Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What’s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...

Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump’s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.’s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzucato. I blush to say that her book is still in THE PILE—I have not read it yet: Martin Wolf: Who creates a nation’s economic value?: "Who creates value? Who extracts value? Who destroys value?...

OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech’s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind” companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.

I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is being done in academic economics—even in macro. I agree with the Economist that academic economists are more-or-less neutralized at best in the public sphere, with bad actors, bad methodology, and bad ideologues drowning out information. I agree that economics should do a much better job of policing its own internal community and standing within it via what my colleague Alan Auerbach calls "obloquy". I agree that economics should do a much better job of managing its discursive modes, in both empirical and theoretical work. But I do wish the Economist would turn its microscope on what purports to be economic journalism more: Noah Smith: OK, so The Economist has an ongoing series of articles about the shortcomings of the economics profession: "https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740403-first-series-columns-professions-shortcomings-economists...

Will the Trump Fed be "normal"? I will give Ken Randy Quarles. I grant Rich Clarida. But Marvin Goodfriend does not seem to me to be a particularly normal Federal Reserve appointment. He's one of the "debasement" crowd who had no respect for Ben Bernanke's judgment and tried as hard as they could to limit his freedom of action. If that's "normal", "normal" is not a good thing. And otherwise... a lot of unfilled seats. I told Jason Furman he needed to fill up the Fed Board on January 4, 2017. He did not do so: Ken Rogoff: Donald Trump’s Normal Fed : "Unfortunately, the battle for the Fed’s independence is far from over...

The behavior of the Federal Reserve remains a puzzle. They seem to be reacting month-to-month, and to be happy with their current policy stance of gradual raising until and unless something goes wrong. They do not seem to be thinking down the game tree very far—not taking account of how their current policy stance exposes them to huge downside risks should low r-star continue, should "secular stagnation" be the correct diagnosis, and should there be any kind of significant adverse demand shock to the economy: Tim Duy: Set To Stay On Current Path: "When is the economy at or beyond full employment?...

81%? Only 81% of "Initial Coin Offerings" created by "con artists, charlatans, and swindlers"? What are the other 19%? What of their own resources are the issuers putting on the line, and what is the path to long-run value? Not 81%: 100%, Nouriel!: Nouriel Roubini: Initial Coin Scams: "Initial coin offerings have become the most common way to finance cryptocurrency ventures, of which there are now nearly 1,600 and rising...

Geoffrey Hodgson: 200 Years of Karl Marx: "At least two major aspects of Marx’s thought removed protections of human rights and paved the way for brutal totalitarianism...

Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels—"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

Paul Rincon: Hun migrations 'linked to deadly Justinian Plague': "Eske Willerslev, Peter de Barros Damgaard and others... sequenced genomes... recovered DNA from a strain of plague related to the one responsible for the Justinian Plague...

Anecdotes trump data for what I wish were a surprisingly large proportion of male American economists: Economist: Barriers to entry: "In economics, men receive tenure at a rate 12 percentage points higher than women do, after controlling for family circumstances and publication records...

Some very interesting thoughts from Ken Rogoff. But he does not seem to recognize that Shenzhen is now at least as much a global hub of hardware and manufacturing process innovation in small-scale high-tech devices as anywhere else in the world. World class communities of engineering practice are hard to build. But China looks to be building one. I would dearly love somebody to take a deep close look at Shenzhen and tell me to what extent it is already more than just "the great assembler": Ken Rogoff: Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony?: "Over the next 100 years, who takes over, Chinese workers or the robots?...

If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters—and national security matters—come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...

Noah Smith: Remember Karl Marx for the many things he got wrong: "Marx didn’t make it to 200, but the ideas he injected into the global conversation and the ideologies that bear his name far outlasted the German economist and philosopher...

