Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog:

• Nick Bunker: The upside of expanding access to the Earned Income Tax Credit
• Nick Bunker: Trying to get a grip on the gig economy
• Paul Krugman: Obamacare and the Cockroaches: "Zombie ideas are claims that should have been killed by evidence..." :: Still looking, without success, for conservatives at think tanks willing to be reality-based on health care...
• Ryan Cooper: How Climate Change Ate Conservatism's Smartest Thinkers: "Like Clive Crook, Will Wilkinson, and Walter Russell Mead, Douthat doesn't seriously engage with the evidence..." :: It is important to note that global warming is not unique here...
• Kevin Hoover: The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics: "Representative-agent models [do not] provide microfundations... do not solve the problem of aggregation; rather they assume that it can be ignored..." :: The combination of representative-agent modeling and utility-based "microfoundations" was always a game of intellectual Three-Card Monte...
• Dani Rodrik: When Economics Works and When it Doesn’t: "The efficient markets hypothesis... models... [of] sovereign debt crises.... I wish we’d put greater weight on stories of the second kind rather than the first. We’d have been better off..." :: There is an awful lot of bad right-wing economics. There is much less bad left-wing economics...
• Zack Cooper et al.: The Price Ain’t Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured: "Health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three.... The correlation... [with] Medicare... is only 0.14..." :: Yes. Constraining hospital and doctor-group market power is very important to creating a more efficient health-care system. Why do you ask?
• Nick Bunker: Trying to Get a Grip on the "Gig Economy": "The sharing economy... follows rather than causes the bulk of the increase in 'independent contracting'..." :: When put that way, what we need is not a halfway house between W-2 employees and 1099 independent contractors, but more expansionary monetary and fiscal policy