Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Nathaniel Rakich: What The Heck Is Happening In That North Carolina House Race?: "Affidavits... in which voters said that people came to their doors to collect their unsealed absentee ballots. One voter alleged that her ballot was incomplete at the time and that the collector said 'she would finish it herself'. Another claimed to have received an absentee ballot that she did not request.... Something unusual happened in absentee-by-mail voting in Bladen County.... In six of the district’s eight counties, fewer than 3 percent of total votes were absentee-by-mail ballots. But in Bladen County, that number was 7.3.... Absentee-by-mail ballots tended to be much better for McCready than other ballots—except in Bladen County... [where] absentee-by-mail ballots were more Republican-leaning than the rest of Bladen’s votes by 8 percentage points. But if we look at the whole district, absentee-by-mail ballots were 24 points more Democratic-leaning...

Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging: Inequality in Life and Death: Policy and Prospect: "Featured Speaker:  Peter Orszag.... Speakers:  Yuriy Gorodnichenko... Hilary Hoynes... Ronald Lee... Gabriel Zucman.... Moderator:  Alan Auerbach.... Inequality has become a central focus of policy discussions, but inequality has multiple dimensions and correspondingly many potential policy interventions. This mini-conference will consider inequality from this broad perspective...

Hold on, every day, to the fact that this is not normal: Matthew Yglesias: Trump Wall Street Journal Interview: Transcript Shows Trade Ignorance: "He confuses tariffs and interest rates, and invents phantom new steel plants.... One of Trump’s earliest trade moves was to impose broad new taxes on imported steel and aluminum, which has allowed him to hand out exemptions as political favors.... It’s been bad for American companies that manufacture things made out of metal. Trump’s view, however, is that this policy has been a stunning success that’s made America’s steel industry 'vibrant'.... 'You know, they’re building plants all over the country because I put steel—because I put tariffs, 25 percent tariffs, on dumping steel'...

I really wish that they had included something like my full quote—that: "It is Trump's policies that have created a situation in which a Federal Reserve headed by Jay Powell cannot do otherwise than raise interest rates, and so raise the value of the dollar and increase the trade deficit. So what is he complaining about, really?" Philip Rucker et al.: Trump Says He's Not Happy with Chairman of Fed: "Trump says he's not happy with chairman of Fed: 'I'm doing deals, and I'm not being accommodated by the Fed', Trump said. 'They're making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me'...

Paul Krugman: The Bank of England's Dire Estimates of Brexit: "Another trade discussion where I would like to believe the worst but not convinced: Brexit. The Bank of England just released some very dire scenarios...

Tyler Feder: Time for a New Installment of Work-From-Home L👀ks…

Marcy Wheeler: Mueller Just Guaranteed He Can Issue a Public Report: "Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them.... Giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors... while reporting... to Trump ... increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers... full of lies.... That 'detailed sentencing submission'... Mueller mentions?... There’s your Mueller report, which will be provided in a form that Matt Whitaker won’t be able to suppress...

1. Monday Smackdown: Hoisted: Cliff Asness Department: Cliff Asness spent 82 minutes talking to Tyler Cowen. The phrase "Federal Reserve" does not appear in the transcript. The phrase "quantitative easing" does not appear in the transcript. The word "monetary" does not appear in the transcript. The word "debasement" does not appear. Tyler Cowen does not ask questions using any of those words. Cliff Asness does not use any of those words in answering questions. Seems to me Cliff Asness owes Ben Bernanke a big apology for this. And perhaps he could give us some clues as to whether he has learned anything from looking back at his wrong claim that Bernanke did not understand what the Federal Reserve should be doing?...

2. Weekend Reading: Hilzoy: Liberating Iraq (from 2007)

1. Elizabeth Bear: Shoggoths in Bloom

2. Samantha Henderson: Maybe the Stars

3. Wikipedia: United States Floating Battery Demologos

4. Roger Farmer: How New Keynesian Economics Betrays Keynes: "Self-fulfilling beliefs could explain business cycle fluctuations at least as well as the real- business- cycle paradigm that came to dominate graduate programs for the next thirty- five years. But, the sun spot agenda did not have a single strong leader and the figures who wrote the first two papers in the area, Azariadis, and Cass and Shell, were dismissive of the practical and empirical relevance of their ideas...

5. Philosopher Alex Rosenberg's actions are incomprehensible until you realize that he believes and desperately desires to convince us that there are no such thing as human beliefs or desires. Also: That Henry Kissinger is a bad man. You see the problem? The neurology level is useless if you want a better theory than the folk theory of mind. The behavioral economics level may be becoming useful. But for the life of me I do not see what Rosenberg has to add here. His book begins with a big song-and-dance about how narrative military history is useless because the Germans' opponents were flummoxed all four times the Germans attacked at Sedan between 1870 and 1940, thus—he claims—proving that it is impossible to learn lessons from narrative military history. It's clear why one might think the French (and their allies) failed to learn anything useful from narrative military history. It is much less clear why Rosenberg is so sur his example shows that the Germans- failed to learn from narrative military history: Alex Rosenberg: _How History Gets Things Wrong: "The Kaiser wasn’t thinking about anything at all when he gave the 'blank-check' to the Austrians. He didn’t have any desires about how matters should turn out, or any beliefs about how to organize things to make them turn out that way. He didn’t because no one has such thoughts... #cognitive

6. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode: Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism

7. Isaiah Andrews and Maximilian Kasy: Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias: "Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. We propose two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study’s results... #minimumwage #equitablegrowth #cognitive #statistics

8. Overlord

9. Bad Times at the El Royale

10. Rory Appleton: Cox Now 447 Votes Behind Valadao

11. Max Boot: Trump Goes to France and Dishonors U.S. War Dead

12. This seems to me to pretty much get it wrong. The right way to talk about what is to be called “rational“ is to imbed the problem of thinking in its proper context. I think thought should proceed thus: (1) Do we have time and resources to gather more information before we have to make a decision? If the answer to this question is “yes”, we then face a second question: (2) would gathering more information increase our knowledge enough to make it worthwhile to do so before making our decision? Answering that question requires very un-Bayesian modes of thought. But that question must be answered. And, having answered it, we either go and gather more information or we proceed to question: (3) Are we playing some kind of game against nature, or are we playing against another mind? If the answer is “we are playing against nature”, then it is appropriate to go full Bayesian. If the answer is “we are playing against another month“, then there is yet another question: (four) what is the other morning that we are playing against thinking that makes it willing to enter into this strategic interaction with us? The answer will probably be: “at least one of the two of us is wrong in our understanding of the situation“—as Warren Buffett says: “if you do not know who is the fool in the market, you are the fool in the market”. Attempting to understand the implications of this question also leaves us down very un-Bayesian roads of thought. But understanding the implications of this question is essential to making a rational assessment of the situation. My problem with Gilboa et al. is that their criticisms of Bayesian Savagery do not provide any gruel at all to nourish us and thus help us in our task of figuring out what to do when Bayesian Savagery breaks down, either for information-gathering or for other-mind reasons: Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler (2009): Is It Always Rational to Satisfy Savage’s Axioms?: "To explain our notion of rational choice, consider the following scenario. You are a public health official who must make a decision about immunization of newborn babies. Specifically, you have a choice of including another vaccine in the standard immunization package. This vaccine will prevent deaths from virus A. But it can cause deaths with some probability. The exact probabilities of death with and without the vaccine are not known. Given the large numbers of babies involved, you are quite confident that some fatalities are to be expected whatever your decision is...

13. I cannot help but thinking that this line of thought misses the elephant in the room. To reset the stories that have been told to us and seek for better stories ought to begin with more thought about why these stories we have inherited are the stories that have been told to us: Amal El-Mohtar (2017): WisCon Guest of Honour Speech: "I am their fury, I am their patience, I am a conversation...

**Hoisted from the Archives: 7 days before the fifth anniversary of his appearing as lead signatory of the right-wing Republican "Open Letter to Ben Bernanke—Cliff Asness spent 82 minutes talking to Tyler Cowen. The phrase "Federal Reserve" does not appear in the transcript. The phrase "quantitative easing" does not appear in the transcript. The word "monetary" does not appear in the transcript. The word "debasement" does not appear. Tyler Cowen does not ask questions using any of those words. Cliff Asness does not use any of those words in answering questions.

Hilzoy: Obsidian Wings: Liberating Iraq: "Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war: 'For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. When I first saw Makiya--the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein's crimes--I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force.' He also writes about why he got it wrong...

Philosopher Alex Rosenberg's actions are incomprehensible until you realize that he believes and desperately desires to convince us that there are no such thing as human beliefs or desires. Also: That Henry Kissinger is a bad man. You see the problem? The neurology level is useless if you want a better theory than the folk theory of mind. The behavioral economics level may be becoming useful. But for the life of me I do not see what Rosenberg has to add here. His book begins with a big song-and-dance about how narrative military history is useless because the Germans' opponents were flummoxed all four times the Germans attacked at Sedan between 1870 and 1940, thus—he claims—proving that it is impossible to learn lessons from narrative military history. It's clear why one might think the French (and their allies) failed to learn anything useful from narrative military history. It is much less clear why Rosenberg is so sur his example shows that the Germans- failed to learn from narrative military history: Alex Rosenberg: _How History Gets Things Wrong: "The Kaiser wasn’t thinking about anything at all when he gave the 'blank-check' to the Austrians. He didn’t have any desires about how matters should turn out, or any beliefs about how to organize things to make them turn out that way. He didn’t because no one has such thoughts...

Isaiah Andrews and Maximilian Kasy: Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias: "Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. We propose two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication as a function of a study’s results...

Gilboa et al. here seem to me to pretty much get it wrong.

The right way to talk about what is to be called “rational“ is to imbed the problem of thinking in its proper context. I think thought should proceed thus:

1. Do we have time and resources to gather more information before we have to make a decision? If the answer to this question is “yes”, we then face a second question:

2. Would gathering more information increase our knowledge enough to make it worthwhile to do so before making our decision? Answering that question requires very un-Bayesian modes of thought. But that question must be answered. And, having answered it, we either go and gather more information or we proceed to question:

3. Are we playing some kind of game against nature, or are we playing against another mind? If the answer is “we are playing against nature”, then it is appropriate to go full Bayesian. If the answer is “we are playing against another month“, then there is yet another question:

4. What is the other mind that we are playing against thinking that makes it willing to enter into this strategic interaction with us? The answer will probably involve: “at least one of the two of us is wrong in our understanding of the situation“—as Warren Buffett says: “if you do not know who is the fool in the market, you are the fool in the market”. Attempting to understand the implications of this question also leaves us down very un-Bayesian roads of thought. But understanding the implications of this question is essential to making a rational assessment of the situation.

My problem with Gilboa et al. is that their criticisms of Bayesian Savagery do not provide any gruel at all to nourish us and thus help us in our task of figuring out what to do when Bayesian Savagery breaks down, either for information-gathering or for other-mind reasons: Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler (2009): Is It Always Rational to Satisfy Savage’s Axioms?: "To explain our notion of rational choice, consider the following scenario. You are a public health official who must make a decision about immunization of newborn babies. Specifically, you have a choice of including another vaccine in the standard immunization package. This vaccine will prevent deaths from virus A. But it can cause deaths with some probability. The exact probabilities of death with and without the vaccine are not known. Given the large numbers of babies involved, you are quite confident that some fatalities are to be expected whatever your decision is...

EG: It is not clear to me that equal percentage income boosts relative to baseline is what we "should" expect education to do. That we fall short of even that yardstick indicates that things are worse than I had believed: Noah Smith: The Rich Get the Most Out of College: "Tim Bartik... Brad Hershbein... the college earnings premium—the lifetime difference in earnings between those who get a bachelor’s degree and those who only finish high school—was substantial for people from all income backgrounds...

1. Review of "Capitalism in America: A History" by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge: Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s “Capitalism in America: A History” argues that it is the American love and embrace of capitalism, the resulting entrepreneurial business culture, and the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist-market system that have given America its special, unique edge in economic wealth...

1. Across the Wide Missouri: FiveThirtyEight's ultimate Thanksgiving dinner menu is: "Tofurky... Frog eye salad... Jell-O salad... Yorkshire pudding... Snickers salad...

1. 175 years ago Friedrich Engels put his finger on the major flaw in economics that Paul Romer has tried to repair over his career: Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: "According to the economists, the production costs of a commodity consist of three elements: the rent for the piece of land required to produce the raw material; the capital with its profit, and the wages for the labour required for production and manufacture.... A third factor which the economist does not think about–I mean the mental element of invention, of thought...

2. I would find the wise and public-spirited Ricardo Haussmann more convincing here if he'd had an explanation for why mandated wage compression by John Dunlop in the U.S. during World War II was not a huge success: Ricardo Hausmann: How Not to Fight Income Inequality: "Trying to combat income inequality through mandated wage compression is not just an odd preference. It is a mistake, as Mexico's president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will find out in a few years, after much damage has been done...

3. I highlighted this two years ago. I am highlighting it again, as I think it has not received the attention it deserves. Ernest Liu: Industrial Policies in Production Networks: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of interventions?..

4. Seth Godin: Throat-Clearing: "Begin in the middle. The first paragraph, where you lay out what's about to happen. The half-apology you use to preface your comments at the meeting. The email that takes a paragraph or two to get to the point…. You can skip those. Throat clearing is a good way to make sure that people are looking at you. And an even better way to give yourself time to collect your thoughts, to indulge your fears or to get yourself warmed up. But we're already looking at you. We've clicked through to your link, given you the microphone, read your note…. Say all that stuff in your head, but, we'd really like to hear the best part first. Begin in the middle...

5. Another very good "Equitable Growth in Conversation" piece: Ioana Marinescu, Herbert Hovenkamp, Kate Bahn, and Michael Kades. In modern antitrust policy, the monopoly and the monopsony analyses need to proceed on two separate tracks: Equitable Growth: In conversation with Herbert Hovenkamp and Ioana Marinescu: "You can’t just do a workup on the product side and then assume you’ve gotten all the work done. If you’ve got a special class of employees, like computer engineers, those engineers might work for firms that don’t compete with each other at all on the product side, and that means that that market will end up having different boundaries than the product market has for those same firms...

6. Equitable Growth's Will McGrew makes a good catch here, and direct us to Brendan Greely: Will McGrew: Weekend Reading: “Monopsony and Mobility” Edition: "Brendan Greely of the Financial Times dives into another aspect of the mobility divide: social capital. Using frequent Equitable Growth guest authors and economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and John Friedman’s recently published Opportunity Atlas as a starting point, Greely explains why relationships and communities are more important than the mere availability of jobs in determining economic mobility. Beyond enhancing a neighborhood’s services and amenities such as public schools, growing up in proximity to people with a diversity of highly paid jobs provides children with role models and connections to higher quality jobs and more numerous economic opportunities... #equitablegrowth

7. It may finally be the time that we get some traction on better measures of economic growth and prosperity than GDP. So go back and reread this from 290016: homas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman: Distributional national accounts: Methods and estimates for the United States: "This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth... #economicgrowth

8. This from eight years ago is still the best thing I have seen about "sustainability" and its proper role in economic analysis: Kenneth J. Arrow, Partha Dasgupta, Lawrence H. Goulder, Kevin J. Mumford, and Kirsten Oleson (2010): Sustainability and the Measurement of Wealth: "We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth–one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as reproducible capital–is maintained through time... #sustainability #equitablegrowth

9. Getting deeply into the weeds on whether much observed social mobility is actually error in measuring "true status". The answer ape to be "no": Martin Nybom and Kelly Vosters: Intergenerational Transmission of Socioeconomic Status: "There is no simple law of mobility: In 2014, Gregory Clark proposed a ‘simple law of mobility’ suggesting that intergenerational mobility is much lower than previously believed, and relatively uniform across countries.... This column tests this... using US and Swedish data... no evidence of a rise in intergenerational persistence and no evidence of uniformity across countries...

10. One might, naively, think that the economies of scale that companies like Wal-Mart possess should redound to the benefit of workers as well as consumers. More efficiencies from economies of scale should leave a bigger pie for everyone else, which would be shared, right? Apparently not. When a business earns more by selling to large buyers, its workers wages appear not to go up but to go down. Something to watch very closely. Sharon Nunn sends us to Nathan Wilmers: Sharon Nunn: Big Businesses Push Down Prices, and Perhaps Wages: "As large firms... command increasing market share in the retail industry, they narrow the field of buyers for companies that make and move consumer products.... [Nathan] Wilmers found that since the late 1970s... a 10% increase in [corporate] earnings that depend on larger buyers is associated with a 1.2% decline in wage growth... #equitablegrowth #inequality

11. Dan Davies on financial fraud is certainly the most entertaining book on Economics I have read this year. Highly recommend itcold Chris Dillow: Review of Dan Davies: Lying for Money: "Squalid crude affairs committed mostly by inadequates. This is a message of Dan Davies’ history of fraud, Lying For Money.... Most frauds fall into a few simple types.... Setting up a fake company... pyramid schemes... control frauds, whereby someone abuses a position of trust... plain counterfeiters. My favourite was Alves dos Reis, who persuaded the printers of legitimate Portuguese banknotes to print even more of them.... All this is done with the wit and clarity of exposition for which we have long admired Dan. His footnotes are an especial delight, reminding me of William Donaldson. Dan has also a theory of fraud. 'The optimal level of fraud is unlikely to be zero' he says. If we were to take so many precautions to stop it, we would also strangle legitimate economic activity...

EG: This was the first working paper the WCEG published. It did not get the attention it deserved then. So why not hoist it?: Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer: Pooling multiple case studies using synthetic controls: An application to minimum wage policiesh: "We assess the employment and wage effects minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2013 by pooling 29 synthetic control case studies...

Across the Wide Missouri: FiveThirtyEight's ultimate Thanksgiving dinner menu is: Tofurky... Frog eye salad... Jell-O salad... Yorkshire pudding... Snickers salad: Walt Hickey*: The Ultimate Thanksgiving Dinner Menu

175 years ago Friedrich Engels put his finger on the major flaw in economics that Paul Romer has tried to repair over his career: Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: "According to the economists, the production costs of a commodity consist of three elements: the rent for the piece of land required to produce the raw material; the capital with its profit, and the wages for the labour required for production and manufacture.... A third factor which the economist does not think about–I mean the mental element of invention, of thought...

I highlighted this two years ago. I am highlighting it again, as I think it has not received the attention it deserves. Ernest Liu: Industrial Policies in Production Networks: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of interventions?...

I would find the wise and public-spirited Ricardo Haussmann more convincing here if he'd had an explanation for why mandated wage compression by John Dunlop in the U.S. during World War II was not a huge success: Ricardo Hausmann: How Not to Fight Income Inequality: "Trying to combat income inequality through mandated wage compression is not just an odd preference. It is a mistake, as Mexico's president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will find out in a few years, after much damage has been done...

Seth Godin: Throat-Clearing: "Begin in the middle. The first paragraph, where you lay out what's about to happen. The half-apology you use to preface your comments at the meeting. The email that takes a paragraph or two to get to the point…. You can skip those. Throat clearing is a good way to make sure that people are looking at you. And an even better way to give yourself time to collect your thoughts, to indulge your fears or to get yourself warmed up. But we're already looking at you. We've clicked through to your link, given you the microphone, read your note…. Say all that stuff in your head, but, we'd really like to hear the best part first. Begin in the middle...

Another very good "Equitable Growth in Conversation" piece: Ioana Marinescu, Herbert Hovenkamp, Kate Bahn, and Michael Kades. In modern antitrust policy, the monopoly and the monopsony analyses need to proceed on two separate tracks: Equitable Growth: In conversation with Herbert Hovenkamp and Ioana Marinescu: "You can’t just do a workup on the product side and then assume you’ve gotten all the work done. If you’ve got a special class of employees, like computer engineers, those engineers might work for firms that don’t compete with each other at all on the product side, and that means that that market will end up having different boundaries than the product market has for those same firms...

Getting deeply into the weeds on whether much observed social mobility is actually error in measuring "true status". The answer ape to be "no": Martin Nybom and Kelly Vosters: Intergenerational Transmission of Socioeconomic Status: "There is no simple law of mobility: In 2014, Gregory Clark proposed a ‘simple law of mobility’ suggesting that intergenerational mobility is much lower than previously believed, and relatively uniform across countries.... This column tests this... using US and Swedish data... no evidence of a rise in intergenerational persistence and no evidence of uniformity across countries...

Equitable Growth's Will McGrew makes a good catch here, and direct us to Brendan Greely: Will McGrew: Weekend Reading: “Monopsony and Mobility” Edition: "Brendan Greely of the Financial Times dives into another aspect of the mobility divide: social capital. Using frequent Equitable Growth guest authors and economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and John Friedman’s recently published Opportunity Atlas as a starting point, Greely explains why relationships and communities are more important than the mere availability of jobs in determining economic mobility. Beyond enhancing a neighborhood’s services and amenities such as public schools, growing up in proximity to people with a diversity of highly paid jobs provides children with role models and connections to higher quality jobs and more numerous economic opportunities...

It may finally be the time that we get some traction on better measures of economic growth and prosperity than GDP. So go back and reread this from 290016: homas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman: Distributional national accounts: Methods and estimates for the United States: "This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth...

This from eight years ago is still the best thing I have seen about "sustainability" and its proper role in economic analysis: Kenneth J. Arrow, Partha Dasgupta, Lawrence H. Goulder, Kevin J. Mumford, and Kirsten Oleson (2010): Sustainability and the Measurement of Wealth: "We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth–one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as reproducible capital–is maintained through time...

One might, naively, think that the economies of scale that companies like Wal-Mart possess should redound to the benefit of workers as well as consumers. More efficiencies from economies of scale should leave a bigger pie for everyone else, which would be shared, right? Apparently not. When a business earns more by selling to large buyers, its workers wages appear not to go up but to go down. Something to watch very closely. Sharon Nunn sends us to Nathan Wilmers: Sharon Nunn: Big Businesses Push Down Prices, and Perhaps Wages: "As large firms... command increasing market share in the retail industry, they narrow the field of buyers for companies that make and move consumer products.... [Nathan] Wilmers found that since the late 1970s... a 10% increase in [corporate] earnings that depend on larger buyers is associated with a 1.2% decline in wage growth...

Dan Davies on financial fraud is certainly the most entertaining book on Economics I have read this year. Highly recommend itcold Chris Dillow: Review of Dan Davies: Lying for Money: "Squalid crude affairs committed mostly by inadequates. This is a message of Dan Davies’ history of fraud, Lying For Money.... Most frauds fall into a few simple types.... Setting up a fake company... pyramid schemes... control frauds, whereby someone abuses a position of trust... plain counterfeiters. My favourite was Alves dos Reis, who persuaded the printers of legitimate Portuguese banknotes to print even more of them.... All this is done with the wit and clarity of exposition for which we have long admired Dan. His footnotes are an especial delight, reminding me of William Donaldson. Dan has also a theory of fraud. 'The optimal level of fraud is unlikely to be zero' he says. If we were to take so many precautions to stop it, we would also strangle legitimate economic activity...

Brilliant, as usual from Costa Shalizi: Cosma Shalizi: Alien Failure Modes of Machine Learning: "They have such alien failure-modes, and... don't have the sort of flexibility we're used to from humans or other animals. They generalize to more data from their training environment, but not to new environments.... If you take a person who's learned to play chess and give them a 9-by-9 board with an extra rook on each side, they'll struggle but they won't go back to square one; AlphaZero will need to relearn the game from scratch...

I really do not know who the audience for this is supposed to be. Addressing the Trump Administration is a pointless waste of time. And this is not written to give Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Chuck Schumer ideas as to how they can constrain Trumpets idiocy: Robert Z. Lawrence: How the United States Should Confront China Without Threatening the Global Trading System: "The Trump administration’s willingness to violate trade rules to maximize its negotiating leverage is undermining its most important and most legitimate objective...

1. Comment of the Day: The Fall of Rome: Am I too Much of a Malthusian-Ricardian to Understand It Properly?

2. Journamalism: The most both-sidesee bothsidism ever is in—where else?—the New York Times!... And it is Ross Douthat!...

3. _[Review of "Capitalism in America: A History" by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/

4. Perhaps Facebook's Top Management Should Give Their Shares in the Company to the Open Society Foundationt?

5. Hoisted from 2012: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?

1. Applause from Noah Smith for Equitable Growth's attempt to focus on the broader implications of rising monopoly: Noah Smith: Economists Gear Up to Challenge the Monopolies: "The antitrust movement is making a comeback.... Think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth are starting to zero in on the issue as well": Jacob Robbins: How the rise of market power in the United States may explain some macroeconomic puzzles: "Gauti Eggertsson, Ella Getz Wold, and I at Brown University argue that these diverse trends are closely connected, and that the driving force behind them is an increase in monopoly power together with a decline in interest rates...

2. The most important thing for you to read: the deadline for Equitable Growth's next set of grant proposals over at Equitable Growth is January 31, 2019: WCEG: Request for Proposals: "The Washington Center for Equitable Growth seeks to deepen our understanding of whether and how inequality affects economic growth and stability. Our academic grants program is building a portfolio of cutting-edge scholarly research investigating the various channels through which economic inequality may or may not impact economic growth and stability, both directly and indirectly...

3. My read of the evidence is somewhat different here: my view is that forward guidance did something, but quantitative easing did very, very little. And the idea that quantitative easing made forward guidance more credible? I do not see that. Yes, quantitative easing was a big deal for the financial professionals Who otherwise would have held the treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve bought. But I do not see any channels through which their attempt to compensate add large affects and the real economy of productions and demand: Ken Kuttner: Outside the Box: Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Great Recession and Beyond: “A preponderance of evidence nonetheless suggests that forward guidance and quantitative easing succeeded in lowering long-term interest rates. Studies using micro data have documented tangible effects of quantitative easing on firms and financial intermediaries. Macro models suggest that the interest rate reductions are likely to have had a meaningful impact. The adverse side effects appear to have been mild, and are dwarfed by the costs of the more protracted recession in the United States that likely would have occurred in the absence of the unconventional policies. The benefits of unconventional policy therefore probably outweighed the costs... #monetaryeconomics #monetarypolicy

4. For whom was the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire that commenced with the Antonine Plague a decline and fall? It was a decline and fall for: 1. Those at the top of the state apparatus who saw their resources collapse, and their ability to avoid barbarian power projection into the empire decline. 2. Those who were rich. 3. Those who were urban, dependent on the flow of resources from the countryside to the city. 4. Those in the countryside who had been prosperous and free, and who were now enserfed. 5. Those who benefited from large-scale efficient production and distribution of conveniences. 6. Those for whom the maintenance of the pax Romana was really important. The question is: what happened to those on the bottom in the countryside? They now are much more productive. Yet they face increased pressures from above to exploit them more in order to compensate for the reduced rent flow from depopulation, and they suffer from increased dissipative violence—both from their superiors and from barbarian invasions. Yet on the other hand their increased value might have given them increased leverage: that was the case for western European serfs in the aftermath of the Black Death. My view: slave —> serf a definite improvement. For everyone else, a decline: loss of conveniences with the end of large-scale efficient production, loss of resource flow to city-dwellers, loss of resources that had underpinned the pax Romana. What is uncertain is the relative numbers of the winners and losers—and whether even the winners in terms of consumption were better off facing the barbarian rather than the slavemaster. In any event, very interesting: Willem Jongman (2006): Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of The Roman Economy: "For the naive historian, it would seem that we now have all we need: we have a range of examples of catastrophic decline, and some potential causes. What we do not yet have, however, are the mechanisms by which this shock propagated through the economic and social system. Imagine a pre-industrial and largely agricultural economy in a fairly stable equilibrium. Next that equilibrium is disturbed by mortality.... The biggest economic and social change, however, was to the land-labour ratio...

5. FiveThirtyEight: Yes, It Was A Blue Wav | FiveThirtyEight: "natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The arguments that it ISN’T a blue wave are dumb. Can we end the chat now and get lunch?.... sarahf: Haha, no. We’re here to tell readers why it’s dumb—although Nathaniel did do a pretty good job of convincing me. nrakich: People seem to be defining “blue wave” as, “Did Democrats outperform expectations?” They’re forgetting that expectations were already for a blue wave. natesilver: What is the argument that it isn’t a blue wave? That Democrats didn’t win the Senate?...

6. Perhaps Facebook's top management should give their shares in the company to the Open Society Foundationt?: Patrick Gaspard: Letter to Sandberg...

7. Rafael Behr: The Brexit wreckers Are Slinking Away from the Rancid Mess They’ve Made: "Dominic Raab and Esther McVey have resigned because they know Brexit is intrinsically dysfunctional.... There is now no Brexit true believer prepared to take an author’s credit on the deal that is about to come before parliament.... These resignations confirm a fundamental structural problem with the whole leave prospectus: it was a fantasy, and as such incompatible with the mundane fulfilment of ministerial responsibility. Raab has come to the same conclusion that David Davis and Boris Johnson reached earlier in the year: it is easier to be on the team that accuses the prime minister of failing to deliver majestic herds of unicorns than it is to be stuck with a portfolio that requires expertise in unicorn-breeding...

8. Adam Gopnik: Wine, War, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron: "Macron made a speech... as clearly directed at and against Trump as any he could have made... distinguished between nationalism (bad) and patriotism (good)... in eloquent terms... #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #history

9. Jason Kottke: The Odyssey of Reading "The Odyssey": "In this clip from the TV show Articulate (which airs on PBS), host Jim Cotter talks with Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn about The Odyssey, different versions of the self, translations, and more...

10. The chances for equitable growth in America over the next three years may or may not be crippled by the trade war that Donald Trump is now trying to launch. What should you be reading and watching to try to figure out what is going on? I believe that the Peterson Institute of International Economics is the place to go for up-to-date analysis on the trade war that Donald Trump is trying to launch, over the—not dead bodies, but—active opposition and passive resistance of pretty much everybody in his administration save Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer. This is not being driven by any interest groups outside the administration. It is being driven by three people inside the administration: Navarro, Lighthizer, and Trump: Navarro... On the few occasions that I have interacted with Navarro he has seemed to me to be... not quite all there. The kindest thing I have heard said about him comes from Paul Krugman: "Peter Navarro predicted that nobody would retaliate.... Trump’s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view.... Unlike Trump, the Chinese and other targets of his trade wrath seem to have a clear idea of what they’re trying to accomplish. The key point is that the Navarro/Trump view, aside from its fixation on trade balances... seems to imagine that the world still looks the way it did in the 1960s, when trade was overwhelmingly in final goods like wheat and cars..." Lighthizer... I do not understand at all. The policies that he is pushing forward are pretty much 180 degrees reversed from those he worked for in his previous stints in government. He is now too old—70—to be anything other than a rainmaker at his old law firm of Skadden Arps after he departs from government. And businesses with international trade legal needs will think that the guy who launched a trade war is not a rain but a drought maker. His actions do not compute on any rational-actor decision theory... Trump... There is little to understand. Somehow he has become convinced that running a bilateral trade deficit with a country means that we are "losing" to them, and that this should stop. Why he believes this we do not know, and he cannot explain it. We do know that none of those working for him—not Priebus, not Mnuchin, not Kudlow, not Ross, nor any of the others—have been able to change his knee-jerk instincts. Currently the best place to go to figure out what, concretely, has actually happened is to the PIIE's trade-war timelines: Chad P. Bown and Melina Kolb: Is Trump in a Trade War? An Up-to-Date Guide: "The timelines below track the development of the most pressing trade conflicts with links to the latest available data and PIIE analysis... #orangehairedbaboons #globalization #tradewar

11.You should go see this, if you are in DC tomorrow: Equitable Growth: Building a New Consensus on Antitrust Reform Tickets, Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 12:00 PM: "Please join the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on Wednesday, November 14, at noon for a conversation on reforming federal antitrust law.... Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, will deliver keynote remarks.... RSVP is required by Friday, November 9... #monopoly

1. New computer and communications technologies were supposed to democratize information—route around corrupt media and data-centrer oligarchies, and allow a flourishing of the public sphere. Yes... and no...: Joi Ito: The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED: "SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 2 and 3 billion years ago, what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, took place, causing the mass extinction of ... the dominant life form at the time.... Cyanobacteria... had the photosynthetic ability to produce glucose and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water using the power of the sun. Oxygen was toxic to many anaerobic cousins... #riseoftherobots

2. Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: A New Keynesian Model with Wealth in the Utility Function: "Wealth... [in] the utility function. The extension modifies the Euler equation: in steady state the real interest rate is negatively related to consumption instead of being constant... Thus, when the marginal utility of wealth is large enough, the dynamical system representing the equilibrium is a source not only in normal times but also at the zero lower bound. This property eliminates the zero-lower-bound anomalies of the New Keynesian model, such as explosive output and inflation, and forward-guidance puzzle... #monetaryeconomics

Applause from Noah Smith for Equitable Growth's attempt to focus on the broader implications of rising monopoly: Noah Smith: Economists Gear Up to Challenge the Monopolies: "The antitrust movement is making a comeback.... Think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth are starting to zero in on the issue as well": Jacob Robbins: How the rise of market power in the United States may explain some macroeconomic puzzles: "Gauti Eggertsson, Ella Getz Wold, and I at Brown University argue that these diverse trends are closely connected, and that the driving force behind them is an increase in monopoly power together with a decline in interest rates...

The most important thing for you to read: the deadline for Equitable Growth's next set of grant proposals over at Equitable Growth is January 31, 2019: WCEG: Request for Proposals: "The Washington Center for Equitable Growth seeks to deepen our understanding of whether and how inequality affects economic growth and stability. Our academic grants program is building a portfolio of cutting-edge scholarly research investigating the various channels through which economic inequality may or may not impact economic growth and stability, both directly and indirectly...

My read of the evidence is somewhat different here: my view is that forward guidance did something, but quantitative easing did very, very little. And the idea that quantitative easing made forward guidance more credible? I do not see that. Yes, quantitative easing was a big deal for the financial professionals Who otherwise would have held the treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve bought. But I do not see any channels through which their attempt to compensate add large affects and the real economy of productions and demand: Ken Kuttner: Outside the Box: Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Great Recession and Beyond: “A preponderance of evidence nonetheless suggests that forward guidance and quantitative easing succeeded in lowering long-term interest rates. Studies using micro data have documented tangible effects of quantitative easing on firms and financial intermediaries. Macro models suggest that the interest rate reductions are likely to have had a meaningful impact. The adverse side effects appear to have been mild, and are dwarfed by the costs of the more protracted recession in the United States that likely would have occurred in the absence of the unconventional policies. The benefits of unconventional policy therefore probably outweighed the costs...

Comment of the Day: in response to Brad DeLong: On Twitter: For whom was the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire that commenced with the Antonine Plague a decline https://t.co/FdZeNjvtCr: Carlos Noreña: @carlosfnorena: "Yes, bad for all of those sectors, and devastating in systemic terms for this large-scale political economy. I also agree with Jongman that what he calls the "resilience" of the Roman central state was remarkable..." I respond: Perhaps my problem is that I am too much a Malthusian-Ricardian to see history straight, but...

The most both-sidesee bothsidism ever is in—where else?—the New York Times!

And it is Ross Douthat!

#journamalism

For whom was the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire that commenced with the Antonine Plague a decline and fall?

It was a decline and fall for:

1. Those at the top of the state apparatus who saw their resources collapse, and their ability to avoid barbarian power projection into the empire decline.

2. Those who were rich.

3. Those who were urban, dependent on the flow of resources from the countryside to the city.

4. Those in the countryside who had been prosperous and free, and who were now enserfed.

5. Those who benefited from large-scale efficient production and distribution of conveniences.

6. Those for whom the maintenance of the pax Romana was really important.

The question is: what happened to those on the bottom in the countryside? They now are much more productive. Yet they face increased pressures from above to exploit them more in order to compensate for the reduced rent flow from depopulation, and they suffer from increased dissipative violence—both from their superiors and from barbarian invasions. Yet on the other hand their increased value might have given them increased leverage: that was the case for western European serfs in the aftermath of the Black Death.

My view: slave —> serf a definite improvement. For everyone else, a decline: loss of conveniences with the end of large-scale efficient production, loss of resource flow to city-dwellers, loss of resources that had underpinned the pax Romana. What is uncertain is the relative numbers of the winners and losers—and whether even the winners in terms of consumption were better off facing the barbarian rather than the slavemaster.

In any event, very interesting: Willem Jongman (2006): Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of The Roman Economy: "For the naive historian, it would seem that we now have all we need: we have a range of examples of catastrophic decline, and some potential causes. What we do not yet have, however, are the mechanisms by which this shock propagated through the economic and social system. Imagine a pre-industrial and largely agricultural economy in a fairly stable equilibrium. Next that equilibrium is disturbed by mortality.... The biggest economic and social change, however, was to the land-labour ratio...

FiveThirtyEight: Yes, It Was A Blue Wav | FiveThirtyEight: "natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The arguments that it ISN’T a blue wave are dumb. Can we end the chat now and get lunch?...

...sarahf: Haha, no. We’re here to tell readers why it’s dumb — although Nathaniel did do a pretty good job of convincing me.

nrakich: People seem to be defining “blue wave” as, “Did Democrats outperform expectations?” They’re forgetting that expectations were already for a blue wave.

natesilver: What is the argument that it isn’t a blue wave? That Democrats didn’t win the Senate?

Review of Capitalism in America: A History by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge: The world as a whole is much richer than it was three centuries ago. And the United States of America is the richest land of all. For nearly two centuries its unique dynamic of economic growth has made America, as Leon Trotsky put it after his brief residence in New York, “the furnace where the future is being forged.” Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s “Capitalism in America: A History” argues that it is the American love and embrace of capitalism, the resulting entrepreneurial business culture, and the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist-market system that have given America its special, unique edge in economic wealth. In America, successful entrepreneurs, innovators, organizers and promoters have become not just well-off but heroes.... While it is no surprise that Greenspan and Wooldridge have produced this book, they are, I think, broadly correct in their argument... Read MOAR at the Washington Post

Perhaps Facebook's top management should give their shares in the company to the Open Society Foundationt?: Patrick Gaspard: Letter to Sandberg:

11/14/18

Sheryl Sandberg
Chief Operating Officer
Facebook
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Dear Ms. Sandberg:

I was shocked to learn from the New York Times that you and your colleagues at Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to stir up animus toward George Soros.

As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead—an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros’s home. You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook.

The notion that your company, at your direction, actively engaged in the same behavior to try to discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role in disseminating vile propaganda is frankly astonishing to me.

It’s been disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook’s platform. To now learn that you are active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.

These efforts appear to have been part of a deliberate strategy to distract from the very real accountability problems your company continues to grapple with. This is reprehensible, and an offense to the core values Open Society seeks to advance. But at bottom, this is not about George Soros or the foundations. Your methods threaten the very values underpinning our democracy.

I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this matter with you in person, and to hear what steps you might take to help remediate the damage done by this deeply misguided—and dangerous—effort carried out at Facebook’s behest.

Sincerely,

Patrick Gaspard
President
Open Society Foundations

Rafael Behr: The Brexit wreckers Are Slinking Away from the Rancid Mess They’ve Made: "Dominic Raab and Esther McVey have resigned because they know Brexit is intrinsically dysfunctional.... There is now no Brexit true believer prepared to take an author’s credit on the deal that is about to come before parliament.... These resignations confirm a fundamental structural problem with the whole leave prospectus: it was a fantasy, and as such incompatible with the mundane fulfilment of ministerial responsibility. Raab has come to the same conclusion that David Davis and Boris Johnson reached earlier in the year: it is easier to be on the team that accuses the prime minister of failing to deliver majestic herds of unicorns than it is to be stuck with a portfolio that requires expertise in unicorn-breeding...

Adam Gopnik: Wine, War, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron: "Macron made a speech... as clearly directed at and against Trump as any he could have made... distinguished between nationalism (bad) and patriotism (good)... in eloquent terms...

Hoisted from 2012: Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Oh dear, that's a really tough question. So let me make it tougher by sharpening it and give it historical context. During the Gilded Age of the 1890s and 1900s you had strong political movements saying "something is going remarkably wrong with this, this isn’t the country we thought we were going to live in". The way that the historian—I'm blanking—Ray Ginger? Harley Shaiken: Yes, Ray Ginger. Brad DeLong: Ray Ginger put it in two absolutely brilliant books—Altgeld’s America and The Age of Excess—even the Republicans thought that they wanted to live in Abe Lincoln’s America, where when you are young you split wood into fence rails and go to law school at night and when you are middle-aged you become a lawyer and get rich and when you are old you enter politics and save the Union and free the slaves. They wanted to live in that kind of world, of upward mobility, in which opportunity is wide open even to the son of a penniless and not very successful rural farmer. But by 1890 they discovered that they weren’t living in Abe Lincoln's America at all...

The chances for equitable growth in America over the next three years may or may not be crippled by the trade war that Donald Trump is now trying to launch. What should you be reading and watching to try to figure out what is going on? I believe that the Peterson Institute of International Economics is the place to go for up-to-date analysis on the trade war that Donald Trump is trying to launch, over the—not dead bodies, but—active opposition and passive resistance of pretty much everybody in his administration save Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer. This is not being driven by any interest groups outside the administration. It is being driven by three people inside the administration: Navarro, Lighthizer, and Trump:

• Navarro... On the few occasions that I have interacted with Navarro he has seemed to me to be... not quite all there. The kindest thing I have heard said about him comes from Paul Krugman: "Peter Navarro predicted that nobody would retaliate.... Trump’s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view.... Unlike Trump, the Chinese and other targets of his trade wrath seem to have a clear idea of what they’re trying to accomplish. The key point is that the Navarro/Trump view, aside from its fixation on trade balances... seems to imagine that the world still looks the way it did in the 1960s, when trade was overwhelmingly in final goods like wheat and cars..."

• Lighthizer... I do not understand at all. The policies that he is pushing forward are pretty much 180 degrees reversed from those he worked for in his previous stints in government. He is now too old—70—to be anything other than a rainmaker at his old law firm of Skadden Arps after he departs from government. And businesses with international trade legal needs will think that the guy who launched a trade war is not a rain but a drought maker. His actions do not compute on any rational-actor decision theory.

• Trump... There is little to understand. Somehow he has become convinced that running a bilateral trade deficit with a country means that we are "losing" to them, and that this should stop. Why he believes this we do not know, and he cannot explain it. We do know that none of those working for him—not Priebus, not Mnuchin, not Kudlow, not Ross, nor any of the others—have been able to change his knee-jerk instincts.

Currently the best place to go to figure out what, concretely, has actually happened is to teh PIIE's trade-war timelines:

Chad P. Bown and Melina Kolb: Is Trump in a Trade War? An Up-to-Date Guide: "The timelines below track the development of the most pressing trade conflicts with links to the latest available data and PIIE analysis...

You should go see this, if you are in DC tomorrow: Equitable Growth: Building a New Consensus on Antitrust Reform Tickets, Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 12:00 PM: "Please join the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on Wednesday, November 14, at noon for a conversation on reforming federal antitrust law.... Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, will deliver keynote remarks.... RSVP is required by Friday, November 9...

Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: A New Keynesian Model with Wealth in the Utility Function: "Wealth... [in] the utility function. The extension modifies the Euler equation: in steady state the real interest rate is negatively related to consumption instead of being constant... Thus, when the marginal utility of wealth is large enough, the dynamical system representing the equilibrium is a source not only in normal times but also at the zero lower bound. This property eliminates the zero-lower-bound anomalies of the New Keynesian model, such as explosive output and inflation, and forward-guidance puzzle...

New computer and communications technologies were supposed to democratize information—route around corrupt media and data-centrer oligarchies, and allow a flourishing of the public sphere. Yes... and no...: Joi Ito: The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED: "SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 2 and 3 billion years ago, what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, took place, causing the mass extinction of ... the dominant life form at the time.... Cyanobacteria... had the photosynthetic ability to produce glucose and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water using the power of the sun. Oxygen was toxic to many anaerobic cousins...

William Darity (2005): Africa, Europe, and the Origins of Uneven Development: The Role of Slavery: "The economic foundations of the Atlantic slave trade and [its]... role in generating European and American... growth...

A very interesting study of what appears to be highly successful job search assistance in Nevada: Day Manoli, Marios Michaelides, and Ankur Patel: Long-Term Effects of Job-Search Assistance: Experimental Evidence Using Administrative Tax Data: "Administrative tax data... examine the long-term effects of an experimental job-search assistance program operating in Nevada in 2009...