Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
Stagnant Real Wages and Secular Stagnation Are Not Closely Related: DeLong FAQ
Cosma Shalizi: Machine Learning: Data, Models, Intelligence: Weekend Reading
Rodney Brooks: The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions: Weekend Reading
Nicholas Foulkes: Jony Ive on the Apple Watch and Big Tech’s Responsibilities: "The Apple Watch is the latest in the bloodline of the totemic Apple products.... Sales are now such that Apple claims to be the number-one watch brand—though I question whether a wrist-worn device of this type is really a watch... #riseoftherobots
Matthew Yglesias: Affordable Housing Is Just the Beginning of YIMBY: "high-cost metropolitan areas should revise their zoning rules to allow for more and denser construction, and that this will, among other things, improve the situation for low-income renters and reduce the displacement associated with gentrification. As a matter of tactical politics, adding affordable housing advocates to the YIMBY coalition is certainly a good idea... #NIMBYism #regionaleconomics
Kai Stinchcombe: Ten Years In, Nobody Has Come Up with a Use for Blockchain: "Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use... besides currency speculation and illegal transactions... #grifters
Meg Benner, Erin Roth, Stephenie Johnson, and Kate Bahn: How to Give Teachers a $10,000 Raise: "While CAP believes that a new federal investment is necessary to dramatically improve teacher pay, other efforts at the federal, state, and local levels are essential to maximize compensation for all teachers...
Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: Two Myths of the 2008 Meltdown: "The 2008 financial crisis was not the result only of moral hazard; nor was it unforeseeable. While too-big-to-fail banks believed–rightly, it turned out–that they would be bailed out, consumers, rating agencies, and policymakers all bet on housing as well, destabilizing the system.... Two misconceptions in the current retrospectives of the crisis. These misunderstandings may seem purely academic, but they are not. They have major consequences for the ability of policymakers to prevent future crises...
Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Universal Basic Income or Universal Living Wage?: "The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they pay enough to provide a decent standard of living.... A universal basic income (UBI) would be both regressive and prohibitively expensive. Yet the idea continues to attract a motley crew... #equitablegrowth #labormarket
Corey Husak: How Not To Help Distressed Mortgage Borrowers: Evidence From The Great Recession In The United States: "The federal government has been criticized by many for failing to provide adequate assistance to U.S. homeowners who were financially devastated by the housing crisis and subsequent Great Recession and its aftermath in the late 2000s. New evidence suggests that even when assistance was given, it was poorly designed... #greatrecession #finance
An insightful twitter thread from earlier this year on how too much of the discussion on marriage rates implicitly takes a male point of view, and so misses about half the subject: Kate Bahn: @LipstickEcon: "I'm having a lot of feelings about this article that summarizes AEI and Opportunity America on how men's declining economic stability has reduced marriage rates... #gender
Github: Licenses: "GNU LGPLv3: Permissions of this copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications under the same license or the GNU GPLv3. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. However, a larger work using the licensed work through interfaces provided by the licensed work may be distributed under different terms and without source code for the larger work... #riseoftherobots #intellectualproperty #opensource
Interesting. The question is always: do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be happy they bought, or do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be unhappy they bought—by grifting them? And what determines the balance of providing value vs. deception in selling commodities aimed at different income classes? I am not sure they have it right here. I am sure that this is very important: James T. Hamilton and Fiona Morgan: Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals: "How information is produced for, acquired by, and utilized by low-income individuals... #behavioral #riseoftherobots
Reuters: CVS, Aetna Win U.S. Approval for $69 Billion Merger: "Pharmacy chain CVS Health Corp (CVS.N) won U.S. antitrust approval for its $69 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna Inc (AET.N), the Justice Department said on Wednesday... #monopoly
Darrick Hamilton definitely is asking the right questions. And he might have the right answers. But I suspect not. Yes, there is something very deep in America's culture that discourages public responsibility for the conditions of poor and especially poor black Americans, to the country's shame. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that: "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge... the people, should... be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged..." We today can replace his "greater part" with "substantial part", and it is still true. But I suspect that the health gaps between high-status, high-income, and high-wealth African Americans and their white peers have other origins—not that I know what those other origins are, mind you: Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans, as measured by education, still exhibit large health disparities... #racism
John Cole annoys me by directing me to Irwin Stelzer and his claim that under Trump economic growth is "around... 4%". It is not. GDP growth under Trump has been and is widely projected to be roughly 2.7% per year, not "around... 4%". Irwin Stelzer is a liar. Liars are not worth reading. The Weekly Standard needs to step up its game. Badly: Irwin Stelzer: National Debt Under Trump Rises to $21.7 Trillion: "The economy is growing at around a 4 percent rate in response to the tax cuts and to a revival of animal spirits as entrepreneurs and corporate chieftains wake up in the morning wondering not what the government is going to do to them, but what it might do for them... #economicsgonewrong #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons
A Baker's Dozen of Fairly-Recent Links
Adam Rogers: How Hurricane Michael Got Super Big, Super Fast
Sandy Stachowiak: How to use Twitter Search like a pro
Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "The rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work, a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms... #equitablegrowth #labormarket
(2006): Partha Dasgupta Makes a Mistake in His Critique of the Stern Review
Wikipedia: List of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Episodes
Madison Malone Kircher: How to Add Low-Power Mode to iPhone Control Center: "Your iPhone has a genuinely useful setting called “low power mode.” In low power mode, your phone’s brightness decreases, your emails stop fetching unless you refresh your inbox, your iCloud Photo Library stops automatically updating, and your phone defaults to an auto-lock after 30 seconds. Basically, it starts doing as many things as possible to save your battery life...
Yes, distributions have lower tails. But it still seems to me that the absence of clearly visible life out there is powerful evidence that there is a "Great Filter": that one of the parameters (or more than one of the parameters) in the Drake Equation is near zero. Sandberg et al. seem to me to be arguing not so much that the absence of visible life out there is likely even if none of the parameters are near zero, but that our uncertainty is so great that it is not surprising that the universe we live in has one or more parameters near zero even though the average value of each parameter across all universes we might live in is larger: Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving The Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox, it just looks like one if one is overconfident in how well we know the Drake equation parameters. Doing a distribution model shows that even existing literature allows for a substantial probability of very little life, and a more cautious prior gives a significant probability for rare life. The Fermi observation makes the most uncertain priors move strongly, reinforcing the 'rare life' guess and an early 'Great Filter'.. http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/01/should-read-i-have-to-think-about-this-yes-distributions-have-lower-tails-but-it-still-seems-to-me-that-the-absence-o.html
Spencer Ackerman: There’s Been a George Soros for Every Era of Anti-Semitic Panic: "Other Jewish bogeymen may haunt the fever dreams of the vicious, but the scale and intensity of the attacks on Soros are unrivalled. They reveal what the global nationalist right believes is at stake in this present moment. We may one day look back on this era as the Soros Age of anti-Semitism...
Nouriel Roubini: Blockchain Isn't About Democracy and Decentralisation–It's About Greed: "A small group of companies–mostly located in such bastions of democracy as Russia, Georgia and China–control between two-thirds and three-quarters of all crypto-mining activity and all routinely jack up transaction costs to increase their fat profit margins. Apparently, blockchain fanatics would have us put our faith in an anonymous cartel subject to no rule of law, rather than trust central banks and regulated financial intermediaries. A similar pattern has emerged in cryptocurrency trading. Fully 99% of all transactions occur on centralised exchanges that are hacked on a regular basis...
C. J. Sansom: Tombland https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0316412457
Paul Romer: Nonrival Goods After 25 Years: "Rivalry and excludability map cleanly onto the mechanism design approach to aggregate theory, which starts with a specification of preferences and production possibilities and investigates the mapping from the rules that a society adopts into equilibrium outcomes. Here is the key: Rivalry and its opposite nonrivalry are assertions about production possibilities. Excludability depends on a policy choice about rules...
Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, and Alison Presmanes Hill: blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown
Wall of Shame:
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'...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don’t know what the [New York] Times should’ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."
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.
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...
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...
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...
Shame on the Editors of Vanity Fair!: Highlighted/Hoisted from Two Years Ago
