Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog:

• Must-Read: Adam Posen: Some Big Changes in Macroeconomic Thinking from Lawrence Summers
• Refet S. Gürkaynak and Troy Davig: Central Bankers as Policymakers of Last Resort: "Central banks... have been shouldering ever-increasing policy burdens beyond their core mandate.... The end result is that tools available to the central bank may be used excessively but ineffectively..." :: I would say central bankers should be (a) more modest, but also (b) commit not to price stability but to making Say's Law true in practice...
• Charles Arthur: Artificial Intelligence: "‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’..." :: Just what is it that makes some personal service jobs--personal-care attendant, housekeeper--low-status and Low-pay, while keeping others--investment manager who fails to beat the indexes--high status and high pay?
• Jeffry Frieden: ‘The Money Makers,’ by Eric Rauchway: "For the next 10 years, even as war clouds gathered and then as war raged, American and British policy makers, led by John Maynard Keynes and the United States Treasury official Harry Dexter White, planned a new international monetary order..." :: Few people today realize the extent to which the New Deal was not ideological or theoretical but rather their opposites: pragmatic. And where the New Deal was ideological or theoretical, it tended to be the least successful--witness Thurman Arnold and utilities, or Roosevelt's austerian turn in 1937-1938.
• William Poole: Don’t Blame the Fed for Low Rates: "Long-term rates reflect weak job creation and credit demand, both a result of President Obama’s poor economic stewardship..." :: The factors he points to... would... produce both (a) a fall in interest rates and (b) a fall in the equity values of established companies. We have the first. We do not have the second...