Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (November 20, 2018)
Comment of the Day: The Fall of Rome: Am I too Much of a Malthusian-Ricardian to Understand It Properly?
Journamalism: The most both-sidesee bothsidism ever is in—where else?—the New York Times!... And it is Ross Douthat!...
_[Review of "Capitalism in America: A History" by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/
Hoisted from 2012: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?
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... #monetaryeconomics #monetarypolicy
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?...
Perhaps Facebook's top management should give their shares in the company to the Open Society Foundationt?: Patrick Gaspard: Letter to Sandberg...
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... #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #history
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...
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
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
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
