Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (January 15, 2019)
Global North research university problem: Speaker: "My major concern is: How can I be interested in fewer things?...
Welcome to the 21st-century, in which my coffee machine says that it is “booting”...
Costs and Benefits of International Capital Mobility: Reply to Bhagwati: Hoisted from 20 Years Ago: Needless to say, time has left me a lot wiser: We need to design economies so that they can operate without disaster even when deregulatory clowns like those of the George W. Bush or the Donald J. Trump administrations are in control of the levers of policy at key moments...
Comment of the Day: Charles Steindel: "British produce comes in before the Swiss spaghetti harvest?...
Supply and Demand Shocks, and Seasonal Adjustment: Think that there are no such things as aggregate fluctuations generated by shifts in tastes and technologies? Think again. Look at the pattern of monthly payroll employment changes...
A million dollars? As a tort settlement? What was going on?: Michelle Boorstein: C. John McCloskey: Opus Dei paid $977,000 to settle sexual misconduct claim against prominent Catholic pries
That conservative parties' policies redistribute wealth and power upward while distracting their mass base by focusing them on internal or external enemies has long been the point of Toryism—since before try Gordon Riots, in fact. And now Tucker Carlson is surprised that there is gambling going on, and is just asking questions? Does he want us to take him seriously?: Eric Levitz: Why Tucker Carlson Plays a Critic of Capitalism On TV: "Melinda Cooper... explains: 'Writing at the end of the 1970s, the Chicago school neoliberal Gary Becker remarked that the “family in the Western world has been radically altered—some claim almost destroyed—by events of the last three decades.”… Becker believed that such dramatic changes in the structure of the family had more to do with the expansion of the welfare state in the post-war era than with feminism per se... a consequence rather than an instigator of these dynamics.... Becker’s abiding concern with the destructive effects of public spending on the family represents a key element of his microeconomics... that is consistently overlooked'...
Farmers, miners, merchants, assembly-line workers—four key categories of workers that at various times in the past had to be supported and nurtured in order to create the wealth of a nation. Now none of those categories seem likely to embrace any substantial proportion of any future workforce. So how, then, we inquire, are we to understand the nature and causes of the wealth of nations in our future?: David desJardins: "It's too Late for Industrialization and Manufacturing to be a Path to Increasing Returns for Developing Countries.: "he information economy... is where the real increasing returns are today.... The key question for developing economies today is whether they can take advantage of the information economy.... China has moved pretty darn quickly up the ladder. Basically created a significant number of rather productive information workers in a single generation... #globalization #economicgrowth #riseodftherobots
David Cho: The Labor Market Effects of Demand Shocks: Firm-Level Evidence from the Recovery Act: "How do firms respond to demand shocks?... Leveraging two firm-level datasets... linked employer-employee administrative records for a subset of U.S. firms from ADP, LLC with a comprehensive database of transactions from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)... I compare firms that received ARRA funds to a counterfactual sample of employers that were not directly connected to the Recovery Act.... The magnitudes of these changes suggest that the labor supply to an individual firm is relatively inelastic, even in a deep recession, and provide evidence of monopsonistic wage-setting in U.S. labor markets... #fiscalpolicy
Noah Smith: Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class: "Politically and economically, unions are sort of an odd duck. They aren’t part of the apparatus of the state, yet they depend crucially on state protections in order to wield their power. They’re stakeholders in corporations, but often have adversarial relationships with management. Historically, unions are a big reason that the working class won many of the protections and rights it now enjoys... #equitablegrowth #labormarket #politicaleconomy
Paul Krugman (1998): America the Boastful
Jagdish Bhagwati (1998): The Capital Myth
Sendhil Mullainathan: Using Machine Learning to Understand Health Care Systems: "Machine learning... can also be used to improve our understanding of the health system itself... contribute to empirical science and better grounded policy. I describe results from two projects where the predictive approach proves particularly illuminating, both on 'wasted' spending: one on over-testing and the other on the high concentration of spending at the end of life. I will also describe methodological issues that arise that are relatively neglected in the machine learning literature, such as measurement error and the impact of unobserved variables...
Lyz Lenz: You Should Care That Richard Spencer's Wife Says He Abused Her: "Despite the so-called alt-right’s attempt to be respectable, violence seems to follow it everywhere—even, allegedly, into Spencer’s own home...
Seems to me @biscuit_ersed and everybody else needs their first game-theory lecture to be (1) defect-defect as dominant-strategy Nash equilibrium in prisoner's dilemma, (2) the unraveling equilibrium in finite related prisoner's dilemma, and (3) this first prisoner's dilemma ever played: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/economists/prisoners_dilemma.html https://twitter.com/biscuit_ersed/status/1084812993509105671... #economics
UCLA Gymnastics: "A 🔟 isn't enough for this floor routine by @katelyn_ohashi...
Marie Le Conte: "One of my favourite things about being alive in 2019 is vaguely remembering that someone once sent you something you now need and having to look through the conversation archives of four different social media platforms to find it...
Flood and Dresher devised a simple game where Nash equilibrium wasn't such a good outcome......
Welcome to the 21st-century, in which my coffee machine says that it is “booting”...
The very sharp Jeet Heer traces David Brooks's intgellecutal panic back to the John Birch Society; Jeet Heer: A Few Thoughts on "Cultural Marxism," Marcuse, John Wayne, the John Birch Society, and Anti-Semitism: "Goobers in the Trump administration are worried about 'Cultural Marxism' in the 'Deep State' opposing Trump.... 'Cultural Marxism' is a big boogeyman on the alt-right: it's the people who are supposedly responsible for creating PC, feminism, etc. The actual historical 'cultural Marxists' (or 'Western Marxists') were the Frankfurt School: Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse etc... sought to supplant and update Marx's economic system with recognition of cultural forces...
Todd C. Neumann, Price V. Fishback, and Shawn Kantor: The Dynamics of Relief Spending and the Private Urban Labor Market During the New Deal: "Positive shocks to relief during the First New Deal were followed by increased private employment and earnings, consistent with demand stimulus in that period...
Delany Crampton: Veterans in the U.S. Labor Market Face Barriers to Success That Can and Should Be Addressed - Equitable Growth: "Anna Zogas of the University of Washington observes in her 2017 research that the U.S. military does an extremely effective job of training veterans to operate within the military and an extremely poor job of preparing them, especially young servicemembers, for post-military job...
According to my Grandmother Florence Richardson Usher Lord, my Great-Great Uncle Abbott Payson Usher back in The Day used to teach—very boringly, she said—(1) Middle Ages, (2) Commercial Revolution, (3) Industrial Revolution, (4) Age of Modern Science, with growth accelerations in each of the four: Dietz Vollrath: Sustained growth and the increase in work hours: "Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf... labor contract terms in England over several centuries... annual labor contracts starting seeing sustained growth in their value around 1650 or so, far sooner than the day wages indicated...
Xavir Jaravel (2017): Product innovations and inflation in the U.S. retail sector have magnified inequality: "shifts in income distribution in the United States lead to product innovations that target high-income households, which increases purchasing-power inequality...
Stephanie Victoria: "I'm a say this lil story then I'm gon' let'chall get back to tweeting...: Recently, I discovered a grocery story even bougie-er than Whole Foods in my new 'hood. My addition to the list of 'approved negroes after 6PM' recently went through so my neighbors have stopped staring at me & the resident coons only give disapproving looks on trash day instead of their usual 'don't start no trouble' slave talks in the hallway...
David Rezza Baqaee and Emmanuel Farhi: The Microeconomic Foundations of Aggregate Production Functions: "We provide a general methodology for analyzing...aggregate production functions by deriving their first- and second-order properties... provide non-parametric characterizations of the macro elasticities of substitution between factors and of the macro bias of technical change in terms of micro sufficient statistics. They allow us to generalize existing aggregation theorems and to derive new ones. We relate our results to the famous Cambridge- Cambridge controversy...
Equitable Growth Steering Committee member Karen Dynan and company point out a big problem. Should we be trying to pay down our debt now in order to create "fiscal space"? Our should we take secular stagnation seriously, and not fear the possibilty of a sudden downward valuation of government debt that would take fiscal space away?: Karen Dynan, Jay Shambaugh, and Eduardo Porter: What Tools Does the U.S. Have to Combat the Next Recession?: "Today's lower equilibrium interest rates make it more likely that monetary policy would need to make use of unconventional tools to spur the economy. On the fiscal front, we have a much larger level of government debt relative to GDP than we did prior to the financial crisis. However, viewing this level of debt to GDP as a reason to restrain stimulus spending in case of a crisis could make the problem worse. Whether the government uses fiscal policy to stimulate the economy will depend more on political willingness, than on the actual limits on fiscal policy...
This book is fun!: Jeff Erickson: Algorithms: "'Algorithm' does not derive... from the Greek roots arithmos (αριθοσ), meaning “number”, and algos (αλγοσ), meaning 'pain'. Rather, it is a corruption of the name of the 9th century Persianm athematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwarizmi is perhaps best known as the writer of the treatise Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fihisab al-gabr wal-muqabala, from which the modern word algebra derives. In a different treatise, al-Khwarizmi described the modern decimal system for writing and manipulating numbers—in particular, the use of a small circle or sifr to represent a missing quantity—which had been developed in India several centuries earlier. The methods described in Al-Kitab, using either written figures or counting stones, became known in English as algorism or augrym, and its figures became known in English as ciphers...
Abbott Payson Usher (1921): European Economic History: European Industry and Commerce in the Nineteenth Century. Half-course (second half-year). Tu., Th., Sat., at 9. Dr. Usher
Irwin Collier presents my Great-Great-Uncle Abbott's 1922 exam: Abbott Payson Usher: Final Exam Questions for: European Industry and Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, 1922
Nicholas Lardy: Xi Jinping’s Turn Away from the Market Puts Chinese Growth at Risk: "Credit is flowing to state-owned companies, not more productive private ones...
