Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Must-Reads:

• Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don’t know what the [New York] Times should’ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."
• Laura J Keller, Ben Steverman, and Charles Stein: Inside Wall Street's Towers, Traders Grouse Over Trump Tax Plan: "Many are figuring out greater benefits will go to billionaires. One, sipping a Bloody Mary, vows to quit the Republican party...
• Martin Wolf: Inequality is a threat to our democracies: "Between 1980 and 2016, the top 1 per cent captured 28 per cent of the aggregate increase in real incomes in the US, Canada and western Europe, while the bottom 50 per cent captured just 9 per cent of it...
• Jason Furman and Larry Summers: Robert Barro’s Tax-Reform Advocacy: A Response: "Now Barro has provided Project Syndicate with an analysis that uses his own estimates to conclude that the long-run level of output would increase by 7%...
• Samuel Bowles, Alan Kirman, and Rajiv Sethi: Reflections on Hayek: "Hayek pioneered the informational view of markets in which prices are messages...
• John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: "The austere view, which would employ a high rate of interest to check at once any tendency in the level of employment to rise appreciably above the average of; say, the previous decade...
• Naomi Janowitz: Office Hour Podcast: "NAFTA with Special Guest Brad DeLong...
• Nouriel Roubini: Populist Plutocracy and the Future of America: "Donald Trump has consistently sold out the blue-collar, socially conservative whites who brought him to power...
• Jason Furman and Larry Summers: Susan Collins is wrong to say that the tax cuts will pay for themselves, despite the economists she cites: "Sen. Susan Collins... defended her vote on the Senate GOP tax bill...
• Paul Krugman: La Trahison des Clercs, Economics Edition: "A former government official... asked... have any prominent Republican economists taken a strong stand against the terrible, no good, very bad tax legislation their party just rammed through the Senate?...
• Rich Yeselson: Senator Susan Collins and Three Highly Unprofessional Republican Economists: "Sen[ator] Collins on @MeetThePress today said that she had talked to [Holtz-]Eakins, Lindsay, and Hubbard and they believed that the supply side stimulus would produce an increase on government revenue...
• Adam Elga: Defeating Dr. Evil with Self-Locating Belief: "Safe in an impregnable battlestation on the moon, Dr. Evil had planned to launch a bomb that would destroy the Earth...
• Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor (Wednesday, November 29, 2017): Economists respond to Summers, Furman over Mnuchin letter: "First Point You Raised: Our letter addresses the impact of corporate tax reform on GDP; we did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result (though official revenue estimators will obviously need to do so for short-run analysis)..."
• Jason Furman and Larry Summers: A modest proposal: time to rethink the impact of US tax reform: "You recently wrote an open letter to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin quantifying the economic impact of tax reform...
• Enrico Moretti: Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the California Dream: "The fires that ravaged Northern California in October claimed lives, weakened communities and scarred one of the West’s most distinctive landscapes...
• Dylan Matthews: You're not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth: "With... 'distributional national accounts'... exactly where economic growth is going...

Should-Reads:

