Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

This is the word on how the government ought to analyze proposed tax regulations: Greg Leiserson and Adam Looney: A Framework for Economic Analysis of Tax Regulations: "Treasury and the IRS should conduct a formal economic analysis of regulations in two cases. First, for regulations that implement recent tax legislation, the agencies should conduct an analysis if they have substantial discretion in designing the regulation and if different ways of doing so would vary substantially in their economic effects. Second, for regulations unrelated to recent legislation, the agencies should conduct an analysis if the regulation would have large economic effects relative to current practice...

Ray [REDACTED]: Gather Round, Kids, While I Tell You About What I Call.. "The Greatest S---show in Crypto": "Many of you will be surprised to learn that there is a thriving industry of paid advice on buying and selling cryptos assets, including newsletters, telegram groups, and subscriber-only emails. Until very recently, one of the most popular paid services was something called Standpoint research, seen here on CNBC with Mr. Wonderful from SharkTank. In February of 2018, Standpoint Research recommended that its subscribers buy an unknown asset known as $DIG, because the owner of Standpoint thought there was insider trading going on. You read that right. He suspected fraud, so he issued a 'buy' recommendation. The coin then subsequently grew from a fraction of a penny to 16 cents per token, as buyers rushed in to acquire this asset. For the craziest reasons you can imagine. The coin itself claims to be backed by $15 billion (not a typo) in Gold Bullion. Their website, if you are curious, is http://arbitrade.io ...

Barry Eichengreen: The Euro at 20: An Enduring Success but a Fundamental Failure: "The belief of... Francois Mitterrand and... Helmut Kohl that a single European currency would apply irresistible pressure for political integration. It would lead eventually to their ultimate goal.... To function smoothly, monetary union requires banking union... an integrated fiscal system.... Banking union and fiscal union will only be regarded as legitimate if those responsible for their operation can be held accountable for their decisions by citizens.... Monetary integration creates a logic and therefore irresistible pressure for political integration. Or so the euro’s architects believed...

AOC Dances To Every Song:

In the context of overall labor-market utilization trends, the rise in the household-survey estimate of the unemployment rate in December relative to November is worth a note:

• First, the rise in the unemployment rate is due predominately to yet another increase in labor force participation. It's not that people found it harder to find and keep jobs—it's that people who had thought it would be hard concluding that it will be easier, and so starting to look.

For the Weekend: Rocky Training Montage:

Rand Paul: Protecting Property Holders’ Rights to Discriminate on the Basis of Race: "Is the Hard Part About Believing in Freedom...": I had thought that my brilliant-but-at-times-highly-annoying coauthor @Econ_Marshall was making a more sophisticated point: that here in America "libertarianism" is a Frankenstein's monster that got its lightning-bolt juice from massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.

Dismantling the New Deal and rolling back the social insurance state were not ideas that had much potential political-economy juice back in the 1950s and 1960s. But if the economic libertarian cause of dismantling the New Deal could be harnessed to the cause of white supremacy—if one of the key liberties that libertarians were fighting to defend was the liberty to discriminate against and oppress the Negroes—than all of a sudden you could have a political movement that might get somewhere. And so James Buchanan and the other libertarians to the right of Milton Friedman made the freedom to discriminate—or perhaps the power to discriminate?—a key one of the liberties that they were fighting for in their fight against BIG GOVERNMENT. And this has poisoned American libertarianism ever since.

This—Marshall thinks, and I am more than half agree, is the right way to look at it.

For example, consider when Rand Paul came out of the libertarian fever swamps to Washington https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/161217-paul-says-he-would-have-opposed-civil-rights-act and began saying that he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it infringed On property holders’ rights to discriminate:

Yes, the "LEAVE!" faction of the British Conservative and Unionist Party is bats--- insane. Any questions?: Arj Singh: 'Increasing Number' Of Tory MPs Are Considering No-Deal Brexit As A 'Viable' Plan B: "A Leave-backing former cabinet minister said... 'People aren’t going round and saying "No Deal" is going to be a cakewalk. But... people are... asking "how much will this actually impact people’s lives?" We won’t be able to get certain foods like bananas or tomatoes but it’s not like we won’t be able to eat. And we’ll be leaving at a time when British produce is beginning to come into season, so it’s the best possible time to leave with no deal'...

