investigating abortion clinics as attorney general and for his role in a grand jury investigation while serving as Johnson County district attorney…. Kline was accused of "dispatching staff to record license plates of women entering George Tiller's abortion clinic, getting records from a motel where patients stayed, and obtaining state medical files under false pretenses, then retaining them after his term as AG was over and repeatedly lying about it in court." These alleged actions occurred during Kline's pursuit of Tiller, who ran Women's Health Care Services in Wichita, Kan., and who was shot to death in 2009….

Kline, who is now an assistant professor of law at the Pastor Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University in Virginia, has previously stated that he does not intend to practice law in Kansas again…. His official biography on Liberty University's website portrays him as victim of the "abortion industry."

Back in 2007 I thought that Paul Krugman was broadly right in his assessment of Milton Friedman.

Alex Tabarrok disagreed. So did Edward Nelson and Anna Schwartz.

Has the reality of the last six years left anything of the Tabarrok-Nelson-Schwartz position standing? Or is it all 100% rubble?

I mean to start with:

(1) Krugman’s misstatements in “Who Was Milton Friedman?” about Friedman’s economics and about monetarism, as well as his assertions of existence of liquidity traps. (a) On Friedman: Krugman’s (2007a) concluding paragraph states that “Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage…"

does not auger well for the rest of the article…

That is one of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's constant applause lines--that he wants Kansas to be a lot less like California and a lot more like Texas.

And so I was reading Bryan Burrough on Erica Grieder: ‘Big, Hot, Cheap and Right’: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas, and ran across Burrough's claim:

AS a Texas-raised journalist, I can tell you two things with confidence about my native state. One, its economy has been humming nicely for years…

And I think: which years are those? The Texas unemployment rate jumped 4.5% points to above 8% in the depths of the Lesser Depression, and is still 6.5%. That's not "humming"--at least not unless you view the experience of the unemployed and of those who fear they might lose their jobs as of no account.

John Cassidy: Interview with Eugene Fama:

Eugene Fama: What [the banks] got wrong, and I don’t know how they could have got it right, was that there was a decline in house prices around the world, not just in the U.S. You can blame subprime mortgages, but if you want to explain the decline in real estate prices you have to explain why they declined in places that didn’t have subprime mortgages. It was a global phenomenon. Now, it took subprime down with it, but it took a lot of stuff down with it.

John Cassidy: So what is your explanation of what happened?

Eugene Fama: What happened is we went through a big recession, people couldn’t make their mortgage payments, and, of course, the ones with the riskiest mortgages were the most likely not to be able to do it. As a consequence, we had a so-called credit crisis. It wasn’t really a credit crisis.

Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky: Health Website Woes Widen as Insurers Get Wrong Data - WSJ.com:

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

In the New York Times, Ross Douthat: A Teachable Moment:

One of the themes running through my various government shutdown posts has been the importance of seeing the current wave of right-wing populism clearly and weighing its merits and demerits judiciously. That requires understanding the strategic thinking that led to the shutdown in the first place… acknowledging the legitimate sense of political disappointment that underlies the right’s inclination toward intransigence… and most importantly, recognizing that relative to the G.O.P. establishment (such as it is), today’s right-wing populists often have better political instincts and better policy ideas…

"Better political instincts and policy ideas"? Like a caucus that only got 48% of the vote in the last election backing a fringe that stages a tantrum that costs the country $25 billion? Like spending the last three days of the tantrum trying to figure out whether they would rather do a favor to the medical device-manufacturing industry or cut each of their staff's salaries by $12,000/year? Those political and policy instincts?

Igor Bobic: McConnell Rules Out Future Government Shutdowns:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell… ruled out shutting down the government in exchange for policy change…. “One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days. There is no education in the second kick of a mule. There will not be a government shutdown."

• Tom Levenson: "Please, Sir, May I Have Another?" Republican Congressional Staff Tweeting
• Rep. Peter King (R-NY): The Importance of Keeping Ted Cruz Muzzled
• Sarah Kliff: At least 185,000 people have applied for Obamacare
• Matthew Yglesias: Efficient markets mean massive market failures

And:

1. "YELLOW-BELLIED BIG-GOVERNMENT MARXIST!!" Tea Party Insult Generator: as seen on John Boehner's Facebook Page
2. "Legislators of both parties–like Sen. Obama in 2006–have made grandstanding votes against the debt limit many times in the past. But those were stage-managed protests in which votes were carefully counted and there was no serious fear the U.S. would actually default, unlike in 2011, when the crisis resulted in a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. That’s another case where 'the other side did it too' does not an equivalence make…. 'Both sides got us into this mess' sounds neutral, but it’s actually taking a side--or, at least, adopting the framing that one side is counting on using to a political end. Reality doesn’t always have a bias, liberal or otherwise. But when it does, it’s not journalism’s job to rebalance reality"
3. "This brinksmanship, which happens every three, six, [or] twelve months, is corrosive on our collective psyche and it is weighing on our willingness and ability to take risk. I am increasingly of the view that the reason why we can’t get our groove back, why those animal spirits that are so key to the well workings of the American economy are bottled up are because of what’s happening… the continued brinksmanship": Mark Zandi: Corrosive Political Conflict Is Holding Back U.S. Growth
4. "When furor over exchange glitches starts to fester in the media void that Ted Cruz left behind, remember that the last two weeks of  political histrionics—which achieved nothing of consequence in health policy land, despite being premised on an effort to defund Obamacare—racked up a price tag that makes the exchange infrastructure’s budget look like a pittance": Adrianna Macintyre: The shutdown could have bought healthcare.gov 40 times over
5. "College Men: Stop Getting Drunk. It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell men to stop doing it": Ann Friedman: College Men: Stop Getting Drunk

The Third Moscow Conference:

The governments of the United States of America, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China;

United in their determination, in accordance with the declaration by the United Nations of January, 1942, and subsequent declarations, to continue hostilities against those Axis powers with which they respectively are at war until such powers have laid down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender;

Conscious of their responsibility to secure the liberation of themselves and the peoples allied with them from the menace of aggression;

At least 185,000 people have applied for Obamacare:

Matthew Yglesias: Efficient markets mean massive market failures.:

An enormous amount of mischief is done around Eugene Fama's work and the idea of efficient financial markets by the fact that both the "efficient" and the "markets" in "efficient markets hypothesis" provoke strong ideology-linked associations…. John Cochrane… remarks: "Unhappy investors who lost a lot of money to hedge funds, dot-coms, bank stocks, or mortgage-backed securities… should have listened to Gene Fama, who all along championed the empirical evidence… that markets are remarkably efficient, so they might as well have held a diversified index." And indeed this is what people should have done. What's a bit strange to me is that Cochrane doesn't see the clear implication here that there are dramatic and remarkably persistent market failures in the financial services industry, and an extremely strong case for paternalistic regulation.

Actual Insults on John Boehner's Facebook Page

Peter King: Ted Cruz will try to do all of this again. Will John Boehner let him?:

He’s going to be coming back, rewriting history, saying, ‘We were on the verge of victory back in October, and we could have won if we’d just stayed in there another week.’ And he’s going to have phone calls being made, and he’s going to have town hall meetings. And he’s going to have all those support groups out there, threatening to downgrade people on their scorecards and all that stuff.”... I think it’s important for people in the Republican Party around the country not to just come in at the end and say, ‘Congress was dysfunctional,’ or ‘Congress screwed up.’ That’s too easy to do. Say who it was. Because it wasn’t Congress. it was one person who was able to steamroll Congress and unless we target him for what he is, he’s going to do it again. So I’m hoping other Republicans will join me and start going after this guy, and say we’re not going to let it happen again…

Has he forgotten that the last successful bipartisan budget negotiation was in… 1990? That calling on President Obama to use his Green Lantern-like powers to create a large budget-balance deal is a strategy that has not produced any results in 23 years?

And, given that Alice Rivlin is saying that she thinks that discretionary spending at current levels is too low for the government to function effectively, isn't it time for Leon Panetta to shut up and sit down and stop talking about the need for "tough choices" to further reduce spending?

There are times when I wonder if I lived through the same history as the Green Lanternists…

Tom Levenson: Cue the World’s Tiniest Violin, Ted Cruz (Office) Style:

Via Brad Friedman, we learn that Sen. Ted Cruz’ speech writer and senior communications adviser Amanda Carpenter put this up on the Twitter machine:

It’s almost November and I have no idea what my health plan will be or what it will cost in January. This. Is. Awful.

Well, maybe if you hadn’t spent the last whatever helping your boss help the GOP conspire to take away your congressional staff health benefits…

…Aww.  Fekkit.  Not even going to try to argue the logic. Just--if you don’t want gov’t. to help you, don’t kvetch when it doesn’t.

• Timothy Jost: Prospective income verification a fantasy
• Menzie Chinn: Policy Uncertainty, October 14, 2013
• Paul Ford: Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle
• Tom Kludt: Houston Chronicle Retracts Its Endorsement of Ted Cruz

And:

1. "Treasury running out of money to pay its bills would have dire economic consequences. But the mere possibility has already taken a toll…. Macroeconomic Advisers… released a new assessment suggesting that the fiscal instability of recent years, along with austerity policies, bumped up the unemployment rate by more than one percentage point. It’s easy to blame this all on Ted Cruz, Tea Party Republicans, and groups like Heritage Action…. It’s the less extreme Republicans, the ones who know better, who allowed this to happen, because they never stood up to the far right wing. And one reason they stayed silent is nobody stood up to lead them. That somebody should have been Boehner": Jonathan Cohn: Shutdown Endgame: US Citizens Will Suffer
2. "Democratic unity went beyond a (correct) calculation that it would be dangerous to pay any ransom at all… a genuine moral revulsion at the tactics and audacity of a party that had lost a presidential election by 5 million votes, lost another chance to win a favorable Senate map, and lost the national House vote demanding the winning party give them its way without compromise. Probably the single biggest Republican mistake was in failing to understand the way its behavior would create unity in the opposing party. Not until the very end, when the crisis was well under way, did any conservatives even acknowledge the Democratic view that the GOP had threatened basic governing norms…. Paul Ryan Republican… seemed to think their extortion scheme was a simple business deal. Its collapse is one of the brightest days Washington has seen in a grim era": Jonathan Chait: Stop Fretting: The Debt-Ceiling Crisis Is Over!
3. "Give the Republicans on Capitol Hill one thing: they don’t leave a job half done. Evidently disturbed by polls showing Congress with a single-digit approval rating, they appear intent on driving it to zero. What other explanation can there be for Tuesday’s farcical maneuvers?": John Cassidy: G.O.P. Blues: Another Farcical Day on Capitol Hill
4. "A technical default at most would freeze immediate payments. But if the market continues to believe in the solvency of the US, they will continue to circulate those claims regardless. Which means the fate of the US will be determined by market psychology not a handful of loose cannon politicians in Washington. The fact that there is no cross-default clause will help immensely on this front as well. Everything becomes a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘whether’. The great thing for markets is that ‘when’ creates an incentive to hold securities regardless. It also provides a monetisation or substitution mechanism for those who need the cash payments immediately or are not allowed to hold defaulted securities": Isabella Kaminzka: Some are born solvent, some achieve solvency, and some have solvency thrust upon them

This is Ashok. | reality in bits: economics, technology, and thought:

• A Remark on Ricardian Taxes | This is Ashok. *nThe Ease of Defeating Derp Report (Niall Ferguson Edition) | This is Ashok.
• The Economy’s Not a Rock, and Paper Isn’t Killing It | This is Ashok.
• Notes on falsifying Fiscalism | This is Ashok.
• Market Monetarism is not Really Free Market | This is Ashok.

Timothy Jost: Quote of the day: Prospective income verification “a fantasy”:

As I reported earlier,  income verification requirements are already quite demanding — far more demanding than verification requirements for tax benefits received by other Americans such as business-expense deductions — but in the end verification in advance of how much lower-income American families will earn over a year is a fantasy.  Lower-income Americans often work in part-time, intermittent, or seasonal jobs and are paid hourly wages, making predicting income exactly a year in advance simply not possible. Lying on an application is subject to serious civil and criminal penalties, and the amount of tax credits received by an individual will in any event be reconciled with actual income at the end of the year.  A good-faith estimate of income is all that is possible.  Congress cannot reasonably require the impossible.

Tom Kludt: Houston Chronicle Expresses Regrets For Endorsing Cruz:

'When we endorsed Ted Cruz in last November's general election, we did so with many reservations and at least one specific recommendation--that he follow Hutchison's example in his conduct as a senator', the editorial read. 'Obviously, he has not done so. Cruz has been part of the problem'

• Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America

• Peter F. Drucker: The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

• Stephen Kinzer The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

• Frank Dikötter: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

• Solomon Northup: Twelve Years a Slave

• Fritz Stern: Five Germanys I Have Known

• Jeff Madrick: Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

• John Ringo: The Emerald Sea

Paul Ford: Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle:

Healthcare.gov isn’t just a website; it’s more like a platform…. Visiting the site is like visiting a restaurant…. The kitchen is the back end, with all the databases and services. The contractor most responsible for the back end is CGI Federal. Apparently it’s this company’s part of the system that’s burning up under the load of thousands of simultaneous users. But it’s not just that the kitchen’s on fire. The alarm system doesn’t work either. The waiters can’t hear the screams of the cooks. It’s hard for outsiders to tell exactly what’s going on, because CGI Federal’s code is locked away out of sight, and the company hasn’t replied to press inquiries (including those from Bloomberg Businessweek). You can’t get a waiter’s attention to save your life…. Put charitably, the rollout of healthcare.gov has been a mess…

The sixth thing economists have to say is about “macro”: about how sometimes the entire market system appears to go awry in some puzzling way. Sometimes when you go the market, you find the money prices that you have to pay higher than you expected—perhaps 10% higher than you expected last year when you made your plans. It seems that, somehow, there is too much spending money chasing too few goods. How is this that this happens? And what should the government do to make sure that it does not happen?

Menzie Chinn: Econbrowser: Policy Uncertainty, October 14:

Policy uncertainty, as measured by the Baker, Bloom and Davis index, is skyrocketing. If one thought that policy uncertainty was slowing the economy, would this be any way of conducting policy?

Maeve Reston reminds me of a conversation from 1993, reconstructed and reimagined from my memory, after an OEOB Ira Magaziner health care reform meeting:

Another Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary: "You've lived in California; Washington, DC; and Massachusetts. You don't really understand the rest of the country--you don't understand the South; you don't understand Texas."

Me: Half my extended family lives in Florida...

ATDAS: "That's not the South..."

Me: Three of my four grandparents come from Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri...

ATDAS: "The Midwest is not the South, or Texas..."

Me: One of my great-great-great grandfathers is buried in Wichita...

ATDAS: "And Wichita is not Texas.

Me: True...

From James Fieser's ([email protected]) Hume Archives:

LETTER FROM ADAM SMITH, LL.D.
TO WILLIAM STRAHAN, ESQ.
Kirkaldy, Fifeshire, Nov. 9. 1776

Dear Sir,

It is with a real, though a very melancholy, pleasure that l sit down to give you some account of the behaviour of our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume, during his last illness.

1. Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium: A first draft of electoral history is always worth reading.
2. "Under Article II of the Constitution, the President of the United States 'may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them'…. House rules account for the very circumstance where lawmakers try to prevent the lower house of Congress from operating by refusing to show up to work. Under those rules, '[i]n the absence of a quorum, a majority comprising at least 15 Members… may compel the attendance of absent members'": Igor Volsky: No, House Republicans Can't Just Skip Town And Stick Obama With A Ransom Note
3. "Markets… have been happy to buy UK government debt… with a solid coalition Mr Osborne could have taken credible steps to encourage spending during the slump while charting a course to long-term fiscal rectitude. Why didn’t he do that? Political timing. Mr Osborne’s economic mismanagement has cost a lot of people their jobs. It may well keep his own secure": Tim Harford: Dr Osborne’s bitter medicine is no cure
4. "Economics is an extremely popular major--for men. Ten to 20 percent of all male undergraduates…. However… there are 2.6 males for every female economics major; there are 2.5 males for every female at the top 100 research universities. Worse, these differences have widened over the last two decades": Claudia Goldin: Can ‘Yellen Effect’ Attract Young Women to Economics?:

And:

• As the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives Prepares to Shit Where It Eats...
• Can't Anybody Play This Game?: Not Understanding What a "Legislature" Is Department
• "Uncharted"
• Will, It's Called "Liberalism"
• Josh Barro: Niall Ferguson Uses Twitter Science To Prove He Is Better Than Everyone
• Brad DeLong : Two Million Jobs, 3% of GDP Lost to Republican Budget Brinkmanship. Any Questions?
• Economist's View: Fama, Hansen, and Shiller
• Brad DeLong : The Thought of Nobel-Like Prize Laureate Eugene Fama: "Bailouts and Stimulus Plans", Uncut
• Felix Salmon: Boehner's and McConnell's Cowardly Refusal to Stand Up to the Tea Party Has Already Started Breaking the Economy
• Robert Shiller: ‘When I look around I see a lot of foolishness, and I can’t believe it’s not important economically’
• Let Me Endorse Ta-Nehisi Coates: It's Not the Idiot with the Flag, It's the Crowd That Doesn't Think He's an Idiot...
• Can Somebody Please Check on Scott Sumner? In the Wake of the Nobel-Like Prize Announcement, He May Need His Meds Adjusted…

von Mellinthin on the Dnieper Line:

At 0630, on 16 October the Russians launched their attack against the positions of XLVIII Panzer Corps; I happened to be in one of the forward observation posts of 19 Panzer Division, and had to stay there for fully two hours. The artillery bombardment was really quite impressive. No movement was possible, for two hundred and ninety guns of all calibres were pounding a thousand yards of front, and during these two hours the Russians expended their normal ammunition allowance for one-and-a-half days.

Better stock up on sewing needles, bottled water, and ammunition for the coming day when their staffs drive them into the desert and sharpen their flensing knives...

Will Wilkinson: Is a Non-Ideological Political Philosophy Possible?:

It's mostly personal epistemic virtue, but the content of belief helps too. I think a moderate general Pyrrhonism plus conceptually savvy empiricism plus pluralism plus a socially deliberative/procedural bent (not just democratic but also scientific) adds up to something close to non-ideological--as close one is likely to get, at any rate.

I stopped calling myself a libertarian in part because I thought my many marginal disagreements added up to something really substantive and categorical. Mostly, though, because ideological self-definition inwardly encourages a spirit of community and camaraderie and partisanship that is one of the blessings of life, but which also makes true philosophy next to impossible. I struggle daily with the possibility that I have made the wrong decision, and that belonging, even on the basis of shared error, is more important than truth. Where my label was, there is a scar.