• Kai Stinchcombe: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: "For the person paying for a product, the key feature of a new payment system...
• Greg Ip: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient: "There isn’t a paradox: automation hasn’t advanced nearly as far as evangelists claim, and where it has, it’s often created more jobs than it’s destroyed...
• Noah Smith: A Road Map for Reviving the Midwest: "John Austin believes that there are 'two Rust Belts'...
• Söhnke M. Bartram and Mark Grinblatt: Agnostic fundamental analysis works: "We take the view of a statistician with little knowledge of finance...
• Heather Boushey: The tax bill should've been called The Inequality Exacerbation Act: "Policymakers should reform the corporate tax system while maintaining or increasing the level of revenues it raises...
• Morgan C. Williams: Gun Violence in Black and White: Evidence from Policy Reform in Missouri: "On August 28, 2007 the Missouri General Assembly repealed an 86 year-old 'permitto-purchase' (PTP) law...
• Robert E. Hall and Thomas J. Sargent Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Milton Friedman's Presidential Address: "The immediate effect of Friedman's 1968 AEA presidential address on the economics profession was the introduction of an adaptive term in the Phillips curve...
• Charlie Stross: Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe: "We're going to run out of new BTC to mine... [then] the incentive for mining (a process essential for reconciling the public ledgers) will disappear...
• José Azar, Ioana Marinescu, Marshall I. Steinbaum: Labor Market Concentration: "A product market is concentrated when a few firms dominate the market...
• Nouriel Roubini: The Mystery of the Missing Inflation: "The recent growth acceleration in the advanced economies would be expected to bring with it a pickup in inflation...
• Peter Leyden: California is the Future-of American Politics: "The 21st-century hit California early, and the innovative state adapted quickly...
• John Maynard Keynes: Essays In Biography "If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be to-day!...
• Jeffrey Friedman: What's Wrong with Libertarianism: "Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, inadequate...
• Murat Iyigun, Nathan Nunn, and Nancy Qian: The Long-run Effects of Agricultural Productivity on Conflict, 1400-1900: "A newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles...
• Zeynep Tufekci: @zeynep on Twitter: "Anyone who is concerned about security online...
• Noah Smith: How Affordable Urban Housing Stays Affordable: "San Francisco’s black population has declined... Hispanic population has... fallen in some historically Hispanic neighborhoods like the Mission District...
• German Lopez: Cornel West’s attacks on Ta-Nehisi Coates, explained - Vox: "In discussing the “black elite leadership” that has tried to fit into “a neoliberal world,” West cited “[d]ear brother Ta-Nehisi Coates” as an example...
• Sidney Blumenthal: Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856: "When [Lincoln] hurtled on a train to Bloomington for the founding of the Illinois Republican Party on May 29, 1856, it was a familiar trip to a place he had visited many times to practice the law...
• JEC: The Taxonomy of Oligarchs: "Rich people in America have the luxury of indulging an astonishing variety of self-destructive fantasies...
• Thomas Robert Malthus: PPrinciples of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application: "We cannot too highly respect and venerate that admirable rule of Newton, not to admit more causes than are necessary... but the rule itself implies, that those which really are necessary must be admitted...
• Economist: Women and economics: Inefficient equilibrium: "Donna Ginther... has found telling evidence that women... in economics... face a thicker glass ceiling...
• Alan Cole: @AlanMCole on Twitter: "Don't think this one's gonna pay for itself, guys...
• Free Exchange: A decade after it hit, what was learnt from the Great Recession?: "The success of those policies, and the relatively bearable recession that resulted, allowed governments to avoid more dramatic interventions...
• Nicholas Crafts: The Postwar British Productivity Failure: "British productivity growth disappointed during the early postwar period...
• Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles: The Conservative Inequality Paradox: "Conservatives have two intellectual commitments that are increasingly incompatible...
• Danny Yagan: EMPLOYMENT HYSTERESIS FROM THE GREAT RECESSION: "This paper uses U.S. local areas as a laboratory to test whether the Great Recession depressed 2015 employment...
• Barry Eichengreen: Two Myths About Automation: "Robots, machine learning, and artificial intelligence promise to change fundamentally the nature of work...
• Nathan Jensen: Exit options in firm-government negotiations: An evaluation of the Texas chapter 313 program: "A unique economic development incentive program in the state of Texas that holds almost all elements of bargaining constant...
• James Kwoka: U.S. antitrust and competition policy amid the new merger wave: "This dramatic and well-documented increase in concentration raises the question about its causes...
• Ben Orlin: The Three Barriers to Deep Thinking in School: "Three crude reasons why deep thinking fails to bloom...
• Jacob Levy: Black Liberty Matters: "'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?'...
• Jerry Taylor (2016): Is There a Future for Libertarianism?: "The Rand Paul campaign and its (admittedly uneven) agenda of social tolerance, military restraint, and fiscal conservatism is little more than a very small pile of smoking embers...
• Guido Menzio and Shouyong Shi: Efficient Search on the Job and the Business Cycle: "A model of directed search... in which transitions... between unemployment and employment and across employers are driven by heterogeneity in the quality of firm-worker matches...
• Michael Tomasky: Republicans Have Lost Touch With Blue America: "Blue America... is the America that produces the vast majority of our innovators and thinkers and scientists and creative people...
• David Anderson: Aetna, CVS and data thoughts: "This is a risk adjustment data gold mine...
• Catherine Rampell: Populism died on Saturday: "In the end, only those on the populist right successfully took over a major political party, and later the country....
• Robert Waldmann (2008): Optimal Capital Income Taxation It Is: "The simplest... standard growth... aK model with optimizing consumers with logarithmic utility...
• Charlie Stross (2015): The Present in Deep History: "I'm more worried about what I used as a throw-away in 'Glasshouse' as 'cognitive dictatorships'...
• Ed Lorenzen: @CaptainPAYGO on Twitter: "The Treasury Department dynamic 'analysis' of tax reform makes a mockery...
• Laura Tyson and Susan Lund: Rage Against the Machine?: "Almost every aspect of our economies will be transformed by automation in the coming years...
• Gray Kimbrough: @graykimbrough on Twitter: "Chris Ruhm...has some really stark stats on drug, alcohol, and suicide deaths by race/ethnicity 1999-2015...
• Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin: The Global Productivity Slump:  Common and Country-Specific Factors: "Productivity growth is slowing around the world...
• Simon Wren-Lewis: First Stage Reality and Brexiters... see... the important facts... and... apply them relentlessly despite what politicians say...
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Hey, Hey, New York Times: Just What Are the "Increasingly Blurred Lines" in Health Care?: "I don't get it...
• Matt Zapotosky: Prominent Republican-Libertarian appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski: "A former clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski said the powerful and well-known jurist...
