Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Our Public Sphere, Now in as Bad Shape as It Has Ever Been (Hi Gerry Baker! Hi Dean Baquet!)
Public Sphere:
Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
Paul Krugman says that the public sphere—even the good part of the public sphere—has gone wrong because of the threat and the menace that is twitter: Paul Krugman: Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "This discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication–and, I think, an unfortunate one...
Note to Self: I am pretty good at making sure Twitter does not seize my attention and hack my brain. But many other people are not. Platforms so that you can control aggregators. How was it that Tim Berners-Lee's Open Web crushed the Walled Gardeners in the 1990s? And how have the Walled Gardeners made their comeback? And what can be done?: Manton Reece (2014): Microblog Links: "Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks...
Nick Bunker provides an excellent tweetstorm on the issues involved in thinking about slack, wage growth, unemployment, and employment. He also mourns for the pre-twitter bite web: "remember blogposts? Those were cool!" It is certainly the case that Twitter has devoted zero—nay, less than zero—effort to building tools for curating tweet call-and-response episodes into anything that Plato would recognize as a dialogue...
From the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma's Economists' View continues to be the single best link aggregator in economic policy and theoretical economics: read him...
If you do not make the Economic Policy Institute one of your trusted information intermediaries, you are doing it wrong. Badly wrong.
The Sisyphean work of getting to people to recognize that the Reagan "morning in America" boom was a standard Keynesian reaction to a larger federal deficit in a time of high unemployment—it continues: Menzie Chinn: The Reagan Tax Cuts and Defense Buildup: Supply-Side Miracle or Keynesian Stimulus?: "This set of outcomes does not deny the existence of some supply side effect—the dots in Figure 2 don’t line up exactly on a straight line—but the overall pattern seems to be more consistent with an AD shift from the tax cuts and spending increases (combined with monetary policy relaxation) as opposed to a supply-side scenario as laid out by Wanniski and Laffer.... Bruce Bartlett, who was there at the inception, reminds me of Barry Ritholtz’s review of Reaganomics. See also Bartlett’s piece on the subject..."
The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mark Thoma: On the 2009-2015 Dark Age of Macroeconomics: Weekend Reading
Paul Krugman (2012): Economics in the Crisis: Weekend Reading
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?...f
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...
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...
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...
Jag Bhalla: The Epistemic Vigilance We Evolved To Do Well: "Confirmation Bias Isn’t a Bug, It’s Operator Error...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Can someone with a larger tolerance for reading b---s--- than I tell me how Robert J. Barro trimmed his estimate of the effects of the Trumpublican tax cut bill from "smaller than 8.4%.... not by much... I made a rough downward adjustment of the long-run level effect from 8.4% to 7%..." to 0.4%?: Robert Barro and Jason Furman: The macroeconomic effects of the 2017 tax reform: "The result is that GDP would rise by 0.4 percent in the law-as-written case...
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...
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...
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”...
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..."
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...
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...
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...
Josh Barro and Isaac Chotiner: Policy without politics, immigration, and Trump’s self-awareness: Isaac Chotiner: "Are you enjoying this moment? By 'this moment', I mean the last 14 to 15 months of being a political commentator?...
