Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

Baker's Dozen of Fairly-Recent Links

stacks and stacks of books

  1. "Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost/Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host./Hear how the demons chuckle and yell/Cutting his hands off, down in Hell..." Sara Lowes

  2. Galileo Galilei: And Yet It Moves

  3. Wikipedia: Myth of Er

  4. 2017: Reading Notes for Robert Skidelsky: "Keynes: A Very Short Introduction"...: John Maynard Keynes was brought up a classical liberal and a classical economist. He believed in free trade, economic progress, cultural uplift, and political reason. He then found himself working for the British Treasury during World War I, unable to stop what he thought were disastrous post-World War I political decisions. He then found himself watching as the classical economic mechanisms he had been taught to admire all fell apart. He then picked himself up. After World War I Keynes used what power he had to—don't laugh—try to restore civilization. He had, all things considered, amazing success and an amazing impact...

  5. Andrew Kent: Faithful Execution of the Office and Laws: New Research on the Original Meaning of Article II: "Since President Trump’s inauguration, we have seen him time and again prove correct the most pessimistic predictions about his character and the manner in which he would use the office. New research on the original meaning of the Constitution suggests that actions taken in bad faith—as many of President Trump’s actions appear to be—are not authorized by, and hence violate, Article II...

  6. Allison C. Morgan, Dimitrios J. Economou, Samuel F. Way, and Aaron Clauset: Prestige Drives Epistemic Inequality In The Diffusion Of Scientific Ideas: "We consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications.... Research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions...

  7. Don Kuehn: A few more thoughts on monopsony and the minimum wage: "Monopsony is definitely not the only and not even really the best theoretical argument for why we see no disemployment effects.... We have work that suggests there is monopsony power in low wage labor markets, and we know that under certain conditions (but not all conditions) dynamic monopsony can explain the no disemployment effect result, so it seems reasonable to me to keep it on the table...

  8. John Stuart Mill (1829): Of the Influence of Consumption on Production: "Those who have, at periods such as we have described, affirmed that there was an excess of all commodities, never pretended that money was one of these commodities; they held that there was not an excess, but a deficiency of the circulating medium. What they called a general superabundance, was not a superabundance of commodities relatively to commodities, but a superabundance of all commodities relatively to money. What it amounted to was, that persons in general, at that particular time, from a general expectation of being called upon to meet sudden demands, liked better to possess money than any other commodity. Money, consequently, was in request, and all other commodities were in comparative disrepute...

  9. Òscar Jordà, Moritz HP. Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor (2014): Betting the House: "Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending and house prices bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises. Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era...

  10. Pia Ceres: 3 Smart Things About Animal-Inspired Robotics: "When turkeys strut, their leg muscles work as shock absorbers to boost energy efficiency.... Though it has a brain, the lamprey—an eel-like beast—doesn’t need it to wiggle about.... Cockroaches can react in 1⁄50 of a second and skitter 25 body lengths per second...

  11. Karl Polanyi: Aristotle Discovers the Economy https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/notes-polanyi-aristotle-discovers-the-economy-hoisted-from-the-archives.html http://delong.typepad.com/polanyi-aristotle.pdf https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0GwzWFlWB8EGxTiETO8L6-OkA

  12. Notes: Polanyi: Aristotle Discovers the Economy: Hoisted from the Archives

  13. Dylan Matthews: Human Extinction: How To Help People Millions Of Years From Now: "A few brief thoughts on the very, very distant future...


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