Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Should-Reads:

• Kim Clausing: Would Cutting [U.S.] Corporate Taxes Raise Workers' Incomes?: "Overall, it is difficult to document a relationship between lower corporate taxes and higher wages...
• Cosma Shalizi Review of Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J. P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe http://bactra.org/reviews/fools-gold/: "This is an extremely smart and well-written look at the growth and explosion of credit derivatives, as told through the story of Tett's sources at J. P. Morgan...
• Equitable Growth: Research on Tap: Promoting equitable growth through tax reform: "Join us on November 6, 2017, for the second event in Equitable Growth’s new 'Research on Tap”' conversation series...
• Bill Moyers: LBJ: 'Convince the Lowest White Man He's Better Than the Best Colored Man': "We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs... http://www.snopes.com/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
• Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo: Wealth distribution and social mobility in the US: A quantitative approach: "We concentrate on... i) skewed and persistent distribution of earnings...
• Bridget Ansel and Heather Boushey: Modernizing U.S. Labor Standards for 21st-Century Families: "Women now make up almost half the U.S. workforce...
• Heather Boushey: Economics and feminism: "Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict...
• Alice Rivlin: Evidence and Policy Analysis in the Age of Fake News: "The paradox of current political turmoil is...
• Library/CTL: Making Textbooks and Course Readers Affordable: "Panel Discussion | October 27 | 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Wurster Hall, Environmental Design Library Atrium...
• Alan Auerbach: Understanding the destination-based approach to business taxation: "The rising importance of multinational companies and the changing nature of production represents a challenge to the traditional ways that countries try to tax corporate profits...
• Paul Krugman: On Twitter: "Brad is right here: "Brad is right here...
• Jared Bernstein: When econ models potentially mislead, econ profs should say so: "Greg Mankiw points out the direction [but not the magnitude] of Hassett’s result is consistent with a particular economic model...
• Dani Rodrik: Growth Without Industrialization?: "FLow-income African countries can sustain moderate rates of productivity growth into the future, on the back of steady improvements in human capital and governance...
• Chye-Ching Huang: GOP Tax Framework Looks Much Like Kansas’ Failed Tax Cut Package: "In 2012, Kansas adopted an array of tax cuts that were large, costly, and heavily titled to those high on the income scale...
• Brian Buetler: The Seeds of Media Self-Sabotage: "In explaining last week why Sean Hannity had once called Julian Assange an enemy of the United States, but now—thanks to Assange’s in-kind support for Donald Trump—proposes a U.S. government-Wikileaks alliance, CNN’s Dana Bash called it 'classic politics'...
• Andrew Gelman: Using black-box machine learning predictions as inputs to a Bayesian analysis: "We started by using the output from the so-called machine learning as a predictor... http://andrewgelman.com/2017/09/20/using-black-box-machine-learning-predictions-inputs-bayesian-analysis/
• Nathan Robinson: Current Affairs: "Charles Murray... in the 1950s... staged a cross burning on top of a hill...

Links:

• Jeet Heer: The Old New Republic & Gender: Some notes
• Cameron Joseph: Once More Unto The Breach! Romney Eyes Senate Run To Fill Anti-Trump Void
• FT: Xi Jinping and China’s global ambitions: Under President Xi, who consolidated his power at this week’s Congress, China is showing a new confidence globally in its cultural, economic and diplomatic model. But how ‘soft’ is its ‘soft power’? Here’s the best of our comment and analysis..."
• Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero: Teacher diversity gaps hit close to home for nearly everyone
• David Schleicher: Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation
• Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads: "The same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response..."
• Jonathan Chait: The Insane GOP Plan to Win Reelection Through Plutocracy: "The human mind is an incredibly adept tool for generating reasons to turn one’s own self-interest into a moral argument. The Republican Congress has turned this normal process of rationalization on its head. They have taken actions they truly consider to be morally correct, and convinced themselves that they are following their own self-interest..."
• Martin L. West: Atreus and Attarissiyas: "We can now reconsider the relationship... between Atreus and At-ta-ri-is-si-ia-as...a 'man of Ahhiya' who in the reign of Tudhaliyas II (c. 1390-70?) had invaded Hittite territory... with infantry and a hundred chariots and subsequently assisted the rebel vassal Maddhuwattas..."
• Chris Patten: China’s New Emperor by Chris Patten - Project Syndicate: "From the stupefying antics of US President Donald Trump to the damaging rise of populist nationalism in Europe, democratic countries are experiencing their share of trials. But democratic systems have built-in stabilizing mechanisms..." <— not how it looks from China...
• Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, & Franklin Qian: The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco: "The substantial welfare losses due to decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against large rent increases was provided as a form of government social insurance, instead of a regulated mandate on landlords..."
• Martin Sullivan: Corporate Tax Incidence Made Simple: "The bottom line of the JCT and CBO... one-quarter to one-fifth of the corporate tax burden is borne by labor.... Wade through the papers listed below. The second paper by Jane Gravelle is a two-page summary and an excellent place to start..." <-- On the idiocy of Mankiw's SOE 100% of tax incidence is on labor assumption...
• Annalee Newitz: Reprogramming: "It was like growing up in a science fiction novel. You were not allowed to change things.... The idea was that it would reduce conflict and be this beautiful community. Obviously it wasn’t. Growing up there was super weird..."
• Heather Boushey: That Greedy Upper-Middle Class: "Will the top 20 percent be willing to forego some of their advantages so that others may rise? Tough one..."
• Patrick Iber: The Party’s Over: Looking Back on Communism: "Lenin... was committed to smashing forms of bourgeois power, including representative democracy. Because Lenin... emerged victorious... [his] approach came to be taken as a prescriptive model rather than a strategic intervention at a particular moment..."
• INET: 2017 Edinburgh INET Program
• Lachesis
• Cosma Shalizi: Homework 3: Past Performance, Future Results: "More practice with cross-validation and with smoothing; baby steps in using simulation to see how a model behaves and to do hypothesis testing; reinforcement that 'the variable matters' ̸= 'the co- efficient on the variable is statistically significant'..."
• Carola Binder: Cowen and Sumner on Voters' Hatred of Inflation: "I can still hardly imagine circumstances in which expansionary policy in a downturn would be the unpopular choice among voters themselves..."
• Diane Coyle: Economics for good: "Jean Tirole’s book Economics for the Common Good is out now... highly recommended.... I’ve... most appreciated Tirole’s ability to crystallise complicated issues in a straightforward way, combining surgical analysis with very clear explanation. This is too rare a skill among economists..."
• Lawrence Summers: The Business Roundtable’s outlandish tax cut claims: "I had low expectations, but the BRT methodology was even less serious than I expected.  It appears that they have gone into the “fake fact” business..."
• Paul Krugman (2010): A Quotation Ruined By Context: "[Mill:] there is no opinion so absurd as not to have been maintained by some person of reputation..." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mill-john-stuart/1844/currency.htm
• David Glasner: The Standard Narrative on the History of Macroeconomics: An Exercise in Self-Serving Apologetics | Uneasy Money
• Jennifer Bissell-Linsk: Robotics in the running for Nike’s factories of the future: "Developing countries could lose low-cost manufacturing if leisurewear companies increase focus on automated production..."
• Joseph E. Stiglitz, Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev: Intellectual Property for the Twenty-First-Century Economy: "Developing countries are increasingly pushing back against the intellectual property regime foisted on them by the advanced economies over the last 30 years. They are right to do so, because what matters is not only the production of knowledge, but also that it is used in ways that put the health and wellbeing of people ahead of corporate profits..."
• Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan: The DeLong-Shiller Redux
• Dani Rodrik: Policy, Inequality, and Growth:Comments on Jason Furman <— I strongly question Dani Rodrik's claim that a 1.3% of GDP gain for Mexico is in any sense "minute"...
• Stefania Albanesi, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Jaromir Nosal: Credit growth and the Global Crisis: A new narrative: "Mortgage default during the Great Recession came from real estate investors, not subprime credit holders.... Investors that played a critical role in the rise in mortgage debt, specifically among the middle and the top of the credit score distribution..."
• Yuko Takeo: Abenomics Trickles Down to Smaller Japanese Companies: "Total profits are at a record but labor shortage is biting..."
• Lorenzo Caliendo and Fernando Parro (2014): Estimates of the Trade and Welfare E§ects of NAFTA

Here at Grasping Reality:

• What Is a "Static" Revenue Analysis?
• Basic Econ 1-Level Tax Incidence Primer: Owen Zidar Requests MOAR Tax Incidence Model Blogging
• A Question I Did Have Time to Ask Alice Rivlin
• Another Question I Didn't Have Time to Ask Ask Alice Rivlin: Possibilities for Technocracy
• A Question I Will Not Have Time to Ask Alice Rivlin This Afternoon...
• Q & A: Should We Focus Our Attention on a Revitalized Public Sector and Social Insurance System?: INET Edinburgh
• Q & A: What Can We Economists Do Right Now to Be Useful?: INET Edinburgh
• (Early) Monday Smackdown: Male Ex-Old New Republic Editors Are Simply Not Credible Here...
• (Early) Monday Smackdown Watch: John Taylor Edition
• Weekend Reading: Context for Matthew Klein Talking to Stephen Kotkin about Stalin
• For the Weekend: Stephen Vincent Benet: The Devil and Daniel Webster IX
• Live from the Right-Wing Economists' Self-Made Fresh Incidence Hell: One more time, morons: will you at least try to understand it if presented this way?...
• Live from the MCP Bunker: Still looking for some kind of acknowledgement from any of Hendrik Hertzberg, Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan—or, indeed, Marty Peretz—just how big of an asshole Leon Wieseltier...
• Live from CBO: [In] the year of Repeal and Replace... CBO's power and influence was at a maximum even though its bureaucratic influence was zero...
• Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: IRVING KRISTOL IN HIS OWN WORDS: "Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists...
• Live from the Book-Lover's Utopia: Today's haul
• Live from the Caucasus: Walter Jon Williams: THE NUTELLA WAR: "Conflicts within a former Soviet republic are now posing a threat to the world’s supply of Nutella...
• Live from Sexual Harassment Central: Could Wieseltier please change his statement? Could he not say the false: "I am ashamed to know that I made any of [the women with whom I worked] feel demeaned and disrespected"? Could he say, instead, the true: "I am ashamed that now the public knows that I gleefully and joyfully made women with whom I worked feel demeaned and disrespected—and violated"?...
• Comment of the Day: Maynard Handley: WHERE DOES THE USE OF "TAKERS" AS IN "MAKERS AND TAKERS" AND "A NATION OF TAKERS" COME FROM?: "I really think more importance should be placed on the 'makers' part of the phrase, in particular the delusions of the rich..."