• Matt O'Brien: For the last time: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves: "Republican politicians will pretend their tax cuts will largely pay for themselves, and... Republican economists will largely indulge them...
• Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum: The evolving U.S. occupational structure: "Using the text from help wanted ads, we construct a new data set of occupational task content from 1960 to 2000...
• Josh Blumenstock: Fighting Poverty with Data: Research at the Intersection of Machine Learning and Global Development: "Work that capitalizes on recent advances in machine learning to tackle some of the problems affecting poor and marginalized populations...
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Anthem-CVS: What Would Consumers Get Out of It?: "The claim that all chronic care  delivery will be miraculously transformed by the Anthem-CVS merger (and inevitable "me too" mergers between other drugstore chains/PBMs and other health insurers) requires a skeptical view...
• Jonathan Chait: The Republican War on Economics: "On Meet the Press Sunday, Chuck Todd asked Susan Collins how she could support a huge tax cut after having complained about excessive debt...
• Sarah Kliffe: A health merger expert explains the CVS-Aetna deal: " Martin Gaynor.... There are a lot fewer 'vertical mergers' of actors in the health care system that do different things...
• Todd Vasos: The Dollar General CEO just accidentally made clear how screwed up the economy is: "The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer...
• Yingyi Qian: How Reform Worked in China: The Transition from Plan to Market: "A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important...
• Austin Clemens and Heather Boushey: What if we took equity into account when measuring economic growth?: "The four measures shown in the graphs above could all be reasonable ways of thinking about measuring progress in the U.S. economy...
• Peng Zhang et al.: Temperature Effects on Productivity and Factor Reallocation: Evidence from a Half Million Chinese Manufacturing Plants: "This paper uses detailed production data from a half million Chinese manufacturing plants over 1998-2007...
• Greg Leiserson: The Tax Foundation’s treatment of the estate tax in its macroeconomic model: "Notably, this justification for the assumption that the marginal investor is domestic even as the rate of return is fixed...
• Omar Waraich: Tom Friedman on Yemen and Mohamed bin Salman: "'The Arab world has the potential to be a giant Yemen', warns @tomfriedman...
• Andrew B. Hall and Daniel M. Thompson: Who Punishes Extremist Nominees?: Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in U.S. Elections: "The behavioral literature in American politics suggests that voters are not informed enough, and are too partisan, to be swing voters...
• Matt O'Brien: Republicans are looking for proof their tax cuts will pay for themselves. They won’t find it: "The Tax Foundation... starts from the premise that the United States isn't a big open economy like it actually is, but rather a small open one like Ireland...
• Lori Ann LaRocco: Bush tax-cut architect dismisses JCT scoring of the Senate tax bill a 'fraud': "An exclusive note from George W. Bush's former economic advisor, Larry Lindsey...
• Jagdish Bhagwati: "I agree with the main thrust of the Letter I signed, but I do not think it is likely that tax cuts will produce revenues that offset the initial loss of revenue from the tax cuts...
• Josh Barro: Something very stupid is happening in the Senate right now : "The Joint Committee on Taxation's report on the Senate Republican tax bill was unsurprising...
• Douglas Holtz-Eakin (April 26, 2017): Trump’s tax plan is built on a fairy tale: "Proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts and then casually asserting that such a plan would 'pay for itself with growth', as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, is detached from empirical reality..."
• Robert C. Allen: Absolute Poverty: When Necessity Displaces Desire: "A new basis for an international poverty measurement is proposed based on linear programming...
• Tom Simonite: Robots Threaten Bigger Slice of Jobs in US, Other Rich Nations: "Although the short-term disruption from automation may be smaller in developing countries than in richer countries...
• Larry Summers and Jason Furman: A modest proposal part II: the debate over US tax reform: "We appreciate... you are backing off from the statement... that 'the gain in the long-run level of GDP would be just over 3 per cent, or 0.3 per cent per year for a decade'... [and] 'not offer[ing] claims about the speed of adjustment'...
• Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman on Twitter: Understated NYT Headline: https://t.co/3hrbq6mp5n "There is no analysis, because Trump admin doesn't want one—afraid it will say what all the other analyses say, which is not good for admin case. Mnuchin has been lying all along...
• Martin Feldstein: New Priorities for a New Fed Regime: "The Fed has kept the short-term federal-funds interest rate at less than the rate of inflation for nearly a decade...
• Gavyn Davies: Marvin Goodfriend would be good for the Fed: "Prof Goodfriend has recently argued that the FOMC should explicitly compare its policy actions with the recommendations from... a rule...
• Scott Aaronson (2013): Quantum Computing since Democritus: "[Alan Turing's] main idea... as I read it... is a plea against meat chauvinism...
• Charlie Stross: Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929: "The mining process in combination with the hard upper limit...
• Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles: Unfortunately, the tax plan currently under discussion... ignores nearly all the hard choices... incorporating only the 'goodies'...
• One Hundred Unprofessional Republican Economists: Trump tax reform opinion: Why Congress should pass
• Kansas City Star: Jerry Moran: Don't take failed Kansas tax plan nationwide: "Moran... could be the deciding vote.... He has already seen, first-hand, during a very painful five years, what will happen...
• Economist: Jean Tirole: Standing up for economists: "Review of Economics for the Common Good. By Jean Tirole. Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton University Press; 576 pages; $29.95 and £24.95...
• William Best (1824): Sir Edward Coke,: "The fact is, Lord Coke had no authority for what he states...
• Nathan Jensen: Learning public policy from Amazon: "Second, many of these state and local incentive programs are designed to provide very weak tests for providing incentives...
• Topher Spiro: @topherspiro on Twitter: "John Harwood...
• Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson: Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics: "We describe four potential explanations for this clash of expectations and statistics...
• Andrew Prokop: Senate tax reform vote count: key Republicans to watch: "At least 10 GOP senators have expressed some concerns about the current Senate bill...
• Mohamed Saleh and Jean Tirole: Taxing Unwanted Populations: Fiscal Policy and Conversions in Early Islam: "Hostility towards a population, whether on religious, ethnic, cultural or socioeconomic grounds...
• Angus Johnston: @studentactivism on Twitter: "One more quick thing about that NYT profile of Hovater...
• Mark Koyama: The End of the Past: "Temin’s GDP estimates suggest that Roman Italy had comparable per capita income to the Dutch Republic in 1600...
• Alice Sola Kim: @alicek on Twitter: "New York Times: nazi who are you??? what do you want?...
• Mark Koyama: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?: "First... those... think... market expansion is sufficient for sustained economic growth...
• Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles: The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality: "For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality...

Links:

• Joe Thompson: Four Revolutions: A Concise History Of The Modern Watch World: "I drove home from work that day depressed. Watches? Really? What can you possibly write about watches once a month?..."
• Christopher A Pissarides: The Unemployment Volatility Puzzle: Is Wage Stickiness the Answer?: "An equilibrium search model with endogenous job creation and destruction... explanations of the unemployment volatility puzzle have to preserve the cyclical volatility of wages..."
• John Maynard Keynes (1924): A Tract on Monetary Reform
• Alexandra Petri: Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them during a meeting: "'Give me liberty, or give me death'. Woman in a Meeting: 'Dave, if I could, I could just—I just really feel like if we had liberty it would be terrific, and the alternative would just be awful, you know? That’s just how it strikes me. I don’t know'..."
• Max Boot: 2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege: "I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender—and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it. This sounds obvious, but it wasn’t clear to me until recently. I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously..."
• Benjamin Clymer: A Week On The Wrist: The Apple Watch Series 3 Edition: "We look at how cellular makes a difference (hint: it does–a big one) and how the ultimate smartwatch has started to hit its stride (if you can call it a watch)..." https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/hodinkee-apple-watch-review
• Jennifer Williams: Trump foreign policy 2017: 9 bizarre things you forgot Trump did - Vox: "President Trump has gotten the US locked in a military standoff with North Korea, thrown the future of the Iran nuclear deal into doubt, weakened NATO, emboldened Russia, and triggered a diplomatic crisis over Jerusalem.And he’s done that all in under 12 months.... It’s easy to lose sight of the other weird, inappropriate, or just plain bizarre things Trump did on the world stage in 2017..."
• Noah Smith: Rent for the Poor Really Is Too High: "After paying for housing, those in the lowest income bracket have little left for life's essentials..."
• Olivier Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti, and Lawrence Summers: Inflation and Activity: Two Explorations and their Monetary Policy Implications: " We find that the effect of unemployment on inflation, for given expected inflation, decreased until the early 1990s, but has remained roughly stable since then...."
• Olivier Blanchard: The US Phillips Curve: Back to the 60s?: "the US Phillips curve is alive. (I wish I could say “alive and well,” but it would be an overstatement: The relation has never been very tight.)..."
• Douglas O. Staiger, James H. Stock, and Mark W. Watson: How Precise Are Estimates of the Natural Rate of Unemployment?: "The natural rate is measured quite imprecisely... the NAIRU in 1990 is 6.2%, with a 95% confidence interval for the NAIRU in 1990 being 5.1% to 7.7%..."
• William Flesch: Amazon.com: Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (9780674032286): : Books
• J. Bradford De Long: America’s Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s
• L.F. Menabrea and Augusta Ada King-Noel: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage: "With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator..."
• California Department of Housing and Community Developmenet: Where Foundations Begin: Accessory Dwelling Unit Memorandum
• Laura Tyson: In the Wake of the Senate’s Tax Bill, What Does Our Economic Future Look Like?: "The U.S. Senate just passed a tax bill which is in every feature going in the wrong direction..."
• Jesse Shapiro: How to Give an Applied Micro Talk
• Ramez Naam: The Future of Invasive Neural Interfaces
• Austin Clemens: New worldwide report on inequality shows how the United States compares: "Although income inequality increased everywhere between 1980 and 2016, it increased at an especially rapid clip in the United States, eclipsing the rate of increase in other developed nations..."
• Lawrence Norden, Shyamala Ramakrishna, and Sidni Frederick: How Citizens United Changed Politics and Shaped the Tax Bill: "The real impact of an unregulated campaign finance is on policy, and the proof is in this year’s tax bill..."
• Nathaniel Lane: Manufacturing revolutions: The role of industrial policy in South Korea’s industrialisation: "Big push policies spurred rapid industrial development in treated industries... an average of 80% more than non-targeted manufacturing industries, after 1973..."
• Katja Mann and Lukas Püttmann: Benign effects of automation: New evidence: "A new indicator of automation constructed by applying a machine learning algorithm to classify patents... suggests that automation has created more jobs in the US than it has destroyed..."
• Caroline Freund: The United States Wins from Trade Agreements: "Trump is right that trade agreements have been one-sided—but he is wrong about the direction. Recent US trade deals, both multilateral and bilateral, have involved much bigger tariff cuts by US trading partners than by the United States..."
• Ezra Klein: The Republican tax bill is an American betrayal: "The American people voted for populism. They got plutocracy..."
• Charlie Jane Anders: (Writers With Drinks: Amelia Gray, Kate Elliott and more!: "Saturday, January 13, 2018 at 7:30 PM..."
• William G. Gale, Surachai Khitatrakun, and Aaron Krupkin: Winners and Losers After Paying for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
• Tom Nichols: Shame worked in Alabama: "Personally, I am in the 'shame and scold' camp. The 'engage and understand' approach is based on the deeply flawed assumption that these voters don’t know what they are doing..."
• Noah Smith: Sorry, But Economics Isn't 'Astrology for Dudes': "The dismal science can explain lots of things with data and theory. Astrologers explain nothing..."
• Dan Shaviro: Start Making Sense: Under the new tax bill, lose money before tax but make money after-tax: "Our revised Tax Games report should be out within a day or two. (The original is still here.)..."
• Mamta Badkar: Kashkari cites inflation, flattening yield curve for dissent: "Kashkari has now voted against rate rises three time this year.... 'In response to our rate hikes, the yield curve has flattened significantly, potentially signaling an increasing risk of a recession'..."
• JEC: The Next New Macro: "I have my own notions about the best way forward.... I could easily be wrong.... Maybe we'll be able to retire the Robert E. Lucas Jr. Award For Derailing An Entire Discipline without ever bestowing it on a second recipient..."
• JEC: Houdini's Straightjacket: "If after thirty years of study economists failed to 'fully appreciate the Keynesian mechanisms present in the model', one might wonder exactly what such models have to recommend themselves. What is the advantage of an intellectually demanding and mathematically complex modelling approach that makes it harder to actually get the job done? The answer, I suspect, is that 'intellectually demanding and mathematically complex' has become an end in itself..."
• Stanford: Distinguished Careers Institute
• Bridget Ansel: The gender gap in economics has ramifications far beyond the ivory tower: "Some female economists have spoken up about how they’ve been discouraged by male colleagues from explicitly studying gender until they have received tenure.... Former Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Narayana Kocherlakota reflected on how the lack of racial and ethnic diversity within the Federal Reserve system created blind spots with tangible effects on communities of color..."