What I describe as the Rubin questions, because these are questions that I first heard when Bob Rubin would ask them when he led the NEC for Clinton in the 1990s: What might we wish two years from now we had done today? What might we wish ten years now that we had done today? Yes, that decision turned out right, but was it the best decision we could have made then given what we could have known then? Yes, that decision turned out wrong, but was there a better decision we could have made then given what we could have known then, and how could we have made it?: Cory Doctorow: Thinking in Bets: a poker-master's Jedi mind-trick for being less wrong: "Annie Duke... Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts...

Alex Bell et al.: Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation: "Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records...

National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...

Josh Bernoff: How we really should teach writing: "Here’s a radical idea.... Teach... students to write stuff that they’ll actually need to write in life or in an office: emails, blog posts, social media posts, marketing copy, research reports, and presentations...

The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...

Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...

Am I wrong to be appalled at how there are too many economists whose knowledge of models carries with it negative knowledge about the economy?: Paul Krugman: Immaculate Inflation Strikes Again: "We’re currently well above historical estimates of full employment, and inflation remains subdued. Could unemployment fall to 3.5% without accelerating inflation? Honestly, we don’t know...

The extremely sharp Joe Romm: Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds: "Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds..." and he sends us to: Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffman and Toan Phan: Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States: "Seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy...

Interest rates are telling us that the debt is too low: that there are too few safe assets in the world, and that more U.S. Treasury debt would be very valuable in this world: Alan J. Auerbach, William G. Gale, and Aaron Krupkin: THE FEDERAL BUDGET OUTLOOK: EVEN CRAZIER AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: "New Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections... prospect of routine trillion-dollar deficits... underlying problem is even more serious...

History, biography, and fiction are the queens of the humanities because we think via narrative: David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories: "The perfect summer blockbuster. A handsome king... superhuman strength... insufferable arroganc... wreak[s] havoc...

The extremely sharp Joe Romm: Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds: "Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds..." and he sends us to: Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffman and Toan Phan: Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States: "Seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy...

The well-worth reading Ryan Cooper trolls me: Ryan Cooper: It's time to normalize Karl Marx: "For elite American economists, Marx has long been viewed as absolutely anathema, if not some kind of demon...

The highly-estimable Steve Randy Waldmann hoists the banner of "employment for societal usefulness, not for profit". Smart guy: Steve Randy Waldman: Smile: "Pairing a UBI with a job guarantee would mitigate the risk that we neglect the broader project of integrating one another into a vibrant society...

Against North and Weingast: it was not 1688 that was important so much as 1485, 1534, 1543, and 1642, all powerful steps away from quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem: Avner Greif and Jared Rubin: Political Legitimacy and the Institutional Foundations of Constitutional Government: "This paper opens the ‘black box’ of endogenous political legitimacy and asks what role...

Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence...

Jason Rhode: What tech calls “AI” isn’t really AI: "We're in the dark ages of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, to say nothing of the philosophical riddles...

Republicans purge every thinker who was correct. Republican economists who were right about 2007-2012 are now, as best as I can see, all ex-Republican economists. And the same dynamic has long been working in the national security space: Gene Healy (2015): Think Tanks and the Iraq War: "It would be even better if the GOP’s 2016 contenders weren’t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong...

Economic history becomes BIG DATA: Ran Abramitzky, Roy Mill, and Santiago Pérez: Linking Individuals Across Historical Sources: a Fully Automated Approach: "Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors...

Never forget how pig-ignorant stupid the High Priests of Liquidationist Chicago were in 2009: Paul Krugman (2009): The lost generation: "Matthew Yglesias catches Eugene Fama making a strange assertion...

This phenomenon is truly deplorable, on many levels: Gillian Tett: True believers: why US evangelicals support Trump: "80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 election...

As Chief Acolyte of the "hysteresis view", I must protest! The "hysteresis view" has proved correct: Benoît Cœuré: Scars that never were? Potential output and slack after the crisis: "To be clear... I do believe that deep recessions can have effects on the supply capacity of the economy that may take some time to unwind...

Noah Smith: "This is just incredible: @davidminpdx: 'East New York's 129-day stretch without a murder is the longest since the NYPD began keeping modern records'...

The very sharp Alexandra Petri's work about feminism always works on two levels: Alexandra Petri: Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them during a meeting: "'Woman in a Meeting' is a language of its own...

I do think that this is the best thing on Paul Ryan's retirement: Alexandra Petri: Paul Ryan can’t possibly have made a deal with the Devil: "His piano-playing has not improved. He has not become any wiser. He has not been able to travel widely and see the great sights of the present and past...

Kevin Bryan: The 2018 John Bates Clark: Parag Pathak: "Consider the old 'Boston mechanism'.... Everyone would be allocated their first choice if possible...

To a large extent the power of NIMBYism springs from the right-wing tax revolt of the 1980s: Issi Romem: America's New Metropolitan Landscape: Pockets of Dense Construction in a Dormant Suburban Interior: "City planners tend to favor concentrating residential development in dense hubs because they lend themselves to service by public transit, which helps reduce the impact of new residents on emissions and traffic congestion...

We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...

Post-1500 Ottoman retardation and chronic plague?: Ulysse Colonna: Infectious, elegant and maybe wrong: sketch for an explanation of the Long Divergence: "Three different but linked literatures... blissfully ignoring each other...

Should not the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School bigtime rethink the support services it provides to potential donor admittees, and do so pronto? He does have what Wharton calls an economics degree: Justin Wolfers: "If OPEC were boosting oil prices,

Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump’s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What’s the matter with Kansas? It’ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

I don't understand why these smart authors are playing such small ball: Abigail Wozniak and Jay Shambaugh: Why We Need to Help Kids Go to College Wherever They Want: "Previous generations of young adults were much more likely to move for career opportunities...

More and more it looks as though minimum wage laws—and unions—are positive second-best interventions that raise societal wellbeing by blunting the impact of employer monopsony: Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis: The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: "States and localities are increasingly experimenting with higher minimum wages in response to rising income inequality and stagnant economic mobility...

Credulous business-friendly reporters willing to publish cries of "labor shortage" without evidence are annoying: Neel Kashkari: "The extreme emotions around the labor market 'historic, severe worker shortages'. Sounds like a real crisis. Is it?...

Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire: Government as the Problem in the 1970s and 1980s: Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: "The post-[World] War [II] period began in an atmosphere of doubt and fear...

Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-will-increase-average-tariffs-32-percentage-points): "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...

Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...

"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...

The idea that the collapse of the aristocratic Roman Free State into the Roman Empire was due to wild dissipative partying—luxus, a vice caught from the Greeks and "Asiatics", giving rise to avaritia, which then leads to ambitio and cupido imperii—was originally a meme put forward by those I regard as the true villains—plutocrats and political norm breakers—to avoid responsibility: A.W. Lintott (1972): Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: "Imperial expansion in general did of course have divisive economic and political effects...

If you did not read this over at Equitable Growth Value Added a year and a half ago when it came out, you should go read it now: Emmanuel Saez (2016): Taxing the rich more—evidence from the 2013 federal tax increase: "In 2013, a surtax on high earners was levied to help pay for the Affordable Care Act at the same time as the 2001 tax cuts for high-income earners that were signed into law by President George W. Bush expired...

Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump’s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...

We are not yet at maximum feasible employment: Jared Bernstein: Employment Breakeven Levels: They’re higher than most of us thought : "We know neither the natural rate of unemployment nor the potential level of GDP...

Without short selling, the current price of a speculative asset is the expected maximum valuation that will ever be given it by the non-forward looking. When the valuations by the non-forward looking become extrapolative, Katie bar the door!: Noah Smith: Lessons on Bubbles From Bitcoin: "Until there is a way to bet against an asset, its price will be set by the most upbeat buyer...

@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...

An interesting example of non-representative firm macro: Ernesto Pasten, Raphael Schoenle, and Michael Weber: Price rigidities and the granular origins of aggregate fluctuations: "We study the aggregate implications of sectoral shocks in a multi-sector New Keynesian model...

Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, AND Alan M.Taylor􏰀: The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015: "This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century...

Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: February 2018 Report Edition: "The quits rate continues to hold steady at 2.2 percent. The rate has been 2.2 percent on average for the past 3 months as well as the past year..

Nick Bunker: "What does this tell us?: ".@de1ong asked so here it is: the Beveridge Curve with the prime employment rate instead of U3...

Justin Fox: Paul Ryan's Roadmap Was an Epic Fiscal Failure: "Paul Ryan did not cause the financial crisis. He has nonetheless failed pretty spectacularly... his actions have made the situation much worse than it had to be...

Josh Bivens: The fuzzy line between “unemployed” and “not in the labor force” and what it means for job creation strategies and the Federal Reserve: "Jobless people are classified into... either unemployed or not in the labor force...

Jag Bhalla: The Epistemic Vigilance We Evolved To Do Well: "Confirmation Bias Isn’t a Bug, It’s Operator Error...

Liz Hipple: New research on the relationship between race, place, and opportunity in the United States: "Raj Chetty and fellow researchers Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter released... “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective”...

Jonathan Chait: Trump Attacks Comey for Handing Him the Presidency: "Comey all but confirms the Democrats’ complaints.... He considered Clinton a lead-pipe cinch to win...

Robert Skidelsky: The Advanced Economies’ Lost Decade: "Policy interventions immediately following the 2008 crash did make a difference.... The 2008 collapse was as steep as that of 1929, but it lasted for a much shorter time...

Lisa Mascaro and Bill Barrow: Ryan Retirement Fuels House GOP Desperation To Maintain Control: “'It’s like Eisenhower resigning right before D-Day', said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia...

Nick Bunker: JOLTS and the Beveridge Curve

Matthew Yglesias: House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement: good riddance: "The many lives of Paul Ryan: Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-’05...

Ezra Klein (2012): A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign: "Honestly? I didn't want us to write this piece...

Dan Drezner (2014): What Nick Kristof Doesn't Get About the Ivory Tower: "Three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs—academics, Beltway types and money folks...

Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark: "Denmark... the effects of wealth taxes... on wealth accumulation...

Brent Simmons: Blogging System Rewrite: "I realized that I want my blog to be me on the web. This used to be true, but then along came Twitter, and then my presence got split up between two places...

Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Running Into Irrational Humans: "To many young people, the idea of efficient financial markets—the idea that...

Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...

Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/983049473386524672): 'Too far'?" It’s the genteel form of white ethnicism...

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte...

Susan Dynarski retweeted: The Harvard Crimson: "The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has filed a formal Title IX complaint against Government Professor Jorge I. Dominguez, according to correspondence obtained by The Crimson...

Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain’s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...

Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A quintet of notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...

Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s... core advertising business.

Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...

Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.

Mary Daly: Raising the Speed Limit on Future Growth: "Why aren’t American workers working?

Larry Summers: No, “Obamasclerosis” wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama’s policies... materially slowed economic growth...

Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma’s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Leadership and Membership Announcements: "Tamara Lundgren, president and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc., Portland, OR, has been elected as a class B director...

Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes et al.: Mortality from Nestlé's Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countries: "Intensive and controversial marketing of infant formula is believed to be responsible for millions of infant deaths in low and middle-income countries (LMICs)...

Ben Thompson: The End of Windows: "The story of Windows’ decline is relatively straightforward...

Joe Pompeo: “Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces”: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Leadership and Membership Announcements: "Tamara Lundgren, president and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc., Portland, OR, has been elected as a class B director...

Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn’t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we’ve seen in stock prices...

William Beveridge (1942): Beveridge Report: Social Insurance and Allied Services

Martin Wolf: The Chinese economy is rebalancing, at last: "Consumption is at last becoming the most important driver of demand in the Chinese economy...

Janet Yellen: Statement on the Appointment of John Williams as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: "I strongly support the appointment of John Williams as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York...<

Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...

Charles F. Manski (2011): Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy: "Suppose that nearsightedness derives entirely from the presence of a particular allele of a specific gene...

A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...

David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...

Craig Palsson: Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Incomplete Property Rights and Structural Change in Haiti

Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a “strategic competitor” suggests, is it to halt China’s technological progress altogether—an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...

Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...

Emily Eisner: Women in Economics at Berkeley: "However in order to turn bold ideas into a reality, the AEA needs to establish institutions and systems that will incentivize the behavior they endorse...

Valerie Cerra and Sweta C. Saxena: The Economic Scars of Crises and Recessions: "According to the traditional business cycle view... our new study casts doubt on this traditional view and shows that all types of recessions...

Paul Krugman: Immaculate Inflation Strikes Again: "Oh, dear. We’ve been here before.... Economics is about what people... do...

Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...

Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...

Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...

Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...

Nicholas Gruen: The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0: "Simon Heffer’s High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building... ours... liberal democratic world...

Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and Wages Redux: "After Republicans rammed through their big tax cut, there were a rash of stories about corporations using the tax break to give their workers bonuses...

Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that Röpke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...

Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...

A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Can Be Conceived: I give up. Steve Mnuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary that can be conceived—an ontological singularity of sorts a la Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Phenomenally underbriefed and uncurious: Manu Raju: "Told line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional, Mnuchin says: 'Congress can pass a rule that allows them to do it'...

Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, Akira Sasahara, and Yuan Xu: Reconsidering the ‘China shock’ in trade: "While previous studies focus on the job-reducing effect of the surging imports from China or other low-wage countries on US employment...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: The Output Gap is no longer a sufficient statistic for inflationary pressure: "From 1955 to 2007 prosperity grew at an average rate of almost two and a quarter percent each year...

Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...

Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn’t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it’s an Uber car doesn’t surprise me. They’re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..

Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley’s beer...

Tolga Aksoy and Paolo Manasse: The hysteresis-resilience trade-off in unemployment: "We focus on... resilience: the impact of output shocks on the unemployment gap (the lower the impact, the higher resilience)...

Peter Baehr (2001): The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created...

Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...

Ed Luce: Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump: "Whether you are a Muslim, Hispanic, African-American or a globalist, America’s president has made it safe to disparage you...

Martin Wolf: Economics failed us before the global crisis: "Macroeconomics... invented by John Maynard Keynes.... The tests... are whether its adepts understand what might go wrong in the economy and how to put it right...

Noah Smith: Why Money Managers Are Paid So Much Is a Mystery: "Mutual-fund managers are paid less for beating the market than for marketing—i.e., the ability to collect assets...

Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...

Benjamin D. Sommers, Atul A. Gawande, and Katherine Baicker: Health Insurance Coverage and Health—What the Recent Evidence Tells Us: "An analysis of mortality changes after Medicaid expansion suggests that expanding Medicaid saves lives at a societal cost of $327,000 to $867,000 per life saved...

Lant Pritchett: Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth

Caffeine: Better Living Through Chemistry: Nov 1-Jan 14, 2018: no caffeinated coffee drinks... What drink—and how many—should I switch to on April 15?

Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ‘we hold all the cards’ compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...

John Scalzi: No, In Fact, You Should Not Write For Free: "I can see where Douglas has gone wrong... some of it boils down to a matter of definition of what constitutes 'free' writing...

Live from the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton: I wonder if he got affinity program points for his stay?: Erik Schatzker: Alwaleed Reveals Secret Deal Struck to Exit Ritz After 83 Days: "So you were not harmed or mistreated in any way?

Lawrence Summers: “A strong, fully employed economy—where firms looking for workers is a larger issue than workers looking for firms...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Marcy Wheeler: "'What did the president do, and what the fuck was he thinking when he did it?' are questions not about the cover-up, but about the substantive crime. And that's the question Mueller's Watergate prosecutor has now posed to the president's lawyers..."

David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...

Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump’s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as “psychographs”...

Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies: "Until now, the most visible neo-goldbug in the administration has been David Malpass... the former chief economist of Bear Stearns...

Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."

J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, Tim L. Squires, and David N. Weil: The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers...

Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...

Dan Shaviro: Another new publication!: "'Evaluating the New U.S. Pass-Through Rules'...

Noah Smith: How Universities Make Cities Great: "Abel and Deitz find that university research expenditures have a strong effect on the number of educated people in a region—over four times as strong as the effect of degree production...

Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution: "The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective...

Lane Kenworthy: Soci 109: Analysis of Sociological Data (2015): "This course introduces you to techniques and software for analyzing quantitative social science data...

Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...

Charles Plosser (2008): Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on March 18, 2008

Jason Del Rey: Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase: "Amazon... plans to work with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to create a new health care company...

Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier: Gendered Language: "Gender languages assign many—sometimes all—nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine...

Brad DeLong (2012): Ahem! Niall Ferguson Fire-His-Ass-from-NewsBeast-Now Department: Niall Ferguson writes

Henry Farrell: We’re all going to need safe spaces: "What Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China have discovered is that the best antidote to more speech is bad speech...

Jonathan Chait: Nancy Pelosi Is Good at Her Job and She Should Keep It.: "There is zero sign Pelosi’s age has impeded her work...

Matt Townsend et al.: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...

FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."

Ted Ruger (Dean): Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Dear members of the Penn Law community...

Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...

Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump’s new economic adviser...

Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...

Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...

Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...

Dylan Matthews: Larry Summers on the Midwest and South: the case for a government bailout of the heartland: "In 2016, only 5 percent of men ages 25 to 54 in Alexandria, Virginia (a rich DC suburb), were not working...

Ernest Liu (2016): INDUSTRIAL POLICIES IN PRODUCTION NETWORKS: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors...

Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...

Bill McBride: Larry Kudlow is usually wrong... "...and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote...

Noah Smith: California Affordable Housing Is No Mystery: Just Build More: "Urban California should emulate Tokyo, which ensured the supply of dwellings stayed ahead of population growth. By Noah Smith...

Chris Ladd: The article removed from Forbes, “Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel”: "Modern, white evangelicalism emerged from the interplay between race and religion in the slave states...

Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: "Spoiler: There’s room for the job market to improve...

Michael Kremer (1993): The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development: "This paper proposes a production function describing processes subject to mistakes in any of several tasks...

Drew Conway (2013): The Data Science Venn Diagram: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...

Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...

Dahlia K. Remler et al.: Estimating The Effects Of Health Insurance And Other Social Programs On Poverty Under The Affordable Care Act: "The effects of health insurance on poverty have been difficult to ascertain...

Robert Shackleton: Estimating and Projecting Potential Output Using CBO’s Forecasting Growth Model: "CBO regularly produces estimates and projections of potential output...

Dan Davies: "As I always said, if you think it's annoying listening to me, try being me...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are “real Americans”: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

Evan A. Feigenbaum: A Chinese Puzzle: Why Economic "Reform" in Xi's China Has More Meanings than Market Liberalization: "What is going on that produces such a gaping disconnect between Beijing’s story about reform and the views of so many in the markets?...

Willy Lam: China Paves Way For Xi Jinping To Extend Rule Beyond 2 Terms: "'Xi Jinping has finally achieved his ultimate goal when he first embarked on Chinese politics...

Anatole Kaletsky: The Market Dogs That Didn’t Bark: "The bond market’s complacency about US interest rates and inflation may be surprising... [may] turn out to be an expensive mistake... but it is a fact...