Economic Growth: Some Fairly Recent Should- and Must-Reads
Economic Growth:
The answer is: probably in the late 1960s: Joe McMahon: When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?: "When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?..
We may not believe Bob Allen's provocative economic history of Soviet Russia, however. I think that Russia is enough of a "European" country that an "Asian" or "Latin American" baseline is not appropriate. Aside from the value to the world of a heavy industrial complex in Magnitogorsk in 1939 (a big aside), the Stalinist road to industrial society was not only genocidal and long-run counterproductive but medium-run stupid. But why Mehmet Ali Pasha was unable to make Egypt a cotton-spinning and -weaving center remains a fascinating question: Tom Westland: Russia vs Egypt: "In both 19th century Egypt and 20th century Russia, the path to industrial growth was blocked by a formidable swamp: subsistence agriculture...
Lawrence Summers (1994): Foreign Aid: Why Do It? And What Works?: "When the history of the final twenty years of the twentieth century is written, there will be two big stories: the end of the cold war and the transformation of the developing nations...
Necessities become things that are beneath our notice. Conveniences become necessities. Luxuries become conveniences. And then we invent new luxuries—like feeling put upon yesterday because a new 2 terabyte backup disk cost $70 and took 8 hours to get delivered to my door so I couldn't get all of my backups done last night: Jeff Bezos: Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote: "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent...
This is true. This makes the sharp slowdown in measured productivity growth since 2007 a great puzzle—and is one important thing making me believe it is a depression related "hysteresis" phenomenon: Jeff Desjardins: A brief history of technology: "The rate at which newly commercialized technologies get adopted by consumers is also getting faster.... Through increased connectivity, instant communication, and established infrastructure systems, new ideas and products can spread at speeds never seen before – and this enables a new product to get in the hands of consumers in the blink of an eye..."
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...
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...
Mary Daly: Raising the Speed Limit on Future Growth: "Why aren’t American workers working?
Craig Palsson: Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Incomplete Property Rights and Structural Change in Haiti
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...
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...
Highlighted: A Question I Asked a Much Shorter Version of...: I agree... that it would be wonderful if we had strong nonpartisan analytical institutions. But... how can we get there when we see such egregious behavior not just from "economists" who serve political masters and do not know how to do analyses that get the incidence right, but from economists who know well how to do analyses that get the incidence right?...
A Question About the Future of Work...: I have no sense of what kinds of things the masses of displaced workers will do in the future at the level of "microprocessor", "robot", "accounting software 'bot"...
Lant Pritchett: Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth
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...
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...
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.)...
Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...
Ernest Liu (2016): INDUSTRIAL POLICIES IN PRODUCTION NETWORKS: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors...
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...