• Dani Rodrik and Roberto M. Unger:
• Oliver Willis: After black voters win Alabama election, GOP declares their votes don't count: "Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel... 'Doug Jones now answers to Alabamians, who overwhelmingly support President Trump’s conservative agenda, not Schumer & Democrat party bosses who prioritize obstruction over tax cuts and economic revival for Americans...'"
• Adam Serwer: @adamserwe on Twitter: "There's a lesson here about how much 'ironic racism' from non-Nazis is just racism..." Eve Peysar: @evepeyser on Twitter: : "The way the Daily Stormer style guide directs writers to use irony to mask their genocidal bigotry is insane and also, totally expected..."
• Douglas Clement: Interview with Anne Case: "Princeton economist on the cost of AIDS in South Africa, “deaths of despair” in the U.S. and women in economics..."
• Martin Wolf: Conventional wisdom on Japan is wrong: "Solving its economic problems means doing something about private sector surpluses..."
• Bob Brigham: Florida rally cheers when Republican predicts Trump’s Jerusalem embassy decision may usher in Armageddon
• Adora Lily Svitak: Changing the Face of Economics: "UC Berkeley economics professor Dr. Martha Olney explains the importance of diversity in the field, and why she supports initiatives designed to welcome underrepresented groups to the major..."
• Austin Frakt: People Don’t Take Their Pills. Only One Thing Seems to Help: "People Don’t Take Their Pills. Only One Thing Seems to Help. High-tech approaches and 'reminder' packaging don’t work well. Reducing prices does..."
• Albert Silver: The future is here–AlphaZero learns chess
• Cory Doctorow: Square dancing was a racist hoax funded by Henry Ford to get white people to stop dancing to black music: "Wonkette writer Robyn Pennacchia went on a brilliant Twitter rant about the strange history of square dancing, which is not an old American tradition, but rather a 20th century hoax.... Ford even got school districts to teach square dancing in gym classes, and convinced 27 states to make square dancing their official state dances..."
• Bookforum
• Ronald Brownstein: These are the women who could elect Roy Moore: "In the 2016 race, the class gap between whites of the same gender was much larger than the gender gap between whites of the same class..."
• Dani Rodrik: Does Europe Really Need Fiscal and Political Union?: "There is also an alternative, much less ambitious view, according to which only banking union is needed..."
• *Noah Smith: Robot Takeover Matters Less If We're All Shareholders: "A social welfare fund that benefits every American would cushion human obsolescence...."
• Fabio Ghironi: Macro needs micro: "Macroeconomists have accepted that their tools need to incorporate more real world phenomena, such as financial intermediation and labor market frictions... [plus] the need to incorporate more microeconomics to macroeconomics..."
• Josh Marshall: Serve Your Constituency: "It’s not the press’s fault that Donald Trump is still President and Al Franken is about to be an ex-senator. The same applies to Roy Moore. All of these incidents play out based on the constituency of the accused..."
• Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan, and Douglas Webber: The Returns to College Persistence for Marginal Students: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from University Dismissal Policies
• Rana Foroohar: A Conversation With John C. Bogle
• Michael Bauer: Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants 2017
• Team – Blum Center
• Brad DeLong (2013): Niall Ferguson Is Wrong to Say That He Is Doubly Stupid: Why Did Keynes Write "In the Long Run We Are All Dead"? Weblogging
• Melissa Dell, Nathan Lane, and Pablo Querubin: The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam: "[In] Dai Viet... the village was the fundamental administrative unit. Southern Vietnam was a peripheral tributary of the Khmer... a patron-client model.... In villages with a strong historical state, citizens have been better able to organize for public goods and redistribution through civil society and local government..."
• Michael Leachman: House District Map: Partial SALT Repeal Kills Most Valuable Part of Deduction
• Mike Konczal and Marshall Steinbaum: It’s Still Not the Supply Side: "Yes, workers should be able to move and work freely. But economics remains fundamentally about power. A response to the 'What’s Holding Us Back?' symposium..."
• Craig Garthwaite and Fiona Scott Morton: Perverse Market Incentives Encourage High Prescription Drug Prices: "Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)... claim to be a lone bulwark against the rapacious pricing decisions of pharmaceutical firms, but is recent consolidation in the PBM market also a driver of high prices for prescription drugs?..."
• Nick Bunker: Ten years after the beginning of the Great Recession, is it time to abandon the natural rate hypothesis?: "Understanding how much the chance of long-term unemployed workers getting a job varies over the business cycle of an economy could help determine the level of persistence of recessions.... A better understanding of what determines households’ inflation expectations will result in a stronger test of the accelerationist hypothesis..."
• Brad DeLong (2015): The last time I saw Richard Thaler speak, he talked about the “Beauty Contest” game: "'An Infinite Regress. Of Dumb': More Reflections on 'Market Efficiency': tl;dr: Richard Thaler is a genius. His arguments for the importance of behavioral finance are unanswerable..."
• Lyndon Johnson (1964): Remarks at a Fundraising Dinner in New Orleans
• @DynamicWebPaige: "It is an unfortunate reality that academia does not consider software engineering or tool-building valid areas of academic work—but if libraries like ggplot2 and scikit-learn were referenced as often as they were used in research papers, that paradigm might shift..."
• Bob Hall (2005): Bob Hall Corrects the Record...: "[My] roots in programming... on a decimal machine.... The internal name of the 1620 at IBM was Cadet, which was rumored to stand for Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, because it used a table for addition rather than having addition hardware..."
• Leslie Peirce: Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire
• Jeffrey Friedman: Public Choice Theory and the Politics of Good and Evil: "It is rich to read public-choice libertarians begging MacLean for interpretive charity. Their entire careers have been dedicated to denying interpretive charity to the political actors with whom they disagree..."
• Will Wilkinson: How Libertarian Democracy Skepticism Infected the American Right: "Antipathy to democracy, ranging from uneasiness to outright hostility, became part of the right’s DNA, and it still is today..."
• Jacob Levy: Black Liberty Matters: "Reorienting a set of ideas and ideals in light of a morally compromised history, of understanding what lessons need to be learned from it, of separating the arguments for liberty from the yelps, is insiders’ work. No one else is going to do it for us..."
• Arif Dirlik: "'When, exactly... does the 'post-colonial' begin?' When Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe..."