M.G. Siegler: Apple’s Precarious and Pivotal 2019: The battery replacement issue suggests that many people are no longer upgrading iPhones because they’re now 'good enough' and everyone is more than happy to just pay a bit more for a better battery.... The part about 'US dollar strength-related price increases'—yes, this is Apple... acknowledging there may be a price ceiling for the iPhone.... The '$1,500 iPhone' (the most expensive variety of the iPhone XS Max) [was] to test such upper boundaries, like velociraptors testing electric fences. Consider it tested! And they’ll remember!...

1. What Is Going on This Morning Over at "National Review"? Is It Worth Reading? No.: I read 10 articles, and graded each ops 0-to-10 scale. Total score (out of 100); -45. Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life there at all...

1. Lindsay Ellis: Death of the Author #movies

2. Andrew Gaudion: Ranking Every Training Montage in the ‘Rocky’ Franchise

3. Bruce Springsteen: Tougher Than the Rest #music

4. Bruce Springsteen: Brilliant Disguise #music

5. I now think the right dates for the "long" 20th Century are: May 10, 1869-November 8, 2016: Frederick Studemann: The New Year Could Mark the Beginning of a New(ish) Century: "There are those, such as the economic historian Brad DeLong, who wonder whether Hobsbawn may have short-changed the 20th century. Can a case can be made, they ask, for the 20th century to run from 1870, when the wider impact of the industrial revolution became clear, political economics became central and liberal democracy took hold, to just after the global financial crisis?...

6. Noah Smith: China's Economic Growth at Risk From Reversing Reforms - Bloomberg: "There already are some signs that the country is making mistakes that will hobble economic growth.... By many measures, China is the world’s largest economy. This means a number of benefits will now flow—and indeed are already flowing—to China that used to go to the U.S. and Europe. Chief among these is agglomeration.... But... it might easily make mistakes that would prevent the country from leveraging that size for maximum economic benefit. Chief among these self-inflicted wounds would be closing the country to foreign investment, extending state control of the economy and adopting an adversarial relationship with neighboring nations. Ominously, the country seems to doing all of these now, to one extent on another... #economicgrowth

7. Richa Gupta and Umang Aggarwal: Is there a “Late Converger Stall” in Economic Development? Can India Escape it?: "A major driver of these good times is 'economic convergence', whereby poorer countries have grown faster than richer countries and closed the gap in standards of living. The convergence process has been broadening and accelerating for the last 20-30 years.... [But] the possibility of... a 'Late Converger Stall'... #economicgrowth #economichistory #globalization

8. Liz Bruenig: Falwell’s entire view of Christianity and politics... I suspect... stems from a mistaken reading of Augustine, the fourth-century African saint who wrote 'The City of God'... #moralphilosophy

9. Francis Crick (1967): To James Watson

10. Guinness: noitulovE

11. Kate Riga: GOP Senator Calls For End Of Shutdown Without Deal On Trump’s Border Wall: "Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO).... 'I think we should pass a continuing resolution to get the government back open. The Senate has done it last Congress, we should do it again today', Gardner said.... Gardner is up for reelection in 2020 in a purple state...

12. Yes, it was a mistake for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates last month: Chris Matthews: Dow Tumbles 650 points as Apple News, Manufacturing Data Spark Fears of Global Slowdown: ".S. stock indexes closed sharply lower Thursday, after a survey of American manufacturers showed the sector growing at its slowest pace in two years, and after a sales forecast cut by Apple Inc AAPL, -9.96% intensified fears of a slowing Chinese economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -2.83% fell 661.58 points, or 2.8%, to 22,684.66, the S&P 500 index SPX, -2.48% , shed 62.18 points, or 2.5%, to 2,447.87, while the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -3.04% tumbled 202.43 points, or 3%, to 6,463.50...

13. Maybe now that Trump has embraced lowering corporate profits as a policy goal, Mike Pence will be willing to invoke Amendment 25: Josh Barro: China Is Losing Trump’s Trade War—and So Are We: "This is the insanity of the president’s trade war policy: it’s negative-sum.... Trump’s own economic adviser is going on television and saying his policy is going to reduce corporate profits. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the strange disconnect between financial markets and economic data.... Well, as Bloomberg put it in a headline this morning, 'Bad Stuff the Stock Market Worried About Is Starting to Happen'.... The economy is weakening, and market participants know it, but the weakened performance has not yet shown up in lagging economic data...

Nick Rowe: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Are We at Full Employment Yet?": "Set aside the other benefits of switching from an inflation target to an NGDP level path target. If switching targets meant we wouldn't need to ask "Are we at full employment yet?" in order to figure out whether monetary policy is too tight or too loose, that would be a major advantage. Because it's a question we can't answer until it's too late. Instead we would simply hope that we are not at full employment yet: we would hope that target NGDP growth would in future be composed more of real GDP growth and less of inflation. And we would be forced to concentrate instead on microeconomic policies that might improve that composition...

What more would it take to get Pence to Invoke #Amendment25?: Daniel Dale: These Are Headlines About One Trump Cabinet Meeting:

Maybe now that Trump has embraced lowering corporate profits as a policy goal, Mike Pence will be willing to invoke Amendment 25: Josh Barro: China Is Losing Trump’s Trade War—and So Are We: "This is the insanity of the president’s trade war policy: it’s negative-sum.... Trump’s own economic adviser is going on television and saying his policy is going to reduce corporate profits. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the strange disconnect between financial markets and economic data.... Well, as Bloomberg put it in a headline this morning, 'Bad Stuff the Stock Market Worried About Is Starting to Happen'.... The economy is weakening, and market participants know it, but the weakened performance has not yet shown up in lagging economic data...

Yes, it was a mistake for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates last month: Chris Matthews: Dow Tumbles 650 points as Apple News, Manufacturing Data Spark Fears of Global Slowdown: ".S. stock indexes closed sharply lower Thursday, after a survey of American manufacturers showed the sector growing at its slowest pace in two years, and after a sales forecast cut by Apple Inc AAPL, -9.96% intensified fears of a slowing Chinese economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -2.83% fell 661.58 points, or 2.8%, to 22,684.66, the S&P 500 index SPX, -2.48% , shed 62.18 points, or 2.5%, to 2,447.87, while the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -3.04% tumbled 202.43 points, or 3%, to 6,463.50...

What is going on this morning over at National Review? Is it worth reading? I read 10 articles, and graded each ops 0-to-10 scale. Total score (out of 100); -45. Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life there at all:

Richa Gupta and Umang Aggarwal: Is there a “Late Converger Stall” in Economic Development? Can India Escape it?: "A major driver of these good times is 'economic convergence', whereby poorer countries have grown faster than richer countries and closed the gap in standards of living. The convergence process has been broadening and accelerating for the last 20-30 years.... [But] the possibility of... a 'Late Converger Stall'...

Noah Smith: China's Economic Growth at Risk From Reversing Reforms - Bloomberg: "There already are some signs that the country is making mistakes that will hobble economic growth.... By many measures, China is the world’s largest economy. This means a number of benefits will now flow—and indeed are already flowing—to China that used to go to the U.S. and Europe. Chief among these is agglomeration.... But... it might easily make mistakes that would prevent the country from leveraging that size for maximum economic benefit. Chief among these self-inflicted wounds would be closing the country to foreign investment, extending state control of the economy and adopting an adversarial relationship with neighboring nations. Ominously, the country seems to doing all of these now, to one extent on another...

I now think the right dates for the "long" 20th Century are: May 10, 1869-November 8, 2016: Frederick Studemann: The New Year Could Mark the Beginning of a New(ish) Century: "There are those, such as the economic historian Brad DeLong, who wonder whether Hobsbawn may have short-changed the 20th century. Can a case can be made, they ask, for the 20th century to run from 1870, when the wider impact of the industrial revolution became clear, political economics became central and liberal democracy took hold, to just after the global financial crisis?...

1. Hoisted from 2008: Trade and Distribution: A Multisector Stolper-Samuelson Finger Exercise: This argument of an inconsistency between free trade and the well-being of the majority of potential voters rests substantially on the two-factor example of the Stolper-Samuelson result. It does not fare too well when we generalize to a situation in which there are a number of different factors—even if the ownership of the abundant factors of production is very concentrated indeed... #economics, #equitablegrowth, #globalization, #highlighted, #hoistedfromthearchives

1. William Morris said: "If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful". What is the equivalent for our mental houses?: Barry Ritholtz: More Signal, Less Noise: "ere are some things you need to understand if you want to decrease the noise...

2. Quoctrung Bui: Map: The Most Common Job In Every State: "We used data from the Census Bureau, which has two catch-all categories: "managers not elsewhere classified" and "salespersons not elsewhere classified." Because those categories are broad and vague to the point of meaninglessness, we excluded them from our map...

3. Danny Blanchflower: "Hey Stephen Mooreyou need to withdraw this lie NOW: ‘Pay gains in real terms this year are now estimated at 3 percent—one of the biggest increases in two decades’. Real hrly earnings rose 0.8% real weekly 0.5%...

4. David Weigel: "Warren's 2020 launch video is genuinely interesting because it offers Dems something they have not nominated in ages: A nominee who identifies specific sources of trouble and will fight them, instead of suggesting that a good politician can get everyone to work together...

5. Tren Griffin: A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Charlie Munger (Distilled to less than 500 Words) – 25iq: "The intent with this post is to distill Charlie Munger’s approach to making decisions to less than 500 words.  If you don’t have the patience to read 500 words, I can’t help you...

6. Miguel Hernan: Causal Inference Book: "Jamie Robins and I are working on a book that provides a cohesive presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. Much of this material is currently scattered across journals in several disciplines or confined to technical articles. We expect that the book will be of interest to anyone interested in causal inference, e.g., epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, computer scientists… The book is divided in 3 parts of increasing difficulty: causal inference without models, causal inference with models, and causal inference from complex longitudinal data...

7. Erik Berglöf: Learning from China: "Despite 40 years of unprecedented economic growth, Chinese leaders' efforts to promote their development model have run up against political suspicion. But it makes little sense for countries to reject outright the lessons of China’s economic miracle, and deepening hostility between China and the West is in nobody’s interest...

8. John Geanakoplos: Leverage and Cycles

9. Peter Wade: Kelly Confirms He Was Lying All Along: The White House Is in Chaos: "In an exit interview, the outgoing chief of staff tries to protect his legacy...

10. Paul Krugman: The Trump Tax Cut: Even Worse Than You’ve Heard: "The 2017 tax cut has received pretty bad press, and rightly so. Its proponents made big promises about soaring investment and wages, and also assured everyone that it would pay for itself; none of that has happened. Yet coverage actually hasn’t been negative enough.... The reality: No money has... been brought home... the tax cut has... reduced national income... at least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer...

11. Martin Wolf: The Future Might Not Belong to China: "China has had a hugely impressive four decades. After their triumph in the cold war, both the west and the cause of liberal democracy have stumbled. Should we conclude that an autocratic China is sure to become the world’s dominant power in the next few decades? My answer is: no. That is a possible future, not a certain one...

12. Paul Krugman is tired to trying to reason with you people...

13. Dani Rodrik: China’s Boldest Experiment: "China... offered a master class.... Dual-track pricing provided market incentives at the margin without undermining the fiscal revenues. TVEs spurred private entrepreneurship, despite weak frameworks for property rights and contract enforcement. SEZs spurred exports and foreign investment without undermining employment among protected state enterprises. Industrial policies allowed infant industries to internalize learning spillovers. In short, China represents the triumph of practical economics–in which second-best strategies, market failures, general equilibrium, and political economy prevail – over the simplistic reasoning of Econ 101...

Martin Wolf: The Future Might Not Belong to China: "China has had a hugely impressive four decades. After their triumph in the cold war, both the west and the cause of liberal democracy have stumbled. Should we conclude that an autocratic China is sure to become the world’s dominant power in the next few decades? My answer is: no. That is a possible future, not a certain one...

Paul Krugman: The Trump Tax Cut: Even Worse Than You’ve Heard: "The 2017 tax cut has received pretty bad press, and rightly so. Its proponents made big promises about soaring investment and wages, and also assured everyone that it would pay for itself; none of that has happened. Yet coverage actually hasn’t been negative enough.... The reality: No money has... been brought home... the tax cut has... reduced national income... at least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer...

Hoisted from 2008: Trade and Distribution: A Multisector Stolper-Samuelson Finger Exercise: This argument of an inconsistency between free trade and the well-being of the majority of potential voters rests substantially on the two-factor example of the Stolper-Samuelson result. It does not fare too well when we generalize to a situation in which there are a number of different factors—even if the ownership of the abundant factors of production is very concentrated indeed... https://delong.typepad.com/stolper-samuelson_finger_exercise-1.pdf

Comment of the Day: Howard: WTF?!?!: "the definition of "reasonable" being employed here is that a white man with a ph.d. is writing in measured tones, period...

Danny Blanchflower: "Hey Stephen Moore you need to withdraw this lie NOW: ‘Pay gains in real terms this year are now estimated at 3 percent—one of the biggest increases in two decades’. Real hrly earnings rose 0.8% real weekly 0.5%...

Quoctrung Bui: Map: The Most Common Job In Every State: "We used data from the Census Bureau, which has two catch-all categories: "managers not elsewhere classified" and "salespersons not elsewhere classified." Because those categories are broad and vague to the point of meaninglessness, we excluded them from our map:

William Morris said: "If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful". What is the equivalent for our mental houses?: Barry Ritholtz: More Signal, Less Noise: "ere are some things you need to understand if you want to decrease the noise...

1. A Lazy New Year's Eve Morn on Twitter...: I had thought that my brilliant-but-at-times-highly-annoying coauthor @Econ_Marshall was making a more sophisticated point—that here in America "libertarianism" is a Frankenstein's monster that got its lightning-bolt juice from massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Dismantling the New Deal and rolling back the social insurance state were not ideas that had much potential political-economy juice back in the 1950s and 1960s. But if the economic libertarian cause of dismantling the New Deal could be harnessed to the cause of white supremacy—if one of the key liberties that libertarians were fighting to defend was the liberty to discriminate against and oppress the Negroes... #publicsphere #economicsgonewrong #moralphilosophy #ontwitter

2. Note to Self: WTF?!?!: At a ten-percent pre-tax social return to investment, that would require a 1 trillion—a 5%-point of national income—permanent upward jump in the annual flow of investment into America. Given that it looks like Trump is raising the annual deficit by 400 billion, that would require a 1.4 trillion—a 75-point of national income—permanent upward jump in the sum of annual private savings plus the annual trade deficit. On what planet and on what definition of "reasonable" is it "reasonable" to argue that Trump's tax cuts are going produce such a thing?... #fiscalpolicy #economicsgonewrong #orangehairedbaboons #notetoself #wtf

3. Not Only No Wage But Minimal Investment Boosts from Trump-McConnell-Ryan...: Admittedly, making an argument that complex is far beyond the attention span of your standard NYT insider-access journalist. But do we really have any alternative other than to play our position and make the accurate and correct argument? Just saying "no wage growth" is met with parry "it will come in the long run" and being able to say "we told you so" a decade hence is of limited use in today's policy debate, no?... #publicfinance #equitablegrowth #orangehairedbaboons #economicsgonewrong #playingourposition #ontwitter

4. Would Small Minimum Wage Increases Raise or Have No Effect on Employment?: It is only a small minority of economists who follow David Neumark on this—who are confident that a higher minimum wage now would have a noticeable negative effect on employment. Thus Steve gets it wrong... #publicsphere #equitablegrowth #labormarket

1. J. Bradford De Long: America's Only Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s: "The 1970s were America's only peacetime inflation, as uncertainty about prices made every business decision a speculation on monetary policy. In magnitude, the total rise in the price level from the spurt in inflation to the five-to-ten percent per year range in the 1970s was as large as the jumps in prices from the major wars of this century. The truest cause of the 1970s inflation was the shadow of the Great Depression. The memory left by the Depression predisposed the left and center to think that any unemployment was too much, and eliminated any mandate the Federal Reserve might have had for controlling inflation by risking unemployment. The Federal Reserve gained, or regained, its mandate to control inflation at the risk of unemployment during the 1970s as discontent built over that decade's inflation. It is hard to see how the Federal Reserve could have acquired such a mandate without an unpleasant lesson like the inflation of the 1970s. Thus the memory of the Great Depression meant that the U.S. was highly likely to suffer an inflation like the 1970s in the post-World War II period þ maybe not as long, and maybe not in that particular decade, but nevertheless an inflation of recognizably the same genus... #monetarypolicy #macro #highlighted

2. Barry Ritholtz: What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle: "An initial study said the increase to $15 would cost workers jobs and hours. That didn’t happen.... The increase was an 'economic death wish' that was going to tank the expansion and kill jobs, according to the sages at conservative think tanks. The warnings were as unambiguous as they were specific... #minimumwage #labormarket #seattle #equitablegrowth

3. Patriarchy and DNA: We Know Little About the Origins of High Patriarchy and the Extinction of Most Y-Chromosome Lineages ca. 5000 Years Ago, But... #gender

4. Matthew Yglesias: Trump may be correct on Fed interest rate increases - Vox: "Premature interest rate increases hurt workers and the economy... #monetarypolicy

5. Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur and Arvind Subramanian: Everything You Know about Cross-Country Convergence Is (Now) Wrong: "A quarter-century after the empirical growth literature set out to explain why poor countries aren’t catching up with rich ones, cross-country regressions have mercifully gone out of fashion. But in the interim, the core facts have changed... #economicgrowth #convergence #divergence

6. Richard Thaler: The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad: "All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.... It should be as easy as possible to opt out.... There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.... Government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously. But the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior... #behavioral #economics

7. Benjamin Page and William Gale: CBO estimates imply that TCJA will boost incomes for foreign investors but not for Americans: "CBO estimates that TCJA will increase U.S. GDP by 0.5 percent in 2028.... Most of that additional capital will be financed by foreigners... net payments of profits, dividends, and interest to foreigners also will rise... boost GNP by just 0.1 percent in 2028.... To maintain that larger capital stock a larger share of output must be devoted to offsetting depreciation.... Thus, long-run incomes for Americans as measured by NNP will be more or less unchanged by the TCJA... #publicfinance #orangehariedbaboons

8. Howard Shelanski and Michael Kades: Judge Kavanaugh-Would He Increase the Divide Between the Public and Judicial Debate Over Antitrust Enforcement?: "Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has, with one exception that we discuss below, followed a path of reduced enforcement, reflected in decisions weakening prohibitions against vertical restraints... #monopoly #equitablegrowth

9. Everybody in any way associated with National Review knows that ObamaCare must be repealed and replaced. Not a single person is qualified to say how; National Review: Obamacare Court Ruling—Republicans Can’t Rely on the Courts on Health Care: "Republican politicians have repeatedly counted on the courts to deliver them from Obamacare without their having to take any heat for abolishing its popular elements, to come up with workable alternatives, or to accommodate the interests of people who rely on the law while pleasing those who oppose it. O’Connor’s decision is giving them a new dodge: As it winds its way through the courts, they can continue telling the opponents of the law that victory is at hand, continue telling those who benefit from the law that they will protect them whatever happens, and—continue not working on health care. But the courts will almost certainly not, as they should not, deliver Republicans from their duties... #ObamaCare #orangehairedbaboons

10. Barbara Kiviat: The Art of Deciding with Data: Evidence From How Employers Translate Credit Reports into Hiring Decisions: "Half of US employers consider personal credit history when hiring.... They... reach beyond credit reports, both by inferring events that led to delinquent debt and by testing to see if candidates can offer morally redeeming accounts... #equitblegrowth

11. Jonathan Baker: Market Power or Just Scale Economies?: "Growing market power provides a better explanation for higher price-cost margins and rising concentration in many industries, declining economic dynamism, and other contemporary US trends, than the most plausible benign alternative: increased scale economies and temporary returns to the first firms to adopt new information technologies (IT) in competitive markets. The benign alternative has an initial plausibility.... Yet six of the nine reasons I gave for thinking market power is substantial and widening in the US in my testimony cannot be reconciled with the benign alternative.... None of the reasons is individually decisive: there are ways to question or push back against each. But their weaknesses are different, so, taken collectively, they paint a compelling picture of substantial and widening market power over the late 20th century and early 21st century... #monopoly

12. Paul Krugman (2013): Eco 348, The Great Recession #macro #teachingeconomics #greatrecession

13. If you missed Anne Case and Angus Deaton on "deaths of despair" when it came out at the start of this year, you need to go back and read it: Iris Marechal: The Opioid Crisis: A Consequence of U.S. Economic Decline?: "Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton University attribute the sharp increase in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2015 to 'deaths of despair' rather than to the increased ease of obtaining opioids: That is, their research suggests that higher drug suicides are attributable to social and economic factors such as a prolonged economic decline in many parts of the United States. They show that white Americans are more affected by the opioid epidemic, yet less affected by economic downturns than other racial and ethnic groups in the country... #equitablegrowth