Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Jonathan Chait is right: this makes absolutely no sense at all. People who won't go to the doctor don't cost Medicaid anything...

Jonathan Chait: Obamacare-Repealer Explains Poor Don’t Want to be Healthy: "Representative Roger Marshall is a Kansas Republican...

Weekend Reading: Rosa Luxemburg (1918): [: The Russian Revolution: The Problem of Dictatorship][]:

Lenin says [in The State and Revolution: The Transition from Capitalism to Communism] the bourgeois state is an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of the bourgeoisie. To a certain extent, he says, it is only the capitalist state stood on its head. This simplified view misses the most essential thing: bourgeois class rule has no need of the political training and education of the entire mass of the people, at least not beyond certain narrow limits. But for the proletarian dictatorship that is the life element, the very air without which it is not able to exist.

Daniel Davies (2012): New Ideas From Dead Political Systems:

Back in the days before I had realised that a guy who takes five years to deliver a simple book review probably ought to rein in the ambition a bit when it comes to larger-scale projects, I occasionally pitched an idea to publishers of management books. It was going to be called “Great Ideas From Failed Companies”, the idea being that when you have the perspective of the entire history of a corporate story, you’re probably going to get a more honest appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses, and that although companies like Enron, Northern Rock and Atari clearly had major problems, they quite likely also had some good points too, or how did they ever get so big in the first place?

Weekend Reading: Cosma Shalizi (2012): In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: "Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around us as debating whether a devotee of the Olympian gods should approve of transgenic organisms. (Or: centaurs, yes or no?) Contains mathematical symbols (uglified and rendered slightly inexact by HTML) but no actual math, and uses Red Plenty mostly as a launching point for a tangent.

Kristen Wiig: Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

Notes for forthcoming Econ 210b discussion: Tuesday March 7, 2017; Evans 65: 10 am: Robert Allen (2009): The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective | <http://amzn.to/2mR3bKX>

Start with the mysterious "Pseudoerasmus": Random thoughts on critiques of Allen’s theory of the Industrial Revolution:

I love the work of Robert Allen... steel... the Soviet Union... English agriculture. And his little book on global economic history—is there a greater marvel of illuminating concision than that?... His point of departure is always the very concrete reasons that a firm or an industry or a country is more productive than another. I’m not rubbishing institutions or culture as explanations—I’m just saying, Allen’s virtue is to start with problems of production first. Yet I always find myself in the peculiar position of loving his work like a fan-girl and disagreeing with so much of it. In particular, I’m sceptical of his theory of the Industrial Revolution.

Should-Read: The very sharp Jared Bernstein swings and misses...

Of his five reasons for raising interest rates, [5] is simply wrong--wanting to avoid the ZLB in the future strongly calls for not raising rates in any way that fighter be premature; [4] is incoherent--since the point of raising is to slow job growth, claiming that it won't is not an argument for raising; [3] is contradictory; and [2] and [1] seem based on a forecasting gestalt that has been overoptimistic for nine years straight now:

Jared Bernstein: Clashing with the Fed: Should they stay or should they go?: "Should the Fed raise their benchmark interest rate at their meeting later this month?...

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

• Rethinking Productivity Growth | Equitable Growth
• (Late) Monday Smackdown: In Which I Am Annoyed at Being Paired with John Taylor | Equitable Growth:
• Kavya Vaghul: Sustaining preschool gains can help the benefits of early childhood education endure | Equitable Growth
• Nick Bunker: Thinking about levels when it comes to macroeconomic policy targets | Equitable Growth
• Sarah Perry: The History of Fertility Transitions and the New Memeplex: "European cultures have historically prevented people from restricting family size within marriage...
• Jared Bernstein: Inflation?! We ain’t got no stinkin’ inflation!: "The core PCE deflator rose at an annual rate of only 1.2 percent in 2016Q4...
• Rod Dreher: Life in ‘The City of Rod’: "More [from Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig]...:
• John Maynard Keynes (1941): Keynes on the Limits of Econometrics: To Koopmans: "Many thanks for sending me your article. I enjoyed it very much...
• Richard Lipsey: The Phillips Curve and an Assumed Unique Macroeconomic Equilibrium in Historical Context: "So we seem to have gone full circle from the early Keynesian view...
• Clare McCann: The False Promises of Online Education: "Caroline Hoxby found that online education may not be the 'low-cost, high-quality' opportunity many say it is...
• Simon Wren-Lewis: A Self-Fulfilling Expectations-Led Recession?: "I acknowledge that macro rightly got a lot of stick by largely ignoring the role of finance...

Rethinking Productivity Growth: Fresh at Project Syndicate: Today, the world’s population is, on average, about 20 times richer than it was during the long Agrarian Age. Between 7000 BC and 1500 BC, resources were scarce, technological progress was slow, and Malthusian pressures kept almost all human populations at a near-subsistence level, with per capita daily income of less than $1.50 in today’s terms. In 2017, only around 7% of the world’s population is that poor. Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: A Self-Fulfilling Expectations-Led Recession?: "I acknowledge that macro rightly got a lot of stick by largely ignoring the role of finance...

Should-Read: Clare McCann: The False Promises of Online Education: "Caroline Hoxby found that online education may not be the 'low-cost, high-quality' opportunity many say it is...

Should-Read: Richard Lipsey: The Phillips Curve and an Assumed Unique Macroeconomic Equilibrium in Historical Context: "So we seem to have gone full circle from the early Keynesian view...

Should-Read: John Maynard Keynes (1941): Keynes on the Limits of Econometrics: To Koopmans: "Many thanks for sending me your article. I enjoyed it very much...

I still can barely believe that Kevin Hassett used a law professor and a philosopher to urge that CERN's LHC (a) might destroy the earth and so (b) needed to be stopped and shut down (c) using the only means available to the U.S.--(d) an airstrike on the Swiss-French border:

Hoisted from the Archives from 2010: American Enterprise Institute "Economist" of Mass Destruction Kevin Hassett Strikes Again (Republican War on Science Department): Carrying the Republican War on Science to previously unplumbed depths of human stupidity:

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Josh Marshall: Trump's Shame: "Donald Trump, 2/28/17: 'We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens...

Is Kevin Hassett really going to chair the Council of Economic Advisers?

That gives me an idea. April Fools Season is started--32 days to April Fools Day inclusive. Can we find 32 examples of Kevin Hassett writing things that are really stupid--so stupid that they should have gotten him bounced from his cushy chair at AEI immediately for intellectual incompetence? The answer is yes--we could find 32 things from Dow 36000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market alone. But the journey--one a day between now and April 1--will be rewarding...

Dan Froomkin reminds me of number 1, from the very sharp Barry Ritholtz:

Nathan Nunn (2008): The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (February): 139–176 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25098896.pdf>

• From 8 to 6.5 in the natural log…
• exp(1.5) = 4.5: This is enormous! Is this credible? More than 80% of potential wealth today destroyed by something that ended 200 years ago!?
  • Do we need controls?
    • Or, rather, what controls do we need?
• What else might be going on here?
• Do we need instruments?
  • What are our instruments?
  • What is our first stage?
  • Is this a “weak instrument”?
• Under what circumstances is a strong instrument “weak”?
  • Do we need channels?
  • What are our channels?
  • What would a Bayesian say about the publication filter and the file-drawer problem?

Live from America's Better Self: Heather Boushey: Winning Change for Women & Families: "Wed, Mar 1 5:30 PM The Bentley Reserve San Francisco, CA, United States...

• Wednesday March 1 2017 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM PST
• The Bentley Reserve, 301 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA, United States

Featuring a conversation with Heather Boushey, who previously served as Chief Economist to Hillary Clinton's transition team, current Executive Director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and author of Finding Time: the Economics of Work-Life Conflict.... Heather will be interviewed by PL+US Executive Director Katie Bethell. Katie is a 15-year veteran of grassroots social change campaigning. With PL+US, Katie and her team are bringing state-of-the-art communications and mobilization strategy to the fight for paid family and medical leave in the U.S.

Should-Read for Ash Wednesday: May I say that I find this from Rod Dreher responding to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig simply bizarre?:

Rod Dreher: Life In ‘The City Of Rod’][]: "More [from Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig]...:

Can anybody give me a model-based or a framework-based on an empirical data- or observation-based rationale for what John Taylor was saying here about Japan in early 2009?

The IMF's Finance and Development has paired me on "secular stagnation" with John Taylor.

When they told me that I would be paired with John Taylor, I protested: As I see it, sometime in the early 2000s John Taylor ceased being an economist and became a politician. Hence, I thought, he was likely to have very little of value to say to professional economists--to those of us who are trying to use the tools of economics to understand the world.

And I see that I was right: I do not think Taylor's piece has any value at all to professional economists.

Let me take especial note of five passages in Taylor's piece: passages that, in my view, a professional economist simply could not write:

Must-Read: This time series since 2008 is not what would be produced by a central bank with a symmetric target of 2%/year for core PCE inflation:

I see nothing in the data to suggest that 2% will be reached if the Federal Reserve does not reverse its tightening cycle as ill-judged.

That is all.

Jared Bernstein: Inflation?! We ain’t got no stinkin’ inflation!: "The core PCE deflator rose at an annual rate of only 1.2 percent in 2016Q4...