• Josh Bivens: Senate tax bill is a scam, through-and-through: "Besides lying about who would benefit most directly from the tax cut, defenders of today’s bill have also lied about the trickle-down benefits that will accrue to workers in the form of higher wages..."
• Brad DeLong (2002): Wile E. Coyote Explains Bush Administration Fiscal Policy: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal
• Dylan Scott and Alvin Chang: The Republican tax bill will exacerbate income inequality in America: "The bill is investing heavily in the wealthy and their children.”
• Elizabeth Bruenig: Life Comes at You at a Predictable Pace: "The alt right is having a fight because a couple of the major 'demographic decline' female youtube stars aren't having kids for the same reason all the other women aren't lol..."
• Simon Wren-Lewis: If we treat plutocracy as democracy, democracy dies: "We are very close to a point where neoliberalism becomes something much worse.... Escaping this fate, and rescuing democracy... has to involve a democratic defeat of the right wing parties that allowed this plutocracy to emerge, and indeed encouraged it and then made bargains with it when it believed it was still in control..."
• Eshe Nelson: Nobel laureate Jean Tirole explains why we get the bad economic policies we deserve: "The Frenchman’s--- Economics for the Common Good... is a 560-page manifesto on how the profession can get back on track..."
• Annie Lowrey: How the Great Recession Continues to Shape America: "The downturn left the country poorer and more unequal than it would have been otherwise..."
• Souvenir Coffee
• David Frum: "KT McFarland understood why Flynn talks with Kislyak about sanctions relief were first hushed up and then lied about: because Trump WH saw as clearly as anyone that the relief looked like payback for Russia's help in 2016 election..."
• Michael Bennet: The Tax "Reform" Bill
• Robert Rubin: No serious lawmaker should support this tax bill
• Dynamic Periodic Table
• Michael Schmidt et al.: Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election: "As the F.B.I. investigated Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign, James B. Comey tried to keep the bureau out of politics but plunged it into the center of a bitter election..."
• Andrew Prokop, Zack Beauchamp, and Alex Ward: Michael Flynn is concluding a plea deal with prosecutors. Trump should be very worried: "This is the biggest development in the Trump-Russia story yet..."
• Alexander Klein and Sheilagh Ogilvie: Was Domar Right?: Serfdom and Factor Endowments in Bohemia: "Higher land-labor ratios... increase[d] coercion. The effect greatly increased when animal labor was included, and diminished as land-labor ratios rose..."
• Toluse Olurrunipa: Trump's Tax Promises Undercut by CEO Plans to Reward Investors
• Steven M. Rosenthal: Current Tax Reform Bills Could Encourage US Jobs, Factories and Profits to Shift Overseas
• Max Roser: The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it
• Aline Butikofer, Katrine Løken, and Kjell Salvanes: Infant Health Care and Long-Term Outcomes: "Access to mother and child health care centers in the first year of life increased the completed years of schooling by 0.15 years and earnings by two percent..."
• Martin Wolf: Six impossible notions about ‘global Britain’: "The UK is no longer its 19th-century self, but a second-rank power in decline..."
• Richard Rubin and Nick Timiraos: Official Growth Estimate for Tax Bill Will Assume 'Aggressive' Fed Response
• Jason Furman: @jasonfurman on Twitter: "Disappointed that so many Republican economists would sign on to a letter that completely distorts the evidence on the growth effects of tax cuts..."
• Chad Bolt: "We have apparently now hit The Rubio Point on the #GOPTaxScam. Rubio Point = moment in time where so many other senators 'have concerns' with something that even a Senator as spineless as Florida Man decides it's safe to pile on..."
• Hylke Vandenbussche, William Connell, and Wouter Simons: Global value chains and Brexit | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal: "Hard Brexit suggests a loss of 4.47% of UK GDP, again four times as much as a soft Brexit (1.21%)..."
• Dylan Scott: Trump’s phony populism is fully exposed in the Republican tax bill
• Topher Spiro: @topherspiro on Twitter: "The press is not adequately covering the key issue.... McCain, Corker, Flake, Moran, and others have said they will vote no if they’re convinced the bill will increase deficits.... Luckily for Republicans, the conservative Tax Foundation is here to magically supply the numbers they need..."
• Scott Aaronson: (45) What Quantum Computing Isn't: "What we cannot do—even with computers we do not have..."
• Wikipedia: Aumann's agreement theorem
• Andrew Granato: How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire: "Thiel has become a national figure of controversy for, among other things, claiming that 'the extension of the franchise to women… render[s]  the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron', saying, 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible', funding a fellowship that specifically tries to get undergraduates to drop out of college, and donating $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s campaign a week after a tape was released in which the then-candidate discussed how he could grope young female actresses and get away with it..."
• Noah Smith: Socialism and Capitalism Work Together: "Redistribution policies have helped to lift billions of people out of extreme poverty..."; The Economics Data Revolution Has Growing Pains: "Too many studies use small sample sizes that give false positives..."; Immigrants Do a Great Job at Becoming Americans: "They quickly adapt to the culture, learn English and intermarry..."; The Robot Revolution Is Coming. Just Be Patient: "The only question is whether it amounts to much..."
• Ezra Klein: Where the New York Times article on an American Nazi went wrong: "Fausset mentions, but does not dwell on, Hovater’s feeling that 'the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him.'... What is abnormal in this era is not that there are some otherwise normal Americans who hold ugly ideas, but the attention we are giving them."
• Lydia DePillis: Dodging taxes isn't the only reason the rich stash cash offshore
• Ava DuVernay: @av on Twitter: "Just came across an email I sent to a new filmmaker last year who sought advice on shooting her first feature. Maybe it can be helpful to someone else out there. xo..."
• Kim Clausing: Tax benefits should bubble up, not trickle down
• Joseph Rosenberg: The Senate Tax Bill Would Impose High Marginal Tax Rates on Some Pass-through Owners
• David Roberts: All the risks of climate change, in a single graph: "There are a lot of them..."
• Karin Kross: The Revolutionary Optimism of Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels: "The market... remains... crude and essentially blind... intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings..."
• Matthew Yglesias: The theory behind Trump’s tax cuts is exactly what gave us the failed Bush economy - Vox: "An influx of foreign hot money isn’t what we need..."
• Neera Tanden: @neeratanden on Twitter: "Doug Jones is a prosecutor who went after the KKK. He's also not a child molester. So he's got that going for him..."
• Zeynep Tufekci: @zeyneptufekci on Twitter: "Yeah, jumped at me that this was an obvious potential path, not explored at all. Can't be a reporter of modern fascism if you don't understand this dynamic. Profiled guy clearly wasn't about the books he rattled off (bet he hadn't read them)..."

Across the Wide Missouri:

• Live from the Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: Nate Silver is wise and correct here: Go interview some swing voters instead]...
• Live from Near Gehenna: Whether or not the Trump camarilla is involved in this: The entire Middle East believes that it is because of the timing of the Jared Kushner visit to Saudi—and the absence of any public reason for the visit...
• Live from... Well, Near Gehenna: The downward spiral of Israel continues. A long way yet to fall, but the direction is not good...
• Live from the American Libertarians' Self-Made Gehenna: When is the Volokh Conspiracy going to publish its piece on "Judge Alex 'But I Call My Male Clerks into Chambers and Pinch Their Nipples too!' Kozinski...
• Live from the Primate Research Labd: Marcy Wheeler: "Also, both chimps and bonobos have been known to shred copies of Ayn Rand to create bed litter for their friends..."
• Live from the Self-Made Gehenna of the Grand Old Perverts: How Alex Kozinski's career survived the naked-women-painted-like-cows episode is beyond me: "Kozinski sent a memo to all the judges suggesting that a rule prohibiting female attorneys from wearing push-up bras..."
• Live from the Hot and Dry Santa Barbara Area: I do wish that they would distinguish where it is a grass-and-brush fire from where it is a forest fire...
• Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: A tribe of incompetent grifters. But the Donald mistake is more serious: writing the wrong month for your birthdate is very hard to do without major cognitive decline...
• Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: However This Ends, That This Is This Close Is Just So Awful, Awful, Awful!: May I, for one, say that I am overwhelmingly embarrassed at the older white men from the South I have as fellow citizens in this country: Such easily-grifted morons!...

For the Weekend:

• Mel Torme and Judy Garland: For the Weekend: The Christmas Song
• For the Weekend: Stephen Vincent Benét: John Brown's Body I
• Weekend Reading: Sidney Blumenthal on the Finances of Stephen "The Little Giant" Douglas
• Weekend Reading: Richard Thaler: Behavioral Economics
• For the Weekend: Enya: O Come Emmanuel
• Weekend Reading: Judge Kozinski: More Stories: "Courtney Milan’s post about Alex Kozinski is a harrowing read, but an important one..."
• Weekend Reading: "Nor Trust in Wodan / Walhall's High Drighten..."
• Weekend Reading: Courtney Milan: Judge Kozinski: "Judge Kozinski had a way of summoning his clerks..."
• For the Weekend: Veni Emmanuel
• Weekend Reading: Daniel Webster: March 7, 1850
• For the Weekend: O...
• For the Weekend: Scott Aaronson's Take on Quantum Mechanics

Readings:

• Three Books for 2017: Economics for the Common Good, Janesville, Economism

Monday Smackdown:

• Monday Smackdown: :Treasury Document Translation: Steve Mnuchin Is Not a Professional Treasury Secretary. He and His Personal Staff Are Grifters
• Monday Smackdown: (Early Hoisted) Monday DeLong Smackdown Watch: Cosma Shalizi
• Monday Smackdown: Treasury Document Translation: Steve Mnuchin Is Not a Professional Treasury Secretary. He and His Personal Staff Are Grifters
• (Early) Monday Smackdown: Tax Reform Intellectual Garbage Cleanup Edition
• Monday Smackdown: Nine Republican Economists Being Unprofessional on Tax Reform Edition
• Monday DeLong Smackdown: Trying and Failing to Get in Touch with My Inner Austrian Back in 2004...

Tuesday Hoisted:

• Hoisted from the Archives: Watching Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Etc... 2014-01-05, Plus Update Graph
• Hoisted: (Early Hoisted) Monday DeLong Smackdown Watch: Cosma Shalizi
• Hoisted from the Archives: Night Thoughts on Dynamic Scoring
• The Great Depression from the Perspective of Today, and Today from the Perspective of the Great Depression: Hoisted from 2013
• In Which I Try and Fail to Understand the Current State of Right-Wing Monetary Economics: Hoisted from 2014
• On the Negative Information Revealed by Marvin Goodfriend's "I Don't Teach IS-LM": Hoisted from the Archives* Madmen in the Attic: Hoisted from the Archives from 2006
• Monday DeLong Smackdown: Trying and Failing to Get in Touch with My Inner Austrian Back in 2004...

Comment of the Day: