Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Sarah Perry: The History of Fertility Transitions and the New Memeplex: "European cultures have historically prevented people from restricting family size within marriage...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Sluggish Future: Over at Finance and Development | Equitable Growth
• Nick Bunker: Declining business dynamism and illusive allocative efficiency | Equitable Growth
• Equitable Growth: Seven important U.S. economic trends to consider before President Trump’s first address to Congress | Equitable Growth
• Kyle Herkenhoff et al.: The impact of consumer credit access on employment, earnings and entrepreneurship | Equitable Growth
• Reuven S. Avi-Yonah & Kimberly A. Clausing: Problems with destination-based corporate taxes and the Ryan blueprint | Equitable Growth
• Bridget Ansel: Local economic decline affects marriage and fertility rates, but in a surprising way | Equitable Growth
• Kevin Drum: WSJ: Republicans Give Up, Admit They Can't Create a Non-Appalling Health Care Plan: "There you have it...
• Nick Crafts: Whither Economic Growth?: "Only yesterday... the so-called new economy was ascendant...
• Must-Read: Heather Boushey: The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline: "Peter Temin’s... The Vanishing Middle Class.... argues that the distribution of gains from economic growth today...

Must-Read: Heather Boushey: The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline: "Peter Temin’s... The Vanishing Middle Class.... argues that the distribution of gains from economic growth today...

Must-Read: Nick Crafts: Whither Economic Growth?: "Only yesterday... the so-called new economy was ascendant...

Over at Finance and Development: Sluggish Future: You are reading this because of the long, steady decline in nominal and real interest rates on all kinds of safe investments, such as US Treasury securities. The decline has created a world in which, as economist Alvin Hansen put it when he saw a similar situation in 1938, we see “sick recoveries… die in their infancy and depressions… feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment…” In other words, a world of secular stagnation. Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff thinks this is a passing phase—that nobody will talk about secular stagnation in nine years. Perhaps. But the balance of probabilities is the other way. Financial markets do not expect this problem to go away for at least a generation... Read MOAR at Finance and Development

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Kevin Drum: Here Are the Top Ten Republican Accomplishments of 2017 So Far:

1. Trump signs executive order on immigration, but it's so badly drafted it causes chaos around the country and is immediately put on hold by court.
2. Trump chooses crackpot as National Security Advisor, fires him three weeks after inauguration.
3. Trump tries to bully China by playing games with One China policy, is forced into humiliating retreat after realizing he's playing out of his league.
4. Paul Ryan proposes border adjustment tax to raise $1 trillion, but can't convince anyone to sign on.
5. Trump casually green-lights raid on Yemen over dinner, it turns into an epic disaster that kills a SEAL and accomplishes nothing.
6. Trump blathers about the wall and a 20 percent border tax on Mexico, causing the Mexican president to cancel a planned visit.
7. Congress goes into recess, but Republicans are embarrassingly forced to cancel town hall events because they're afraid of facing big crowds opposed to their policies.
8. Trump continues to claim that crime is skyrocketing; that he won a huge election victory; that his inauguration crowd was immense; that polls showing his unpopularity are fake; and that refugees have wreaked terror on America, despite the fact that these are all easily-checkable lies.
9. After weeks of confusion on their signature priority, Republicans finally realize that repealing Obamacare isn't all that easy and basically give up.
10. Trump proposes spending an extra $54 billion on defense without realizing he can't do that.

Should-Read: Kevin Drum: WSJ: Republicans Give Up, Admit They Can't Create a Non-Appalling Health Care Plan: "There you have it...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• John Quiggin: "Decent Republicans": "While Donald Trump is the most unpopular newly-elected president in polling history...
• Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning: "Republican members of Congress do not agree with each other on the parameters of a replacement...
• Paul Krugman: Maid In America: "[In 1996] I argued... that menial work dealing with the physical world...

Ian Morris (2015): Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve <http://amzn.to/2lZUel9>

• Foraging: 4,000-8,000 kilocalories per person per day in energy capture | egalitarian | relaxed attitudes to female sexuality | violent.
• Farming: up to 30,000 kcal/day per person in energy capture | wealth inequality | control of female sexuality and lineage | legal structures.
• Fossil fuels: much greater energy capture | less inequality?? | broken Malthusian link | more gender egalitarian | much less violent....

Five Orienting Questions:

Must-Reads:

• Kaushik Basu: America’s Dangerous Neo-Protectionism: "NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump is about to make a policy mistake...
• Dietrich Vollrath (2016): The Returns to Societal Capital: "Brad DeLong... points out that much of our prosperity comes from a stock of societal capital that we unknowingly rely on every day...
• Lawrence Summers: Revoking Trade Deals Will Not Help American Middle Classes: "There is a debate to be had about the impact of globalisation on middle class wages and inequality...
• Raj Chetty et al.: Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility: "We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013...
• Jim Tankersley: Obama solved one economic crisis. It's the second that haunts him: "If you worked a factory shift in Michigan in January 2009...
• Noah Smith: On Twitter: A Haiku for Humanity: "For a brief summer/We were valuable as/Microcontrollers"

Most-Recent Should-Reads:

• John Quiggin: "Decent Republicans": "While Donald Trump is the most unpopular newly-elected president in polling history...
• Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning: "Republican members of Congress do not agree with each other on the parameters of a replacement...
• Paul Krugman: Maid In America: "[In 1996] I argued... that menial work dealing with the physical world...

Most-Recent Links:

• Scott Lemieux: Will the Trump Era Finally Kill Paul Ryan’s Wonkish Cred?: As Republicans gingerly begin to dismantle Obamacare, his reputation as an earnest number-cruncher is showing serious cracks.
• USDA: The Strawberry
• John Maynard Keynes (1926): The end of laissez-faire
• Marilyn Francus (2012): Jane Austen, Pound for Pound
• Wikipedia: Thomas Wolsey
• 2003 How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy?
• Measuring Worth

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Maid In America: "[In 1996] I argued... that menial work dealing with the physical world...

Should-Read: Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning: "Republican members of Congress do not agree with each other on the parameters of a replacement...

Should-Read: John Quiggin: "Decent Republicans": "While Donald Trump is the most unpopular newly-elected president in polling history...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: What’s the problem a U.S. corporate tax cut will solve? | Equitable Growth
• John Schmitt: The U.S. minimum wage improves access to traditional lines of credit | Equitable Growth
• Matt Markezich: Why is collective bargaining so difficult in the United States compared to its international peers? | Equitable Growth
• Major Malinvestments Do Not Have to Produce Large Depressions | Equitable Growth
• Simon Wren-Lewis: The academic consensus on austerity solidifies, but policymakers go their own sweet way: "Any fiscal expansion in the US would not be for Keynesian reasons...
• Barry Eichengreen et al.: On the fickleness of capital flows: "According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle...
• Marco Buti and Karl Pichelmann: European integration and populism: Addressing Dahrendorf's quandary: "With its current competences lacking the ability to address distribution effects...

Should-Read: Marco Buti and Karl Pichelmann: European integration and populism: Addressing Dahrendorf's quandary: "With its current competences lacking the ability to address distribution effects...

Should-Read: Barry Eichengreen et al.: On the fickleness of capital flows: "According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Trump Lashes Out at FBI Over CNN Report: "President Trump on Friday morning lashed out at the FBI in a Twitter rant...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Duncan Black: Conservative Principles: "One of my least favorite liberal tics is to grant there was some time when American conservatism was some sort wrong but noble affair...

Dietz Vollrath (2017): Who Are You Calling Malthusian? <https://growthecon.com/blog/Malthus/>: "My concept of a Malthusian economy involves....

...First, living standards are negatively related to the size of population... fixed factor[s] of production... agricultural land, but you could just say resources.... Second... population growth is positively related to living standards.... At this point, everything else follows.... Everything in the system is pushing back towards some middle ground where the resource per person, and hence the living standard, is at just the right level so that population growth is zero...

Four Orienting Questions:

Should-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: The academic consensus on austerity solidifies, but policymakers go their own sweet way: "Any fiscal expansion in the US would not be for Keynesian reasons...

Willie Stark learns that his backers are not good-government types who want the best for the state, but rather from the Harrison machine and want him in the race as a spoiler candidate:

Robert Penn Warren (1946): All the King's Men: "Then Willie [Stark] stood all alone by the table...

...saying, “My friends,” and turning his alabaster face precariously from one side to the other, and fumbling in the right side pocket of his coat to fish out the speech. While he was fumbling with the sheets, and looking down at them with a slightly bemused expression as though the stuff before him were in a foreign language, somebody tugged at my sleeve.

The United States had an immense boom in the 1990s. That was in the end financial disappointing for those who invested in it, but not because the technologies they were investing in did not pan out as technologies, not because the technologies deliver enormous amounts of well-being to humans, but because it turned out to be devil's own task to monetize any portion of the consumer surplus generated by the provision of information goods.

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Dani Rodrik: Global Citizens, National Shirkers: "I know what a 'global citizen' looks like...
• Raj Chetty et al.: Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility: "We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013...
• Jim Tankersley: Obama solved one economic crisis. It's the second that haunts him: "If you worked a factory shift in Michigan in January 2009...
• Must-Read: Noah Smith: On Twitter: A Haiku for Humanity: "For a brief summer/We were valuable as/Microcontrollers"
• Elizabeth Jacobs: Can women’s “sagging middle” explain fall in labor force participation? | Equitable Growth

Must-Read: Noah Smith: On Twitter: A Haiku for Humanity:

For a brief summer
We were valuable as
Microcontrollers

Must-Read: Jim Tankersley: Obama solved one economic crisis. It's the second that haunts him: "If you worked a factory shift in Michigan in January 2009...

Must-Read: Raj Chetty et al.: Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility: "We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013...

Sukkoo Kim (2006): Division of Labor and the Rise of Cities: Evidence from US Industrialization 1850-1880 Journal of Economic Geography 6, pp.469-491. <http://www.nber.org/papers/w12246>

If commodities are fully rival and excludible—i.e., the resources devoted to the production of one unit are thereby used up, and cannot be used to aid in the production of a second unit; and if sellers can easily prevent non-buyers from benefiting from what they produce (and non-buyers can easily prevent sellers from imposing costs on them—then, if the distribution of wealth accords with desert and utility, the competitive market economy in equilibrium does the job.

Alexander Klein and Nicholas Crafts (2015): Agglomeration Economics and Productivity Growth, U.S. Cities, 1880-1930 <https://ideas.repec.org/p/cge/wacage/235.html>

If commodities are fully rival and excludible—i.e., the resources devoted to the production of one unit are thereby used up, and cannot be used to aid in the production of a second unit; and if sellers can easily prevent non-buyers from benefiting from what they produce (and non-buyers can easily prevent sellers from imposing costs on them—then, if the distribution of wealth accords with desert and utility, the competitive market economy in equilibrium does the job.

Richard Hornbeck and Daniel Keniston (2014): Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872 <http://www.nber.org/papers/w20467>

If commodities are fully rival and excludible—i.e., the resources devoted to the production of one unit are thereby used up, and cannot be used to aid in the production of a second unit; and if sellers can easily prevent non-buyers from benefiting from what they produce (and non-buyers can easily prevent sellers from imposing costs on them—then, if the distribution of wealth accords with desert and utility, the competitive market economy in equilibrium does the job.

Hoyt Bleakley and Jeffrey Lin (2012): Portage and Path Dependence Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 (May): 587–644 <http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/127/2/587.full>

If commodities are fully rival and excludible—i.e., the resources devoted to the production of one unit are thereby used up, and cannot be used to aid in the production of a second unit; and if sellers can easily prevent non-buyers from benefiting from what they produce (and non-buyers can easily prevent sellers from imposing costs on them—then, if the distribution of wealth accords with desert and utility, the competitive market economy in equilibrium does the job.

But how often is production really constant returns to scale? And how often are spillovers truly absent? And where and when are markets thick enough to actually be in any form of “competitive equilibrium”?

My Great^6 Grandfather James DeLong left his bones in Wichita. But he did so only after carrying out the first-ever extraordinary rendition on the past of the U.S. government, and then getting fired by Abraham Lincoln for being too aggressive in waging the Civil War on all possible fronts...

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/08/an-1862-extraordinary-rendition-in-morocco-by-my-great6-grandfather-james-delong-live-from-the-roasterie-cccxiv-august-22.html

The Box That Changed the World (July 25, 2006): It is 40 feet long, 8.5 or 9.5 feet high, and eight feet wide.

It carries up to 29 tons in its 2,000 cubic feet of recommended available space – goods worth roughly $500,000 (or more) when sold at retail.

It, and what it carries, can be transported in a month anywhere in the world where there are suitable harbors, railways, locomotives, flatcars, truck tractors, diesel fuel, and roads.

It is the modern cargo container, and it is able to move non-fragile, non-perishable goods from any modern factory with a loading dock to any modern warehouse anywhere in the world for about 1% of retail value.

Live from the Economists' Self-Made Gehenna: Dani Rodrik: _On Twitter: "Once asked a job candidate how he'd teach macro at HKS: "I'd use an OLG model, and since this is an intro course, not include money in it." https://t.co/53I9iknQDO

Weekend Reading: Lyndsey Gilpin: [Cancer Rates Are Dropping—But Not In Rural Appalachia | FiveThirtyEight][]: "Just over a year ago, Natasha Lucas, an agent for the University of Kentucky’s Owsley County Extension Office...

...needed a local lung cancer survivor to speak at a popular annual cancer awareness event in Booneville, Kentucky. But she had a devil of a time finding one. It took weeks to track someone down, but as sad as that was, it wasn’t surprising. When it comes to lung cancer, Lucas said matter-of-factly, “there are just very few survivors.”

It's disturbing. As we face the probable abrogation of NAFTA, possible trade wars with China, Germany, and others, and the total cluster** that is the Trump administration's policies (if any) toward NATO and Russia, a number of really smart and really well-intentioned people are, I think, making rhetorical--and in some cases substantive--errors that are degrading the quality of the debate and increasing the chances of bad outcomes. And they are doing it while trying to be forces for good, light, human betterment, truth, justice, and the American way...

So let me do some boundary policing here...

Outsourced to: Elizabeth Kolbert: Hosed: "One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows...

It's disturbing. As we face the probable abrogation of NAFTA, possible trade wars with China, Germany, and others, and the total cluster** that is the Trump administration's policies (if any) toward NATO and Russia, a number of really smart and really well-intentioned people are, I think, making rhetorical--and in some cases substantive--errors that are degrading the quality of the debate and increasing the chances of bad outcomes. And they are doing it while trying to be forces for good, light, human betterment, truth, justice, and the American way...

So let me do some boundary policing here.

Eric Holthaus: @EricHolthaus: "Now that it's over, we can say for sure: 2016 was the warmest year we've ever measured on Earth." https://t.co/zmL9tEwWkA

We need to remember who the deniers and the skeptics have been over the past 30 years: bad judgments and corrupt arguments need to be remembered.

First of all: I'm looking at you, Steve Dubner and Steve Levitt...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Trump's Rosy Scenario: "The claimed returns to Trumpnomics are close to the highest growth rates we’ve seen under any modern administration...
• Michael Berube: Theory Tuesday III: "Sean [McCann]’s account of [how]...
• Dietrich Vollrath (2015): What Assumptions Matter for Growth Theory?: "Somewhere along I-40 and I-81 I was able to get a little clarity...
• Kaushik Basu: America’s Dangerous Neo-Protectionism: "NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump is about to make a policy mistake...
• Dietrich Vollrath (2016): The Returns to Societal Capital: "Brad DeLong... points out that much of our prosperity comes from a stock of societal capital that we unknowingly rely on every day...
• Lawrence Summeers: Revoking Trade Deals Will Not Help American Middle Classes: "There is a debate to be had about the impact of globalisation on middle class wages and inequality...

Should-Read: Dani Rodrik: Global Citizens, National Shirkers: "I know what a 'global citizen' looks like...

Must-Read: Five things are going on with respect to America's blue-, pink-, and--increasingly--white lower-middle and middle-middle working classes. Three of them are real, and two of them are fake:

1. Technology: It has--worldwide--greatly amplified manufacturing labor productivity, accompanied by limited demand for manufactured goods: few of us want more than one full-sized refrigerator, and very very few of us want more than two. That means that if you are hoping to be relatively high up in the wage distribution by virtue of your position as a hard-to-replace cog on a manufacturing assembly line, you are increasingly out of luck. If you are hoping for high blue-collar wages to lift your own via competition, you are increasingly out of luck.

2. Legal and institutional bargaining power: The fact that bargaining power has flowed to finance and the executive suite and away from the shop- and assembly-floor is the second biggest deal here. It could have been otherwise--this is, primarily, a thing that has happened in English-speaking countries. It has happened much less elsewhere. It could have happened much less here.

3. Macro policy: Yes, the consequences of the Reagan deficits were to cream midwestern manufacturing and destroy worker bargaining power in export and import-competing industries. Yes, the low-pressure economies of Volcker, late Greenspan, and Bernanke wreaked immense damage. Any more questions?

4. Globalization: Globalization deepens the division of labor, and does so in a way that is not harmful to high-paying manufacturing jobs in the global north. The high-paying manufacturing jobs that require skills and expertise (as opposed to the lower-paying ones that just require being in the right place at the right time with some market power) are easier to create and hold on to if you can be part of a globalized value chain than otherwise. This is largely fake.

5. Trade agreements: This is a nothingburger: completely fake.

As somebody who strongly believes that supply curves slope up--are neither horizontal nor vertical--and that demand curves slope down--are neither horizontal nor vertical--I think that Larry Summers is misguided here when he talks about how "companies have been able to drive harder bargains with workers, particularly in unionised sectors, because of the threat they can outsource." This was certainly true since the 1950s with the move of American manufacturing to the south, and the rise of deceptively-named "right-to-work" laws. But the threat to outsource is zero-sum on a national level: the balance of payments balances. Individual sectors lose--and manufacturing workers have been big losers. But that is, I think, only because of our macro policies. If we were a normal global North manufacturing power--a Germany or a Japan--exporting capital and running a currency policy that did not privilege finance, he would not be talking a out how "companies have been able to drive harder bargains with workers, particularly in unionised sectors, because of the threat they can outsource." He would be talking about how the opportunity to participate in global value chains increases the productivity of semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing workers in the U.S.

Thus I think Larry conceded too much here. Blame macro policy. Blame technology. Blame the conflict between the market society's requirements that only property rights matter and that everything pass a profitability test against people's strong beliefs that even if they have no property rights they have rights to stable communities, stable industries, and stable occupations. But, to channel Pascal Lamy, look not at the finger but at the moon here.

However, Larry is right on his main point: NAFTA really ain't the problem:

Lawrence Summers: Revoking Trade Deals Will Not Help American Middle Classes: "There is a debate to be had about the impact of globalisation on middle class wages and inequality...

Must-Read: Dietrich Vollrath (2016): The Returns to Societal Capital: "Brad DeLong... points out that much of our prosperity comes from a stock of societal capital that we unknowingly rely on every day...

Must-Read: The incredibly sharp Kaushik Basu is another one who makes what I regard as a substantial mistake in diagnosing the economic ills of our age. The loss of security and place by those who in an earlier age would have been blue-collar workers settled in stable firms with straightforward career paths is due to:

1. Technological progress which has--worldwide--greatly amplified manufacturing labor productivity, accompanied by limited demand for manufactured goods: few of us want more than one full-sized refrigerator, and very very few of us want more than two.

2. The failure to manage the economy to either prevent deep recessions or to insure a rapid bounce-back of employment in the industries that collapsed in the downturn. The Reagan administration, with Paul Volcker, delivered the disinflation shock in the early 1980s and then followed it with a bounce-back that was rapid but generated jobs elsewhere than in blue-collar manufacturing. The Bush administration delivered the 2007-2009 shock, and the Obama administration then failed to deliver a rapid bounce-back anywhere.

3. Macro policies--the Reagan and Bush tax cuts and the strong-dollar policy--that have turned the U.S. not into the trade-surplus capital-exporting economy that a rich economy should be, but a trade-deficit capital-importing economy, and in the process sent the market signals that large chunks, and very valuable chunks, of our manufacturing communities of engineering practice and blue-collar skilled worker pools are simply not wanted.

4. Basu says "globalization"--but globalization is really not on the list. Globalization deepens the division of labor, and does so in a way that is not harmful to high-paying manufacturing jobs in the global north. The high-paying manufacturing jobs that require skills and expertise (as opposed to the moderate-paying ones that just require being in the right place at the right time with some market power, and the low-paying ones) are easier to create and hold on to if you can be part of a globalized value chain than otherwise...

Kaushik Basu: America’s Dangerous Neo-Protectionism: "NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump is about to make a policy mistake...

Most-Recent Must-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: What’s Behind the Decline in U.S. Interest Rates?: "Eggertsson, Mehrotra, and Robbins decompose the roughly 4 percent decline in the natural rate of interest since 1970...
• Richard Baldwin: Trump’s Anachronistic Trade Strategy: "Trump has aggressively lashed out against globalization...
• David Anderson: Governing Is Hard: "The Republican Party has an ACA problem.  The ACA is deficit reducing...
• Colin Camerer: On "Rational Expectations" and John Muth: "Rational expectations pioneer John Muth in 1984...
• Nick Timiraos: Trump Team’s Growth Forecasts Far Rosier Than Those of CBO, Private Economists: "While there are often disparities between the White House and independent agencies on growth projections, they are rarely this large...

Most-Recent Should-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Trump's Rosy Scenario: "The claimed returns to Trumpnomics are close to the highest growth rates we’ve seen under any modern administration...
• Michael Berube: Theory Tuesday III: "Sean [McCann]’s account of [how]...
• Dietrich Vollrath (2015): What Assumptions Matter for Growth Theory?: "Somewhere along I-40 and I-81 I was able to get a little clarity...

Most-Recent Links:

• David Sirota: Republicans Boost Wall Street Donors, Help Finance Industry Stop States From Offering Retirement Assistance To Workers
• Sidney Blumenthal: [A Short History of the Trump Family][]
• Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov (2009): Secular Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 0691136963) <http://amzn.to/2kvXWmI>
• Martin Sandbu (2015): Europe's Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 069116830X) <http://amzn.to/2kvemXt>
• Paul Blustein (2016): Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMF (New York: CIGI Press: 1928096255) <http://amzn.to/2kvpWlz>
• Sidney Blumenthal (2017): Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856 (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1501153781) <http://amzn.to/2lhJUlq>

**Weekend Reading: Why couldn't any of the awful people whining and sniveling about Yale's renaming of Calhoun College read--or reprint--this?

Sidney Blumenthal John C. Calhoun: "On his deathbed, Andrew Jackson, reflecting on the dramatic episodes of his presidency, expressed his greatest regret...

...It was that he had not had John C. Calhoun hung for treason. “My country,” he said, “would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come.” Jackson had once considered him a friend, just as Henry Clay regarded him as a political comrade-in-arms and John Quincy Adams thought of him as an intellectual companion, but they each independently came to the same conclusion that he was a brooding Mephistophelian figure of rancor, vengeance, and dark designs driven by a thwarted and raging mania to be president.

Should-Read: Dietrich Vollrath (2015): What Assumptions Matter for Growth Theory?: "Somewhere along I-40 and I-81 I was able to get a little clarity...

Should-Read: Michael Berube: Theory Tuesday III: "Sean [McCann]’s account of [how]...

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Trump's Rosy Scenario: "The claimed returns to Trumpnomics are close to the highest growth rates we’ve seen under any modern administration...

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brak: Hindenberg Explosion: "And Trump has referenced a non-existent Swedish terrorist attack. I miss the good old days when we used to have to wait for a President to go senile."

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Robert Waldmann: Marking My Beliefs To Market: UK Violent Crime: "The lead causes crime hypothesis...
• Wing Thye Woo: China’s Growth Odyssey: "Former World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin is sanguine...
• Colin Camerer: On "Rational Expectations" and John Muth: "Rational expectations pioneer John Muth in 1984...
• Nick Timiraos: Trump Team’s Growth Forecasts Far Rosier Than Those of CBO, Private Economists: "While there are often disparities between the White House and independent agencies on growth projections, they are rarely this large...
• Caitlin Macneal: Perry Didn't Fully Understand Role Of Energy Secretary At First: "Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry did not realize exactly what the position of energy secretary entails...
• Robert Waldmann: Buchanan, Smith, and Krugman: "There is no reason why macroeconomists can't work on empirical microeconomics while also using old Keynesian models for forecasting and policy advice...
• James Kwak: Health Care and John D. Rockefeller’s Dog: "Few people actually want to live in a world where health care is distributed by a free market...
• Kevin Drum: Charts of the Day: If Only Every State Could Be As "Out of Control" As California: "I feel like someone ought to defend the honor of California against our president, so why not me? Here you go...
• Ruy Teixeira: The Optimistic Leftist: "A new utopian vision for the left’s emerging coalition will... include...