Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Note to Self: No, Apple! No Potty Mouth, Please!: Today I am disturbed that Apple voice recognition keeps hearing “slut“ when I say “slack“...

Comment of the Day: BruceJ: "Honestly, when you look back at Brooks' history, where he 'just happens' to reference ideas out of the 'dark, dank silos of the far right' I see less laziness, than an ongoing subtle injection of those very ideas into so-called 'respectable' conservative commentary. If it IS all happenstance and laziness, Brooks is the luckiest damned blind squirrel in the universe...

Why Economic History?: Good theory is in the end nothing but distilled and crystallized economic history. It could, after all, be nothing else. And piling more and more computer power on to the analysis of nonhistorical data could only be an intellectual optimum if the world was created ex nihilo the instant of the first date of your panel. So this is why we are here. Welcome to economic history...

Comment of the Day: Private-sector entities cannot migrate labor and capital into the business of creating money, for money is liquid trust and can only be created by institutions that are trusted to be, well, good for the money. So the solution is not to move resources out of creating currently-produced goods and services but to move demand into buying currently-produced goods and services. And—as long as it is good for the money—the government's borrowing-and-spending or printing-and-dropping works just fine: JEC: Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics: "The funny thing here is that Barro imagines this to be a killer rhetorical question, when it is in fact a crucial and open research question...

What Will Cause the Next US Recession?: Live at Project Syndicate: Needless to say, the particular nature and form of the next financial shock will be unanticipated. Investors, speculators, and financial institutions are generally hedged against the foreseeable shocks.... The death blow to the global economy in 2008-2009 came not from global imbalances or from the collapse of the mid-2000s housing bubble, but from the concentration of ownership of mortgage-backed securities...

Comment of the Day: Cervantes: "I didn't know that British produce comes into season at the end of March, actually. You learn something every day...

Betting That Nobody Will Check the References as an Intellectual Style: Monday Smackdown: Never mind that Himmelfarb cuts off her quote from Keynes just before Keynes writes that he approves of this Puritan fallacy—that he is not, as Himmelfarb claims, ridiculing it, but rather praising it...

Paul Campos: Tucker Carlson Utters More Than Fourteen Words Evincing Skepticism About Finance Capitalism: Conservative Pundits Blanch In Pure Horror: "white ethno-nationalism, which is what both Carlson and Trump actually market to their respective, heavily overlapping audiences, is likely to become even more successful if it manages to morph into a kind of welfare=state herrenvolk democracy, in which 'real Americans' receive genuine protection from the depredations of capitalism, while a permanently disenfranchised underclass of guest workers and the like gets to live in the libertarian utopia envisioned by the Koch brothers...

Ben Alpers: A Far-Right Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Becomes a Mainstream Irritable Gesture: "At the heart of this largely rote piece of Brooksian pablum is a claim that deserves a closer look. 'The younger militants', writes Brooks, 'tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy'. This is interesting both for what Brooks appears to be trying to say and, more immediately, how he has decided to say it... #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere

Alexander Zubatov: "I think YOU'RE misusing Blackford.... Remember, the whole point of my Tablet article was to respond to Sam Moyn's utterly misleading NYT article claiming cultural Marxism simply doesn't exist and is no more than anti-Semitic right-wing phantasmagoria...

Ben Alper: Fun With Primary Sources: The Free Congress Foundation's "History of Political Correctness": "The notion that the Frankfurt School was responsible for creating 'Political Correctness', 'Cultural Marxism', and a related plot against Western civilization itself emerged from the circle around Lyndon LaRouche from the 1970s (when LaRouche’s attacks on the Frankfurt Institute apparently began) through the early 1990s...

Dave Niewertr: Norway Terrorist Breivik Was An Ardent Subscriber To Theories Of 'Cultural Marxism': "The picture that's emerging is of an ordinary right-wing man stoked into anger by theories about "Cultural Marxism" that originated on the anti-Semitic far right but have in recent years been spreading into more mainstream venues, promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others...

Ben Alpers: The Frankfurt School, Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories, and American Conservatism: "There are obviously a lot of threads that one might pull in this story, regarding, among other things, the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the violent radical right, the strong base of antisemitism that (often silently) underwrites a lot right-wing rhetoric, the deep anti-intellectual and anti-academic tendencies in these modes of thought, and the peculiar role that Lyndon LaRouche and his minions have played in encouraging conspiracy theories of all sorts (they are also an important source for left-wing conspiracy theories about Leo Strauss and the Straussians)...

Samuel Moyn: The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old: "‘Cultural Marxism’ might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history...

Russell Blackford: Cultural Marxism and our current culture wars: Part 1: "In everyday contexts, those of us who do not accept the narrative of a grand, semi-conspiratorial movement aimed at producing moral degeneracy should probably avoid using the term 'cultural Marxism'. Unfortunate cultural tendencies, including those that manifest a left-wing style of authoritarianism, can usually be labelled in less confusing, more effective, more precise ways. By all means, let’s develop useful terminology to express whatever concerns we have about tendencies on the Left, but 'cultural Marxism' carries too much baggage...

Jana Winter and Elias Groll: Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC: "Fired White House staffer [Rich Higgins] argued 'deep state' attacked Trump administration because the president represents a threat to cultural Marxist memes, globalists, and bankers...

Jeet Heer: Let's Talk about Anti-Semitic Ideology: "Bowers... belonged to the far right faction that sees Trump as... claim[ing] to stand for white America but actually works for 'the Jews'.... The idea that George Soros (symbol for many on right of Jewish conspiracy) is behind Caravan isn't confined to Nazis.... Congressman Matt Gaetz... popular Trumpist cartoonist Ben Garrison... House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.... The Soros stuff is just one of many manifestations of the the grand anti-Semitic trope.... The Soros of right-wing mythology (globalist intent on destroy cohesive nations) fit the long history of blaming internal discord on outside agitators as well as the Dolchstoßlegende. The nationalist needs a cosmopolitan nemesis...

Zack Beauchamp: A Trump Voter Hurt by the Shutdown’s Incredibly Revealing Quote: "Think about that line for a second. Roll it over in your head. In essence, Minton is declaring that one aim of the Trump administration is to hurt people—the right people. Making America great again, in her mind, involves inflicting pain. This is not an accident. Trump’s political victory and continuing appeal depend on a brand of politics that marginalizes and targets groups disliked by his supporters. Trump supporters don’t so much love the Republican party as they hate Democrats...

Jeet Heer: Let's Talk about Anti-Semitic Ideology: "The idea that George Soros (symbol for many on right of Jewish conspiracy) is behind Caravan isn't confined to Nazis. Here's Congressman Matt Gaetz. Here is popular Trumpist cartoonist Ben Garrison—again, someone with an audience outside the Nazi right but circulating idea that Soros is working to destroy America. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy...

Tamara Strauss: Blum Center News Digest, Jan. 7: "A selection of articles and reports pulled from the last two/three weeks...

Raj Kumar: Facing Harsh Realities, the Global Development Community Confronts Another Fraught Year: "The outlines of an established global politics on aid are beginning to come into focus, and it’s a fraught landscape. Aid is now openly and directly discussed as a tool to stem migration, achieve foreign policy objectives, and derive domestic economic benefits, particularly for major donors including the U.S., China, Germany, and the U.K...

Paul Krugman: The Economics of Soaking the Rich: "Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he’ll barely notice it. What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want... #equitablegrowth #fiscalpolicy

Steve Richards: Theresa May’s Survival Has Become Dependent on Denying Political Reality: "After the long cabinet meeting on the Brexit deal, the prime minister declared outside Number 10 that ministers had backed her plans. The next day the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, resigned. Mrs May appointed a successor as if the words she had uttered the night before had never been spoken.... She has, in the intervening weeks, insisted that there is space for a significant negotiation with the EU before the approaching Commons’ vote on her deal, expected within the next fortnight. The EU has made clear there is no room for such revision. The disconnect between the prime minister’s public words and what is happening around her is stark. Other prime ministers sought words to make sense of chaotic situations. Alternatively, they tried to change the situation. But Mrs May does neither. She presses on. But her indifference to words and persuasion, these essential arts of leadership, is a fatal flaw...

Patrick Kline, Neviana Petkova, Heidi Williams, and Owen Zidar: Who Profits from Patents? Rent-Sharing at Innovative Firms: "An initial allowance of an ex-ante valuable patent generates substantial increases in firm productivity and worker compensation. By contrast, initial allowances of lower ex-ante value patents yield no detectable effects on firm outcomes.... On average, workers capture roughly 30 cents of every dollar of patent-induced surplus in higher earnings... concentrated among men and workers in the top half of the earnings distribution, and are paired with corresponding improvements in worker retention among these groups. We interpret these earnings responses as reflecting the capture of economic rents by senior workers, who are most costly for innovative firms to replace...

David Weil (2014): The Fissured Workplace: "Large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another...

Jag Bhalla: Judea Pearl's 'The Book of Why' Shakes Up Correlation vs. Causality

Uncle Judea, Melanin, Genetics, and Educational Attainment...: Am I profoundly stupid, or is Uncle Judea's framework of causal confounders—colliders—mediators a huge advance, perhaps not in helping those of you who think carefully do non-stupid statistics, but in helping those of us who do not think carefully do non-stupid statistics, and in providing a royal road to teaching people how to do not-stupid statistics...

This point is absolutely cognitive science-statistics-philosophy of probability gold!: Judea Pearl, Madelyn Glymour, and Nicholas P. Jewell (2016): Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (New York: John Wiley & Sons: 978119186847): "Inquisitive students may wonder why it is that dependencies associated with conditioning on a collider are so surprising to most people—as in, for example, the Monty Hall example. The reason is that humans tend to associate dependence with causation...

Lisa R. Goldberg: Review of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect: "The graphical approach to causal inference that Pearl favors has been influential, but it is not the only approach.... The Neyman (or Neyman–Rubin) potential outcomes model... James Heckman, whose concept of 'fixing' resembles, superficially at least, the do operator that Pearl uses. Those who enjoy scholarly disputes may look to Andrew Gelman’s blog... or to the tributes written by Pearl and Heckman to the reclusive Nobel Laureate, Trygve Haavelmo, who pioneered causal inference in economics in 1940...

Ride | Austin: Frequently Asked Question: "The previous rideshare companies spent millions of dollars then chose to abandon the 'factory' (drivers & riders) they built. We believed with the backing of the community-RideAustin could quickly harness this infrastructure-build the right solution and fill the void and provide a great, safe service.... The tech community contributed technology to power the app that costs millions to develop-but it also took over $7 million in cash donations and significant in-kind services donations to make RideAustin what it is today...

Counterfactuals! There is currently a mishegas at Andrew Gelman's place about Pearl and Mackenzie's Book of Why, which has a reference to this and has led me to the conclusion that I really need to find time to work my way through this entire book: Cosma Shalizi: Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View: "The distributions we observe in the world are the outcome of complicated stochastic processes. The mechanisms which set the value of one variable inter-lock with those which set other variables. When we make a probabilistic prediction by conditioning—whether we predict􏰁 E[Y|X=x] or Pr (Y|X=x) or something more complicated—we are just filtering the output of those mechanisms, picking out the cases where they happen to have set X to the value x, and looking at what goes along with that. When we make a causal prediction, we want to know what would happen if the usual mechanisms controlling X were suspended and it was set to x. How would this change propagate to the other variables? What distribution would result for Y? This is often, perhaps even usually, what people really want to know from a data analysis, and they settle for statistical prediction either because they think it is causal prediction, or for lack of a better alternative... #reasoning

Yes, lots of conservative males feel unmanned because women can now get jobs and contraceptives and so are not (a) desperate to find a man to support them while (b) terrified of getting pregnant. The best answer would be teaching young males that while their grandfathers and male their fathers could be real dicks without it ruining their lives, that is no longer tru: Josh Barro: "I think a big problem with the 'economic and social change undermined marriage and family for the working class' frame is that a main way it did this is by making women less dependent on men...

Jane Coaston: Tucker Carlson Has Sparked The Most Interesting Debate In Conservative Politics: "Carlson... greed that his monologue was reminiscent of Warren, referencing her 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke.... Carlson wanted to be clear: He’s just asking questions.... In this telling, white working-class Americans who once relied on a manufacturing economy that doesn’t look the way it did in 1955 are the unwilling pawns of elites. It’s not their fault that, in Carlson’s view, marriage is inaccessible to them.... Someone, or something, did this to them.... Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes—civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc.—and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are doing to you. And that was my biggest question about Carlson’s monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic. Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy...