Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

• Josh Brown: "This morning the markets are shocked thanks to a year-over-year gain in US salaries and wages of 2.6%. The ten-year Treasury yield is now up almost 10% over the last four days...." http://thereformedbroker.com/2015/04/30/the-new-new-new-normal-us-wages-rising
• Francis Fukuyama (2006): After Neoconservatism http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?pagewanted=all
• Oliver Roeder: How To Read The Mind Of A Supreme Court Justice https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-read-the-mind-of-a-supreme-court-justice/
• Paul Krugman: VSPs versus MSEs http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/vsps-versus-mses
• Paul Rosenberg: Scott Walker, forever tarnished: Republican governors have tanked the GOP brand http://www.salon.com/2015/04/23/scott_walker_forever_tarnished_republican_governors_have_tanked_the_gop_brand/
• Jonathan Ashworth and Charles A.E. Goodhart: Measuring public panic in the Great Financial Crisis http://www.dvoxeu.org/article/measuring-public-panic-great-financial-crisis
• Must-Read: David M. Byrne, Stephen D. Oliner, and Daniel E. Sichel: How Fast are Semiconductor Prices Falling? http://equitablegrowth.org/?p=11156

Over at Equitable Growth:

Over at Equitable Growth

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. NO! NO!!!! READ MOAR

Rereading:

Francis Fukuyama (2006): After Neoconservatism: "How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals?...

He gets himself tangled up in knots because he bends over not just backward but completely upside down to provide a sympathetic view of the Neoconservatist impulse.

I have always had a much more jaundiced view:

Live from Peet's Coffee: Could someone please tell Siri I am much more likely to dictate "view of Neoconservatism" than "video concert"?

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Must-Read: David M. Byrne, Stephen D. Oliner, and Daniel E. Sichel: How Fast are Semiconductor Prices Falling?
• Jeff Spross: The Fed absolutely should embrace a 4 percent inflation target
• Must-Read: Noah Smith: Scott Walker, Labor Market Protectionist
• Must-Read: Josh Brown: The Biggest Threat To Your Portfolio
• Paul Krugman: VSPs versus MSEs
• Jonathan Ashworth and Charles A.E. Goodhart: Measuring public panic in the Great Financial Crisis

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Manufacturing Employment in Historical Perspective: The 27% Manufacturing Labor Force of the Great Society Would Be Gone No Matter What
• Technology and Jobs: Should Workers Worry?: Milken Institute
• Nick Bunker: The merits and limits of “college for the masses”

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of April 30, 2015

And Over Here:

Over at Equitable Growth: The extremely-sharp Dean Baker writes:

Live from Century City: Josh Barro says: Take panel questions via direct message. He is correct. Requiring questions to be less than 140 characters is a major technological innovation!

Live from Peet’s Coffee: It is official: after the last winter in Kansas City, I need a quad latte to be my best self for breakfast meetings.

Is it time for Rehab?

It's going to be eighteenth months of an unprofessional media clown show again, isn't it?

Over at Equitable Growth: Via Mark Thoma, who finds it, and says "I enjoyed this session":

: Video: Technology and Jobs: Should Workers Worry?:

Moderator: Josh Barro, Correspondent, New York Times READ MOAR

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: "It has been astonishing, from a US perspective, to witness the limpness of Labour’s response to the austerity push. Britain’s opposition has been amazingly willing to accept claims that budget deficits are the biggest economic issue facing the nation, and has made hardly any effort to challenge the extremely dubious proposition that fiscal policy under Blair and Brown was deeply irresponsible – or even the nonsensical proposition that this supposed fiscal irresponsibility caused the crisis of 2008-2009..."
• Must-Read: Mark Magnier: China’s True Growth Is a Mystery; Economists Weigh the Clues
• Larry Levitt et al.: "15.5 million people had major medical coverage in the individual insurance market – both inside and outside of the Marketplaces – as of December 31, 2014. Enrollment was up 4.8 million over the end of 2013, a 46% increase..."
• Jason Furman: Advance Estimate of GDP for the First Quarter of 2015

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Cries of Despair Induced by This Morning's Disappointing First-Quarter U.S. GDP Growth Report - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
• Nick Bunker: What does weak U.S. economic growth in first quarter mean for the current recovery?
• Ben Zipperer: How raising the minimum wage ripples through the workforce

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of April 28, 2015

And Over Here:

Over at Equitable Growth: Nick Bunker is out of the gate with his take on the surprisingly low 0.2%/year first-quarter US real GDP growth rate:

A Munich once every three months. Admittedly, some of them are the same Munich, as the same thing reminds him and then re-reminds him, but still...

Adolf Hitler: The Last Will of Adolf Hitler:

As I did not consider that I could take responsibility, during the years of struggle, of contracting a marriage, I have now decided, before the closing of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me. At her own desire she goes as my wife with me into death. It will compensate us for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people.

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Must-Read: Robert Reich: The Political Roots of Widening Inequality
• Cory Doctorow (2009): "VP Joe Biden stood up in front of a bunch of Hollywood execs and promised to appoint a copyright czar, and furthermore, that this would be the 'right' person to protect their interests. I would have voted Dem in the last election, if I got a vote, but make no mistakes: the Dems are the party of stupid copyright laws. From Hollywood Howard Berman on down, they've got a terrible track record on technology and copyright policy..."
• Must-Read: Steve Cecchetti and Kermit L. Schoenholtz: The Euro Area's Debt Hangover
• Must-Read: Robert Skidelsky: Debating the Confidence Fairy
• Must-Read: Eric Rosengren: Most developed countries’ central banks
• Josh Bivens: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Unlikely to Be a Good Deal for American Workers

Here at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Thinking About TPP and TATIP: "Free Trade"
• Nick Bunker: The problem of too much stuff sloshing around the global economy
• Bridget Ansel: New John Bates Clark winner Roland Fryer takes policy-relevant research very seriously
• Nick Bunker: Breaking down the decline in the U.S. labor share of income
• Nick Bunker: Determining the optimal U.S. tax rate for higher earners
• Nick Bunker: Monopsony and market power in the labor market

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of January 31, 2015

And Over Here:

Live from the Beverly Hills Hilton: On my flight to LAX I watched the intro episode of “Star Trek: Enterprise”. First time watching the show.

Does it ever get better? Or do we deal with it in the same way we deal with the Star Wars prequels — i.e., pretend they never happened?

Over at Equitable Growth The advocates for the TPP and TATIP should be making the following points:

1. The gains from trade from these agreements will be equitably distributed as a result of policies X.
2. The stronger copyright protections will actually boost world growth.
3. Alternatively, if (2) is false and the stronger copyright protections are actually bad for the world, it will benefit the United States to receive higher rents from our past and future investments in intellectual property, and the United States ought to exert its bargaining power to get a better deal for us.
4. The dispute-settlement provisions will lead to better political-economic governance in the world as a whole, and will lead to harmonization at the top rather than a race to the regulatory bottom via policies Y.

Those are the arguments that should be made--if they can--to command general support for the TPP and the TATIP.

But, as Dean Baker points out, those are not the arguments that are being made: READ MOAR

Econ 2: Spring 2014: UC Berkeley: Sample Final Exam I: D. Externalities:

Externalities can be subtle…

Let us move across the bay and 60 miles south from Avicenna to the town of Tall Stick, home of Crony Capitalism University…

The 10,000 students at CCU do two things with their disposable incomes of $5,000/year each:

• Buy gourmet pizzas at $20/pizza
• Rent BMWs at $5000/year

The utility of each student is:

U = (number of pizzas) + 500(if renting BMW) - (1/20)(number of other students renting BMWs)

This utility function thus has both envy and spite…

Jon E. Lewis (ed): The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II:

The close combat boys went into action. Their leader was SS-Obersturmfuhrer [First Lieutenant] Babick, battle commandant of the Reichstag. Babick now waged the kind of war he had always dreamed of. Our two battery commanders, Radloff and Richter, were reduced to taking orders from him.

Live from the Roasterie: And If It Snows That Stretch Down South Won’t Ever Stand the Strain…

I must confess that I had thought that Wichita would have done much better in employment during the oil boom of the past seven years:

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Must-Must-Read: Adam Kotsko: The Good Inequality
• Must-Read: Nick Bunker: What Is the Right Size and Purpose of the U.S. Financial System?
• Must-Read: Zeynep Tufekci: The Machines Are Coming
• Must-Read: Timothy B. Lee: The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Great for Elites. Is It Good for Anyone Else?
• The Politics of Financial Insecurity: A Democratic Tilt, Undercut by Low Participation
• Cullen Roche: "It only took 15 years, but the Nasdaq has finally set a new record high.... So, what can we learn from this grueling 15 year round trip? 1) Diversification Works.... 2)  Price Compression Creates Tail Risk.... 3) Stop Chasing the Next Hot Thing in the Pursuit of Maximizing Returns..."
• Scott Lemieux: "Kansas is in the midst of a grim experiment putting crackpot supply-side economic theories into practice... [with] devastating results for poor people... [and a] government more intrusive into the private lives of the state's citizens.... Since the election of Brownback, Kansas has gone full Tea Party. Kansas Republicans have enacted massive upper-class tax cuts, with the idea that they would produce such an explosion of economic growth that the state would actually gain revenues.... Kansas Republicans certainly have no intention of taking responsibility for this disaster, which means a search for scapegoats. The targets should not be surprising: poor people, women, and gay people..."
• Tim Worstall: We Really, Seriously, Don't Want Currency Manipulation Provisions In Trade Deals
• Dan Drezner: This Wasn’t the PhD Advice You Were Looking for
• Robert E. Hall: Macroeconomics of Persistent Slumps

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• What Has Happened to the Middle Class, Anyway? - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
• Just What Are the Risks That Alarm Ken Rogoff?

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of April 27, 2015

And Over Here:

Over at Equitable Growth: A nice piece by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times with good quotes from Cornell's Thomas Hirschl.

One thing going on is that the major lifestyle and utility improvements of the past generation--really cheap access to communication, information, and entertainment--are overwhelmingly available to pretty much everyone. On the one hand, this means that recent economic growth assessed in terms of individual utility and well-being is much more equal then when assessed in terms of income. On the other hand, it means that access these benefits seems much more like simply the air we breathe then as a marker of class status, or achievement. READ MOAR

Must-Read: Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick and Thomas Steger: Global House Prices, 1870‐2012: How have house prices evolved over the long‐run?...

I think Ezra Klein nails this completely. The Washington DC press corps is not becoming better with time. It is becoming worse.

So I am going to make you read Ezra:

World War II Today: Execution of Mussolini:

It was on the 27th April that a column of German trucks made their way north to Switzerland. Amongst the group was Benito Mussolini, thinly disguised in a German army helmet, and his mistress, intending to take a plane to Spain. The group was checked by communists of the 52nd Garibaldi Partisan Brigade in the village of Dongo on Lake Como – and Mussolini was immediately recognised by Urbano Lazzaro, the political officer. That evening Radio Milano announced:

Over at Equitable Growth: As I say, repeatedly: everything that Ken Rogoff writes is very interesting, nd almost everything is correct.

But.

This part of Ken Rogoff's piece appears to me to be very much on the wrong track:

I think Corey Robin nails it here. My only objection is that he does not draw the links back to earlier, early twentieth-century attacks on "boring" politics--the "cretinism of parliaments" and similar doctrines:

Nazi Murder Mills, April 26, 1945 Universal Newsreel: