Grasping Reality by Brad DeLong

Perhaps the biggest hole in growth economics is its inability to properly wrestle with the problem of how to build and entertain the communities of engineering practice that have the externalities that fuel so much of economic growth. The 2% per year rate of growth of labor efficiency seen over the past century comes from somewhere, after all. If it comes from activities like R&D and science that together consume 2% of national income, that is a 60%/year net rate of return on such activities. We badly need to understand more about them: Pierre Azoulay, Erica Fuchs, Anna Goldstein, Michael Kearney: Funding Breakthrough Research: Promises and Challenges of the "ARPA Model": "The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model for research funding has... spread...

Justin Wolfers: Money Really Does Lead to a More Satisfying Life: "Lottery winners said they were substantially more satisfied with their lives than lottery losers.... These effects are remarkably durable... still evident up to two decades after a big win...

This, somehow, does not seem like it lies within the scope of economists' comparative advantage. But do psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists do better?: Roland Bénabou, Armin Falk, Jean Tirole: Narratives, Imperatives, and Moral Reasoning: "By downplaying externalities, magnifying the cost of moral behavior, or suggesting not being pivotal, exculpatory narratives...

Justin Fox: Why German Corporate Boards Include Workers for Co-Determination: "One of the world’s most successful capitalist nations, Germany, currently requires 50 percent employee representation on the supervisory boards of large corporations, and that most countries in the European Union now also encourage or require some such form of employee 'co-determination'...

Ezra Klein: Ben Shapiro’s revealing explanation for Trump: it’s all Obama’s fault: "Obama and Shapiro differ sharply.... Obama blames Trump—and others in the Republican Party and conservative media—for demagogically preying on Americans’ fears and anxieties. Shapiro blames Obama for adopting a lecturing tone that alienated a critical mass of Americans...

Caitlin Rosenthal: How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management: "To move beyond denial requires not only an acknowledgment that slaveholders practiced a kind of scientific management but also a broader rethinking of deep-seated assumptions about the relationship between capitalism and control...

Narayana Kocherlakota: The Fed Should Prepare for the Unexpected: "The staff paper downplayed and Powell ignored what I see as the most important risk...

Economist: Why is macroeconomics so hard to teach?: "Mr Rowe remained... 'fairly low down the totem pole' as a researcher. But he became a thunderbird at conveying macroeconomic intuition...

Roland Nikles: Sovereign of My Opinions: "The unholy intimacy between readers and writers on the Internet, say the N+1 editors, has made op-ed writers of us all...

Adam Ozimek: Wider Labor Market Slack Implies Lower Rates: "Wider slack measured using the prime non-employment rate—the share of people age 25 to 54 who don’t have a job—does a better job explaining wage growth over the last few decades than the unemployment rate, making it a plausibly better recent measure of labor slack.... Continued slack is consistent with strong monthly job growth alongside near-target inflation...

Roland Nikles: News, Reviews & Views: Trump Lies About Everything, All the Time, and his Base Doesn't Care: "We could do worse than contemplate [Hannah] Arendt's description here...

Tim Duy: Fed Interest-Rate Debate Misses the Bigger Picture: "The federal funds rate currently sits in a range of 1.75 percent to 2.0 percent. The median policy maker estimate of the neutral rate is 2.9 percent... the next rate increase widely expected to come Sept. 21...

Pedro da Costa: Wage growth should be much stronger by now given low jobless rates: "Federal Reserve policymakers who continue to argue they must keep pushing interest rates higher in earnest because the unemployment rate is so low that it risks generating runaway inflation as workers ask for big pay raises...

Shame on editor Ian Buruma: Jeet Heer: The New York Review of Books Lets Jian Ghomeshi Whitewash His Past: "Though guaranteed to generate backlash for its personal exculpation marinated in self-pity, the piece’s egotistical approach also obscures the facts of the case...

One would not think that it would be difficult for the rich to understand that enabling kleptocrats with little respect for the rule of law in an attempt to fend off democratic waves of social democracy is very unwise: Harold James: Ten Weimar Lessons: "The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the emergence of the Nazis' Third Reich in the early 1930s still stands as one of modern history's most powerful cautionary tales...

Martin Wolf: Why So Little Has Changed Since the Financial Crash: "What happened after the global financial crisis? Have politicians and policymakers tried to get us back to the past or go into a different future? The answer is clear: it is the former...

Last January Trump told friends that Manafort had the power to incriminate him. And it looks like Manafort just has: Marcy Wheeler: Checkmate: The Manafort Cooperation Is Pardon Proof: The plea deal Manafort is pleading to today would include cooperation—and I was correct. Andrew Weissmann told Amy Berman Jackson that the deal does require Manafort cooperation.... the fact that no media outlet was able to confirm whether or not the plea would include cooperation could only be possible if Mueller had made silence about that fact part of the deal...

From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picking up on themes (not original to us by any means!) of Steve Cohen's and my Concrete Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1422189821: _*Mariana Mazzucato*: _Who Really Creates Value in an Economy?: "Investment remains weak... [because] economic policy continues to be informed by neoliberal ideology... rather than by historical experience...

• From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picking up on themes (not original to us by any means!) of Steve Cohen's and my Concrete Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1422189821:Mariana Mazzucato: Who Really Creates Value in an Economy?: "Investment remains weak... [because] economic policy continues to be informed by neoliberal ideology... rather than by historical experience...

• Susan Athey: The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics: "ML does not add much to questions about identification... but rather yields great improvements when the goal is semi-parametric estimation or when there are a large number of covariates relative to the number of observations...

I missed this!: Ed Cara: Fed-Up Hospitals Are Starting Their Own Drug Company so They Can Lower Generic Drug Prices: "A coalition of U.S. hospitals... is going to start its own drug company to compete with big pharma...

Lindsay Ellis: YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!):

John Scalzi: The Whatever Digest, 9/13/18: "I’m a fan of Lindsay Ellis’ deconstructions of film and TV.... But her most recent video isn’t about either of those... it’s about YouTube... and talks about how the people who are making shows and videos there are making them seem 'authentic'...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0-Vd07R6V__-6f43gx1FHoOGw

#berkeley
#teaching
#macro
#MRE
#Solow
#economicgrowth

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0PaBDMHyICsXAsdntSocU1HdA

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0PNdIo_tBhTExjrI8KoCcw8AQ

Hurricane Florence Update Statement

Hurricane Florence Tropical Cyclone Update
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL       AL062018
900 AM EDT Thu Sep 13 2018

...HEAVY RAINBANDS WITH TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS SPREADING OVER
THE NORTH CAROLINA OUTER BANKS...
...LIFE-THREATENING STORM SURGE AND RAINFALL EXPECTED...

Data from an Air Force Reserve Unit Hurricane Hunter aircraft and
NOAA Doppler weather radars from Morehead City and Wilmington,
North Carolina, indicate that Florence has changed little. Maximum
sustained winds remain near 110 mph (175 km/h). The latest minimum
central pressure based on data from the aircraft is 957 mb (28.26
inches).


SUMMARY OF 900 AM EDT...1300 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...33.2N 75.2W
ABOUT 170 MI...275 KM ESE OF WILMINGTON NORTH CAROLINA
ABOUT 215 MI...345 KM E OF MYRTLE BEACH SOUTH CAROLINA
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...110 MPH...175 KM/H
PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 315 DEGREES AT 12 MPH...20 KM/H
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...957 MB...28.26 INCHES

$$
Forecaster Stewart

• No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial costs and no benefits at all: Thomas DeLeire: The Effect of Disenrollment from Medicaid on Employment, Insurance Coverage, Health and Health Care Utilization: "From July through September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules...

• The more Geoff Kabaservice insists that William F. Buckley was much more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary, the more people send me things that seem to strongly indicate that he was little more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary—or, possibly, a grifter who wanted to appear to be a Klansman with a big vocabulary. Is that better? Is that worse?: Jeet Heer (2015): National Review's Racism Denial, Then and Now: "[The] massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but conservative writer Mona Charen seems to have been doubly upset. Writing in National Review... complained that the prospect that the tragedy could be politically exploited by Democrats was 'even more depressing' than the actions of the killer...

If those of us on the left and center are ever going to restart a technocratic debate with those on the right, it will be because thinking on the right becomes dominated by people link Brink Lindsey and his posse, rather then the current crew who are haplessly triangulating between their funders and their political masters: Brink Lindsey: [Welcome to capturedeconomy.com(https://capturedeconomy.com/welcome-to-capturedeconomy-com/): "WA new website dedicated to the problems of 'regulatory capture' and 'rent-seeking'—economist-speak for the pursuit of profits through politics...

Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand argument to people who are allergic to "supply and demand" with a spoonful of sugar. He has three types of housing: newly-built yuppie fishtanks, old housing that can switch between working-class and yuppie, and newly-built "affordable housing" unattractive to yuppies: Noah Smith: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand": "YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents...

Smart proposal to unify U.S. statistical agencies in the Department of Commerce: Erica L. Groshen and Robert M. Groves: Op-Ed: "We depend largely on three professional government agencies: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau...

The analysis of rising inequality and its effects in the United States and elsewhere over the past generation has suffered from a relative downplaying of the role of the family and how income gets earned and then transformed Into well-being. Central to this is the rapidly changing economic role of women in the workforce, but that is not all of it. We need more and better analyses of her public policy needs to shift in the context of changing family structure and rising inequality. Elizabeth Jacobs presents some of our thinking about how Equitable Growth is and will be trying to support this effort: Elizabeth Jacobs: Rethinking 20th century policies to support 21st century families: "...As a raft of research illustrates, economic growth is increasingly concentrating at the top...

• I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. yet Summers, Glaeser, and Austin are smooshing them into one: Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "In Flint, Mich., over 35 percent of prime-aged men—between 25 and 54—are not employed...

A very good point here: there is good reason not to take a markup-free model as our benchmark from which we begin our analysis of Trump: Ben Golub: Krugman Thinks Efficiency Loss of a Trade War Is Small: "Krugman thinks efficiency loss of a trade war is small (Harberger triangle size) even though trade is now in intermediates along supply chains...

No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial costs and no benefits at all: Thomas DeLeire: The Effect of Disenrollment from Medicaid on Employment, Insurance Coverage, Health and Health Care Utilization: "From July through September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules...

It is worth stressing that motherhood penalties—work-gap penalties more generally—appear present throughout and beyond the Global North. Our labor market institutions and expectations are still as if designed for a male-dominated paid workforce in which women exit the paid labor force upon marriage or pregnancy and do not return: Eunjung Jee, Joya Misra, and Marta Murray-Close: Motherhood penalties in the U.S., 1986-2014: "Mothers earn less than childless women...

Nancy L. Yu, Preston Atteberry, Peter B. Bach: Spending On Prescription Drugs In The US: Where Does All The Money Go?: "The US pharmaceutical industry is characterized by a complex and often opaque system of distribution and reimbursement...

The more Geoff Kabaservice insists that William F. Buckley was much more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary, the more people send me things that seem to strongly indicate that he was little more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary—or, possibly, a grifter who wanted to appear to be a Klansman with a big vocabulary. Is that better? Is that worse?: Jeet Heer (2015): National Review's Racism Denial, Then and Now: "[The] massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but conservative writer Mona Charen seems to have been doubly upset. Writing in National Review... complained that the prospect that the tragedy could be politically exploited by Democrats was 'even more depressing' than the actions of the killer...

Paul Krugman: Supply Chains and Trade War: "There are three possible stories about how supply chains might increase the costs of trade war, and while two of them are right, I suspect that many economists are buying into the third, which isn’t...

Thomas Piketty: Social-Nativism, The Italian Nightmare: "It is time for Europe to demonstrate to the working classes that it is best suited to defend them by finally implementing a policy to relaunch the economy and for a just form of taxation. As long as the centrists on all sides practise a similar form of anti-social liberalism, social-nativism will have a promising future ahead...

Wisdom from the office down the hall: claiming that you will tether your cryptocoin to the dollar does not, in fact, make it much less stupid as something for others to invest in. Cryptocurrencies are stupid investments. Investors in them are grifters or fools. A fool can make money if they eventually find a bigger fool to sell to. And the biggest fool of all is the person who sees that fools have made money in stupid investments and thinks that is a reason to imitate them: Barry Eichengreen: The Stable-Coin Myth: "Mania for cryptocurrencies... so-called “stable coins”... Tether, Basis, and Sagacoin... rigidly tied to the dollar...

George Orwell: The Attraction of Communism in the 1930s: "Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal...

Florence, Isaac, and Helene:

Note to Self: I want a prize for this! What kind of prize can I get for this? To whom should I apply for my prize?

George Akerlof: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis:

...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0PejUtBxFLIXN3wTCkbqhadQg

More about the... rather strange... musings of: Geoffrey Kabaservice: Liberals Don't Know Much About Conservative History: "Buckley’s endorsement of Southern segregation was a moral blot on the conservative movement, and he later acknowledged it as his gravest error. But it’s anti-historical to assume that Buckley was little more than a Klansman with a large vocabulary...

Paul Campos: Trump: Symptom or Cause? (Or, tomorrow's historical revisionism today): "The functionalist position will emphasize... continuity between Trump... [and] Goldwater... a triumph of mass movement politics over elite control....

Thinking About This Again: Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here’s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...

Gary B. Gorton (2016): The History and Economics of Safe Assets: "Safe assets play a critical role in an(y) economy...

Patrick Karl O’Brien: The Contributions of Warfare with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France to the Consolidation and Progress of the British Industrial Revolution: "A traditional and unresolved debate on economic connexions between the French and Industrial Revolutions.... The costs flowing from the reallocation of labour, capital and technical knowledge to wage warfare from 1793- 1815 have been overstated in relation to a range of benefits...