Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Note to Self: Neoliberal: The 2019 Neoliberal Shill Bracket: "The round of 64 polls will be published tomorrow and will remain up for 48 hours. Each round will have its own thread with all the polls in it. There will be a 24 hour cool off period between rounds for tasteful smack talk:

Big oligopolistic companies conduct research and development to produce technologies that benefit them—which typically means technologies In which capital substitutes for labor and allows them to shed jobs from their value chain. Enhancing societal well-being, however, requires the development of technologies that do not substitute for but that complement human capabilities. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the private sector cannot get this balance right: Tim O'Reilly: Gradually, Then Suddenly: "Neural interfaces: One of my biggest 'Wow!' moments of 2018 took place in the offices of neural interface company CTRL-labs. The company's demo involves someone playing the old Asteroids computer game without touching a keyboard, using machine learning to interpret the nerve signals.... But that’s just the first stage. Essentially, users of this technology 'grow' another virtual hand, which they can move independently of their physical hands.... Humanity is already going cyborg.... Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that AI will replace humans when it can be used even more powerfully to augment them...

There do not appear to be many examples of governments that both increase inequality and raise the standard of living of the bottom 10%. Instead, it appears to be one or the other: Dan Davies (2015): Up and Down, Left and Right: "Inequality in the UK against the income of the poorest 10%, as a time series.... It hits you right between the eyes. It’s all up-and-down or left-and-right. The sort of thing that generates the difficult cases for liberal political philosophy–increases in inequality which nevertheless benefited the worst-off, which would have showed up as a southwest-to-northeast upward slope–never happened...

Yet more evidence that inflation builds very slowly. There appears to be no such thing as a red line that prudent economies dare not cross: Sylvain Leduc, Chitra Marti, and Daniel J. Wilson: Does Ultra-Low Unemployment Spur Rapid Wage Growth?: "The unemployment rate ended 2018 at just under 4%, substantially lower than most estimates of the natural rate. Could such an ostensibly tight labor market lead to a sharp pickup in wage growth from its recent moderate pace, such that the relationship between wage growth and unemployment is not always linear? Investigations using state-level data show no economically significant nonlinearity between wage growth and unemployment that would predict an abrupt jump in wage growth...

On this question, these days I tend to go the full MMT: the bond market will tell us when it is time to worry about the deficit and the debt, and that time is not now: Jason Furman and Larry Summers: Why Washington Should Worry Less About the Deficit: "As policymakers set budgets in the coming years, a lot will depend on what interest rates do. Financial markets do not expect the increases in interest rates that budget forecasters have priced in. If the markets prove right, that will strengthen the case against deficit reduction. If, on the other hand, interest rates start to rise well above what even the budget forecasters expect, then, as in the early 1990s, more active efforts to cut the deficit could make sense...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey schools our friend, smart young whippersnapper Noah Smith formerly of Stoneybrook and now of Bloomberg: "There is a lot of evidence from political scientists as to how loudly money talks in political democracies, and it is very well laid out in Elisabeth Jacobs's contribution to our After Piketty": Elisabeth Jacobs (1017): Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in _Capital in the Twenty-First Century...

Mark Koyama: A Nationalism Untethered to History: "The novelty of The Virtue of Nationalism is twofold. First, Hazony’s positive vision of a national state is based on the biblical account for the early Israelite kingdom.... Second... the nationalism Hazony defends is essentially an ethnic nationalism.... In the current political environment, these views should not be ignored.... A frank conversation about national loyalty, and especially the history of the nation state and its role in the advances of the modern world, are needed now more than ever. Unfortunately, The Virtue of Nationalism has very little to offer to such a conversation...

• The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson

1. Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts: "From candlelight to early bedtime, I read...

2. Max Roser: Light

3. Erik Loomis: "This Day in Labor History: February 27, 1869: The great workplace safety reformer Alice Hamilton is born. Let's talk about her amazing work and what workers faced in the early 20th century...

4. Thomas Jefferson: VI. Salary Account of the Department of State, [1 April 1791]

5. Measuring Worth

6. *The First Foot Guards Reenactment Group: The Cost of Living: "London, mid 1700s...

7. William Savage: The Cost of 18th-Century Lighting

8. Karl Marx (1853): The Future Results of British Rule in India: "All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...

9. Thomas Jefferson: Statement of Debts, Expenses, and Income, 1 April 1823

10. Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson (2011): Pre-Industrial Inequality

11. Wikipedia: Pareto Distribution

12. Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian: Everything You Know about Cross-Country Convergence Is (Now) Wrong | PIIE

13. David Roberts: Green New Deal Critics Are Missing The Bigger Picture: "Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture...

14. INET: Global Commission Discusses Tech + the Future of Work in San Francisco: "The latest meeting of INET’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation addressed the impact of technological change on jobs and society—and how best to harness the power of tech...

15. World Bank: Trouble in the Making? The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development

16. Joe Studwell: How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World's Most Dynamic Region

17. Saveur: La Louisiane Cocktail

Jack Mclaughlin (1988): Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429936797: "The young tutor Philip Fithian reported that during a holiday dinner, the dining room at Nomini Hall 'looked luminous and splendid; four very large candles burning on the table where we supp’d, three others in different parts of the room'. A total of seven candles could not have produced a great amount of light by our standards, but eighteenth-century eyes existed in quite another world of nighttime illumination. A single candle was enough to read by, and four candles could be 'luminous and splendid'...

This came out last November 26. Is there anybody—anybody—who now thinks that the Federal Reserve would be better prepared for the future and that the economic future would be brighter had the Fed taken Marty's advice and raised interest rates further faster? Anybody? Anyone? Bueller?: Martin Feldstein: Raise Rates Today to Fight a Recession Tomorrow: "A downturn is inevitable as asset prices fall. The Fed can prepare by continuing to raise rates now...

Greg Leiserson has an excellent piece over at MarketWatch for everybody who wants to rapidly get up to speed on what a net-worth wealth tax might be and how it could work: Greg Leiserson: How a wealth tax would work in the United States - MarketWatch: "Policy makers looking for a highly progressive tax instrument that raises substantial revenue would find a net-worth tax appealing. Such a tax would impose burden primarily on the wealthiest families—reducing wealth inequality—and could raise substantial revenues. As noted above, the United States taxes wealth in several forms already. Thus, the policy debate is less about whether to tax wealth and more about the best ways to tax wealth and how much it should be taxed. A net-worth tax could be a useful complement to—or substitute for—other means of taxing wealth, as well as a tool for increasing overall taxation of wealth...

There is no Phillips Curve-breakdown puzzle in the behavior of infaltion over the past decade once one recognizes that (a) the employment-to-population ratio and not the unemployment rate is the right measure of how bad the job market is, and (b) that people have been—I think largely because of misinformation from the press—thinking that inflation is higher than it in fact is: Laurence M. Ball and Sandeep Mazumder: The Nonpuzzling Behavior of Median Inflation: "Inflation behavior is easier to understand if we divide headline inflation into core and transitory components, and if core inflation is measured by the weighted median of industry inflation rates... [that] filters out large price changes in all industries. We illustrate the usefulness of the weighted median with a case study of inflation in 2017 and early 2018. We also show that a Phillips curve relating the weighted median to unemployment appears clearly in the data for 1985-2017, with no sign of a breakdown in 2008...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey engaged with Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, Andrew Berg, and Jason Furman at the Peterson Institute on Thursday January 31: Peterson Institute: Book discussion: Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth: "Book discussion with Jonathan Ostry, @LounganiPrakash, and Andrew Berg of @IMFNews on Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth with additional comments with @jasonfurman of PIIE & Heather Boushey of @equitablegrowth. January 31, 12:15 pm...

Kate Bahn sends us to Equitable Growth alumnus Nick Bunker. Nick continues his campaign to get people to look not at inflation but at wage growth—which has been slowly inching up since 2014—to gauge how close we are to that mysterious "full employment". Bottom line: we are not there yet: Nick Bunker: "Inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings up 1.7% over the past year. A friendly-reminder that real wage growth isn’t a good metric for assessing short-term health/slack of labor market. (Unless, of course, you think swings in energy prices are telling you something very important about the US labor market.) Far less volatility when you look at core inflation, but at this point why not just look at nominal wage growth?...

I have been waiting for this from Piketty-Saez-Zucman to show up for a while, and here it is now in our WCEG working paper series. This is the simplified and streamlined version on their take on how we should do national income statistics for the twenty-first century—how we can and should take advantage of our data to go beyond averages and seriously track issues of distribution. READ IT! Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman: Simplified Distributional National Accounts: "This paper develops a simplified methodology that starts from the fiscal income top income share series and makes very basic assumptions on how each income component from national income that is not included in fiscal income is distributed.... It can be used to create distributional national income statistics in countries where fiscal income inequality statistics are available but where there is limited information to impute other income.... This simplified methodology can also be used to assess the plausibility of the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) assumptions. In particular, we will show that the simplified methodology can be used to show that the alternative assumptions proposed by Auten and Splinter (2018) imply a drastic equalization of income components not in fiscal income which does not seem realistic...

Anthropologist Jason Hickel appears to be dedicated to destroying anthropologists' global reputation. You shouldn't let people put lies on top of your work as headlines—and if you do, you then have no standing to complain that others are in any sense telling the wrong truth. If someone "forces" a headline on you, it's still your headline—you endorse it, or you withdraw your article: Dylan Matthews: Bill Gates Tweeted Out a Chart and Sparked a Debate on Global Poverty: "Anthropologist Jason Hickel stood up to say: Not so fast. In a Guardian article titled 'Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong'.... But... everyone agrees that since 1981, the incomes of the world’s poorest people have gone up.... Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors. Everyone agrees incomes for the poor haven’t gone up enough, and that $1.90 per day is hardly enough for a human being to live a decent life.... Hickel argues that focusing on data showing declines in global poverty does political work on behalf of global capitalism, defending an inherently unjust global system.... [Max] Roser, as he stressed repeatedly in messages to me, just wants to be clear on what the facts say — and what they say definitively is that living conditions for the world order have improved for decades and decades. Based on my read of the evidence, that’s certainly true...

Paul Krugman: Running on MMT: "I was glad to see Stephanie Kelton responding.... The problem is that I don’t understand her arguments.... A key proposition of Abba Lerner’s doctrine of 'functional finance', which is in turn a large part of the MMT doctrine, is that the appropriate size of the budget deficit can be determined by how big it needs to be to ensure full employment.... [But] as long as monetary policy is available, there is a range of possible deficits consistent with that goal. The question then becomes one of tradeoffs...

On December 21, the sun sets at Monticello at 4:57 pm. Civil twilight—when there is still enough light to conduct normal activities—ends at 5:27 pm. By March 21, the sun sets at 6:26 eastern standard time—Monticello is west of the center of America's eastern time zone—and civil twilights ends at 7:52. And on June 21 the sun sets at Monticello at 7:39 pm. Civil twilight ends at 8:11 pm (standard time). Even in the summer, moreover, Thomas Jefferson was unlikely to want to go to sleep when it got dark, with the chickens.

Hence his concern with candles:

1791 September 15: I will now ask the favor of you to procure for me, in the proper seasons 250 lb. of myrtle wax candles, moulded, and of the largest size you can find...

1792 January 24: Myrtle candles of last year out...

1792 November 4: I must now repeat to you my annual sollicitation to procure and send me 200 ℔ myrtle wax candles. I do not know whether the mixing tallow with the wax be absolutely necessary. If not, I would wish them of the pure wax; but if some mixture be necessary, then as little as will do...

• Modern Economic Growth Lecture Slides

• Comment of the Day: PGL: "Your October 2006 take down of that Moore spin noted that Lancet II was not inconsistent with Lancet I (Moore tried to suggest otherwise). The Guardian story from October 11, 2006 is a must-read confirming your view and basically suggesting Moore is a lying idiot...

• Weekend Reading: The Kentucky Strain of American Nationalism: From J. William Ward: "Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age": "'But Jackson he was wide awake/and wasn’t scared with trifles/For well he knew what aim we take/with our Kentucky rifles/So he marched us down to “Cyprus Swamp”/The ground was low and mucky/There stood “John Bull,” in martial pomp/But here was old Kentucky...'

• Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "I will NOT give Elaine Kamarck credit for going after Obama for not going after Wall Street. This is the same Elaine Kamarck who wrote a paper advocating for Fannie Mae shareholders.... Now after serving as a hack and one of the vultures' vultures she is utterly shameless enough to accuse Obama of going easy on Wall Street. This woman has no integrity and not useful role...

• The State of America's Political-Public Sphere

• Note to Self: I am voting for: "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" #spiderverse...

• Debt-Derangement Syndrome: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate—Long Version

1. Sean Illing: "Fascism: A Warning" from Madeleine Albright: "The former secretary of state is sounding the alarm about rising fascism around the world—and in America...

2. David Goldenberg: The Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie - Atlas Obscura: "at first glance, it’s hard to know what’s happening in this picture. A giant mushroom seems to have sprouted in a factory floor, where ghostly men in hardhats seem to be working. But there’s something undeniably eerie about the scene, for good reason. You’re looking at the largest agglomeration of one of the most toxic substances ever created: corium...

3. Neil Irwin: How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deficits and Debt: "The old rules are being rejected, among liberals and conservatives, politicians and economists...

4. James Fallows: @jamesfallows: "If you have any experience in government, you will find these 78 seconds stupefying. And if you don’t, let me tell you: this is stupefying. (Lighthizer is right about how international trade agreements work): JM Rieger: @RiegerReport: 'TRUMP: I don’t like MOUs because they don’t mean anything. LIGHTHIZER: An MOU is a contract. TRUMP: I disagree. I think that a memorandum of understanding is not a contract to the extent that we want. CHINA’S VICE PREMIER: [Chuckles] Okay...

5. Jason Zengerle: The Series of Historical Mistakes That Led to Trump: "Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarized mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving 'moderate Republicanism', are probably futile. But some of his proposals—including... exchange programs... so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa—are both realistic and novel. Indeed, the most helpful—if sobering—point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them...

6. Wikipedia: The Act of Killing: "Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and co-directed by Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian.... The Act of Killing won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won best documentary at the 67th BAFTA awards...

7. BWW: Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In On Berkeley Rep's Paradise Square: An American Musical

8. Yannay Spitzer: Research Papers

9. Yannay Spitzer: Bits and Pieces of My Work and Interests

10. Philip Klotzbach: @philklotzbach: "Supertyphoon #Wutip has now generated the most Accumulated Cyclone Energy for any Northwest Pacific #typhoon during February on record (since 1950), breaking old record set by Nancy (1970). #SuperTyphoonWutip...

11. Wikipedia: Supertyphoon Wutip: "Early on February 25, Wutip reached its peak intensity as a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, with maximum 10-minute sustained winds of 195 km/h (120 mph), 1-minute sustained winds of 260 km/h (160 mph), and a minimum central pressure of 915 hPa (mbar). As of 12:00 UTC on February 25, Typhoon Wutip is located near 14.2°N 140.1°E, also about 280 nautical miles (520 km; 320 mi) north-northeast of Yap. Maximum 10-minute sustained winds are at 105 knots (195 km/h; 120 mph), while maximum 1-minute sustained winds are at 130 knots (240 km/h; 150 mph), with gusts up to 150 knots (280 km/h; 175 mph)...

12. Shushman Choudhury, Michelle Lee, and Andrey Kurenkov: In Favor of Developing Ethical Best Practices in AI Research

13. Miniver Cheevy: DeLong's Principles Of Neoliberalism

14. No s---: Economist: How Welfare Reform Has Had a Negative Effect on the Children of Single Mothers: "Any short-term gains from welfare reform may have come at a cost to the next generation, leading to more of the type of behaviour associated with a “culture of poverty” that the reform was meant to combat...

15. Simon Potter: Models Only Get You So Far: "My remarks will focus on some insights from the book Superforecasting by... Tetlock and... Gardner.... What are some of the underlying reasons individuals and organizations fail to predict? What should we change about our mindsets and practices to improve the chances that we 'notice it' next time, whenever that may be?... Be humble, always question, listen to alternative views, and—very comfortingly for Bayesians like me—always express your forecast as a distribution rather than a point forecast, and crucially update that forecast when new information arrives. Further, constantly assess why forecasts worked and didn't work...

16. Wikipedia: The Hunters of Kentucky

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0m1Ser_mPMUYJ2H2EvS8ydlTw

Comment of the Day: PGL: "Your October 2006 take down of that Moore spin noted that Lancet II was not inconsistent with Lancet I (Moore tried to suggest otherwise). The Guardian story from October 11, 2006 is a must read confirming your view and basically suggesting Moore is a lying idiot: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/11/iraq.iraq

J. William Ward (1962): Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age 0195006992 http://amzn.to/2jAbLvi: "IN the spring of 1822, Noah M. Ludlow, prominent in the beginnings of the theater in the western United States...

...was in New Orleans. One day early in May he received, as was the custom in the early theater, a ‘benefit’ night. Remembering the occasion some years later, Ludlow could not recollect what pieces had been acted on that evening but he did recall doing something that was as a rule ‘entirely out of [his] line of business.’ As an added attraction he had sung a song he thought might please the people. The song was ‘The Hunters of Kentucky.’

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "I will NOT give Elaine Kamarck credit for going after Obama for not going after Wall Street. This is the same Elaine Kamarck who wrote a paper advocating for Fannie Mae shareholders:

Take the paper by Shapiro and Elaine Kamarck, touted as the independent views of officials from both the Obama and Clinton administrations, that comes to the conclusion that the hedge funds ought to be paid dollars for the shares of Fannie Mae they bought for pennies... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vulture-fund-lobbying_us_57350001e4b077d4d6f2a374

Now after serving as a hack and one of the vultures' vultures she is utterly shameless enough to accuse Obama of going easy on Wall Street. This woman has no integrity and not useful role in any discussion. Her dismal record of advocating welfare reform for purely partisan political reasons might not be enough to earn exclusion from polite society, but the gross, monstrous, appalling hypocrisy she recently displayed is too much. The Niskanen Center tainted itself by offering her a platform. If hacks who sell out can keep their ill gotten gains and their reputation, then the debate will continue to be contaminated by mercenaries...

One of my twitter threads from yesterday: I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2018.

On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party—so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins—have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.

We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them, but shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.

Marshall Steinbaum went to the Niskanen Center conference on Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. He got hives. Then his phone battery died: Marshall Steinbaum: https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall/status/1100078529482575872 "Good open from Wilkinson: didn’t moderates get us into this mess in the first place?... Kamarck’s interpretation of the history of the Democratic Party is that New Dems successfully prevented worse outcomes. Certainly not true in antitrust. She’s lamenting that Clinton did not enact “entitlement reform” in his second term. “And that was the end of the center.” The problem with Bush and Obama was that both men did not have the “capacity” to be president. Obama was to weak to resist Wall Street, she says. That’s supposed to exculpate centrism?...

David Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference on Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. He got hives. Then his phone battery died: David Walsh: https://twitter.com/DavidAstinWalsh/status/1100040738371502080: "Guys, this is like if Green Book founded a thinktank. I mean, sure, I can get on board with the basic principle that 'we should all love one another and take care of our children', but... c’mon. When the way you want to do that is an EITC, you’re out of ideas.... Margaret Hoover is now talking.... She did lose me, though, when she called Rick Perry a thoughtful, principled conservative who should have been the future of the movement.... One of the things that strikes me, as someone who is a pretty bad leftie but is at least engaged in the debates on the left... is that none of the speakers here actually know what’s going on on the left! Like, they know the Bush administration and the GOP, but the last time they thought critically about 'the left' was when they were making fun of hippies in college..... Also, they’re really talking up Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan, FWIW...

February 25, 2018 Economic History Seminar: Yannay Spitzer: Pale in Comparison: The Economic Ecology of the Jews as a Rural Service Minority: "The five million Jews who lived in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century were overwhelmingly over-represented in towns and in cities. They specialized in seemingly urban occupations, were relatively literate, and were almost absent in agriculture. This pattern persisted overseas where one-third of them would eventually immigrate. Hence, Jews were typically characterized as an urban minority. I argue that the opposite was true. The economic ecology of the Jews, the patterns of choices of occupation and location, are described in a model in which Jews were countryside workers with a comparative advantage in rural commerce, complementing agricultural workers, and without comparative advantage in denser urban settings...

Also very sorry to be missing this morning: Niskanen Center: Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism: "Welcoming Address from: David Brooks, New York Times columnist and author. Keynote speech by: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Panelists... Brink Lindsey, Frances Lee, Martin Gurri, Margaret Hoover, Will Wilkinson, Elaine Kamarck, Damon Linker, Yascha Mounk, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Aurelian Craiutu, Jacob Levy, Andrew Sullivan, Sam Tanenhaus...

Very sorry that I am going to miss this: Sam Bowles: The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens: "It is widely held today on grounds of prudence if not realism that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let homo economicus be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Bowles will explain why this is so, using evidence from behavioral experiments mechanism design and other sources, and propose an alternative paradigm for policy making...

This is very sad: Mike Boskin goes into intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Chapter 7. no, Trump did not reach for bipartisan consensus on any important issues in his SoTU address. Call in the auctioneers: Michael J. Boskin: The Race to Challenge Trump: "The challenge for Trump in 2020 will be to persuade enough voters in the middle to give him another four years, despite their discomfort with some of his behavior. It remains to be seen whether Trump can tone down his tweeting to offend fewer potential voters and, as in his recent State of the Union address, reach for bipartisan compromise on important issues...

Again if you want to negotiate with China over IP, you start by joining and strengthening the TPP so that the TPP can then confront China about the rules of the globalization game in the Pacific. You do not blow up the TPP on day 1, then follow that by ginning up fake complaints about NAFTA that you then walk away from, and then think there is a chance you will win something substantive and valuable that is against China's interest.

My problem with this whole line of columns from Marty is tha it ignores the fact that Trump is Trump, and has a history and a practice of not understanding the issues and then folding:

Martin Feldstein: Will the US Capitulate to China?: "It’s beginning to look like US President Donald Trump will yield to the Chinese in America’s trade conflict with China.... The most important problem... is that the Chinese are stealing US firms’ technology.... US firms that want to do business in China are required to have a Chinese partner and to share their technology.... That... is explicitly forbidden by World Trade Organization rules.... Second, the Chinese use the Internet to enter the computer systems of US firms and steal technology and blueprints.... Such cyber theft has resumed, presumably because state-owned companies and others have the ability to reach into the computer systems of US firms... The key issue is technology theft. Unless the Chinese agree to stop stealing technology, and the two sides devise a way to enforce that agreement, the US will not have achieved anything useful from Trump’s tariffs...

Josh Barro: Modern Monetary Theory Doesn’t Make Single-payer Any Easier: "The government is not constrained by its ability to obtain dollars, but the economy is constrained by real limits on productive capacity. If the government prints and spends money when the economy is at or near full employment, MMT counsels (correctly) that this will lead to inflation, and prescribes deficit-reducing tax increases to reduce aggregate demand and thereby control inflation...

Matt Bruenig: What’s the Point of Modern Monetary Theory?: "I have only ever written about MMT one time way back in 2013... pondering whether MMT is really just a very roundabout way of arguing that we should manage the price level through the fiscal authority and the debt level through the monetary authority rather than the other way around.... In the six years after my 2013 post, it has become clear to me that the bulk of MMT discourse is not really about what the best policy instruments are for maintaining price stability and debt stability, but rather about using word games to make people believe that the US can have Northern European levels of government spending without Northern European levels of taxation...

Larry Kudlow (April 7, 2008): The Therapeutic Power of Recessions: "Let’s also remember that recessions are therapeutic. They’re even necessary to create the foundations for the next recovery. Economic excesses always occur in free-market capitalist economies, and from time to time they must be cleansed. Just think about the excessive risk-speculation, leverage, and housing prices of the current episode. If anything, recessions make for clean starts...

An excellent catch from Equitable Growth's Michael Kades here. The debate over hospital mergers was mostly about whether scale-driven improvements in quality and reductions in cost would or would not be outweighed by the harm done by greater monopoly-power margins in charges to insurance companies and to patients. But it is looking increasingly likely that there are no scale driven improvements in quality or reductions in costs. He sends us to the extremely sharp Austin Frakt: Michael Kades: "The hospital industry, perhaps more than any other, had argued that consolidation will improve quality. Data increasingly says no: Austin Frakt: Hospital Mergers Improve Health? Evidence Shows the Opposite: "The claim was that larger organizations would be able to harness economies of scale and offer better care...

Note to Self: I am voting for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse #spiderverse

Debt-Derangement Syndrome: Standard policy economics dictates that the public sector needs to fill the gap in aggregate demand when the private sector is not spending enough. After a decade of denial, the Global North may finally be returning to economic basics.

For the past decade the public sphere of the Global North has been in a fit of high madness with respect to its excessive fear of government debts and deficits. But this affliction may be breaking. In the past two weeks I have noted two straws in the wind.

Charles Bramesco: War and Peace: Sergei Bondarchuk’s Adaptation Is One of Film’s Great Epics: "The biggest blockbuster in Soviet history is returning to movie screens in 2019. It’s compulsively watchable—and absolutely worth seeing.... In any serious, sober-minded discussion about what could be selected to exemplify the farthest reaches of cinema’s capabilities, War and Peace—Sergei Bondarchuk’s largely unseen adaptation of Tolstoy’s literary classic—would have to be on the table. The story of its production, of a man moving heaven and Earth to realize a staggering vision, boggles the mind to this day. The adaptation set a new standard for 'epic', capturing all the passion and tragedy of Napoleon’s clash against the Russian aristocracy in its seven-hour sprawl. Anyone who hears '431 minutes of War and Peace' and imagines an airless museum exhibit passing itself off as a film has another thing coming...

Department of "Huh!?!?" This has always struck me as so wrong on so many levels.

Ever since the first politician promulgated the first regulations about product quality and measure, politicians have been legislating market outcomes as they structure markets. What could make a person write such a thing as this?:

Kevin Murphy (2014): How Gary Becker Saw the Scourge of Discrimination: "The rise of the civil-rights movement helped Becker’s work to win wider acclaim in the 1960s.... Legal remedies sought by the campaigners played no significant role in his analysis.... Legal remedies have corrected some problems but exacerbated others.... Firms intent on discriminating in their hiring practices can move to locations without significant minority populations. More fundamentally, if people have a tendency to discriminate on the basis of race, legislation cannot eliminate that tendency. Politicians cannot merely legislate a new outcome, or legislate preferences away. They can only change the way discrimination manifests itself.... One obvious question begged by Becker’s work was, who benefits from discrimination? While he did not directly address this, he did suggest that one beneficiary might be labor unions...

• Weekend Reading: Why Is William L. Shirer's (1960) "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" Still the Best Book to Read About Nazi Germany?

• For the Weekend: Melissa Etheridge and Serena Ryder: The Sing-off!

• Comment of the Day: Kansas Jack: The Jesus Landing Pad: "It's more than foreign policy. Because the 2nd coming is imminent, Global Warming is not a threat either. And that is a lot of people in this country who believe Revelation has shown how the Earth ends and cite Genesis that God has promised never to again flood the world...

• Weekend Reading: The Federal Reserve in 2011 Debates Christina Romer's Ideas About the Need for "Regime Change"

• Weekend Watching: A Night at the Garden

1. Against Alasdair Macintyre's "After Virtue"...: Alasdair Macintyre, at least in his _After Virtue _mode, believes that good civilizations are ones with moral consensus led by prophets, rather than ones with moral confusion managed by managers... Trotskys (less preferred) or St. Benedicts (more preferred), but... [not] managerial Keyneses.... Trotsky says that History speaking through Marx and him knows how to build a Communist utopia. What is a Communist utopia? It is a society... well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and well-entertained.... We can see that Keynes was totally correct in wanting to reduce the influence of a Trotsky in the public square, because a Trotsky’s ideas about good organization of the economy were seen immediately by Keynes as, and turned out to be a horrible disaster, even from the perspective of Trotsky’s values—especially from the perspective of Trotsky’s values...

2. Òscar Jordà, Chitra Marti, Fernanda Nechio, and Eric Tallman: Inflation: Stress-Testing the Phillips Curve: "The increased importance of inflation expectations exposes new risks to standard monetary policy practice. In particular, it suggests that conducting policy consistently to keep expectations well-anchored to the target is key to avoiding large swings in inflation. When policy is set consistently, the public discounts deviations of the unemployment rate from its natural rate and of inflation from its target as transitory...

3. David Leonhardt: New York Did Us All a Favor by Standing Up to Amazon - The New York Times: "Yes, Amazon’s departure will modestly hurt the city’s economy. But it’s also a victory against bad economic policy...

4. Joe Heim: Acts of Extreme Vandalism by Students Stun Gonzaga College High School

5. Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on November 1–2, 2011

6. TBPInvictus (2012): Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Going Viral?: "I had barely finished reading Niall Ferguson’s takedown of President Obama when a flood of takedowns of Mr. Ferguson started hitting the web. This post, then, will not be about his Newsweek piece, but instead about his recent Bloomberg TV interview with Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen. And, in particular, one very specific part of that interview where Ferguson makes what is well beyond what I could even charitably refer to as a rookie mistake...

7. Izabella Kaminska: Stuff Elon Says: "Elon Musk is often dubbed a genius. And yet... if the following statement Musk made during the Tesla Q4 earnings call is anything to go by, he has a habit of stating the obvious and thinking it sounds deeply profound and insightful: 'The demand for-the demand for Model 3 is insanely high. The inhibitor is affordability. It's just like people literally don't have the money to buy the car. It's got nothing to do with desire. They just don't have enough money in their bank account. If the car can be made more affordable, the demand is extraordinary...' So, to help introduce Elon to the concept of how demand and supply interacts with price we thought we'd take the above quote and adapt it according to various economic scenarios in classic econ text book style...

8. Cheddar: How Focus Music Hacks Your Brain

9. Greg Farrell: Paul Manafort Could Face New York Charges If Trump Pardons Him: "Cy Vance has been investigating ex-Trump aide since 2017. District Attorney sees way to avoid double jeopardy protection...

10. Maya Gurantz: Kompromat: Or, Revelations from the Unpublished Portions of Andrea Manafort’s Hacked Texts - Los Angeles Review of Books

11. Pyeong Chang Tofu House: Menus

12. Now compiling and sending out fewer links than in the past, but still by far the best sorter and selector of what is interesting in economics: Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (2/19/19)

Why is this still the best book to read about Nazi Germany?: William L. Shirer (1960): The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0671728687: "A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich...

Melissa Etheridge and Serena Ryder: The Sing-off!:

* #fortheweekend #music

Comment of the Day: Kansas Jack: The Jesus Landing Pad: "It's more than foreign policy. Because the 2nd coming is imminent, Global Warming is not a threat either. And that is a lot of people in this country who believe Revelation has shown how the Earth ends and cite Genesis that God has promised never to again flood the world...

The very smart Simon Johnson believes that something like codetermination is essential if modern capitalism is going to work: Simon Johnson: Saving Capitalism from Economics 101: "Warren is proposing a much broader rethink. Large corporations can still do well, but they need to be held accountable in a much more transparent way. Incentives for executives would be adjusted, and running these companies would no longer be so much about lining their own pockets.... The legitimacy of capitalism–private ownership and reliance on market mechanisms–would be greatly strengthened under the Accountable Capitalism Act. So, yes, like it or not, this will be on the final exam...

John Holbo: @jholbo1: "Write an article entitled "Gaslighting Political Liberalism". I thought of this reading Zizek ages ago but today I read Vermeule. The argument alleges a paradoxical, debilitating blindspot. Political liberalism is supposed to be broadminded, self-critical and yet-and yet!-it cannot see this hole at the heart of ... (bum-bum-BUM!) ITSELF! But the existence of the hole is un-demonstrated, merely asserted (this is the gaslight part of the production)...

Perhaps the strangest thing seen in the clash between Ilhan Omar and Elliot Abrams on whether he has any business working representing the U.S. abroad (he does not have any such business) was the reaction of CAP Foreign-Policy Vice President Kelly Magsamen: "Elliott Abrams... is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable.... we share goals..."

I am flummoxed and flabbergasted:

Charles R. Pierce: Ilhan Omar Questions Elliot Abrams Over El Mozote Massacre, Activities in El Salvador, Guatemala, Central America: "Ilhan Omar's Cross-Examination of Elliot Abrams Honored Thousands of Central American Dead: Someone in Congress finally asked a world-historical ghoul to answer for what he did...

There has never been such a clown show.

Lighthizer, desperate, tries to lecture his boss, and then renames his "Memorandum of Understanding" a "Trade Agreement".

Why? Because Trump thinks the agreement is binding if it is called "Trade Agreement" and not binding if it is called "Memorandum of Understanding":

Jennifer Jacobs and Justin Sink: Trump's Trade Chief Lectures His Boss and Gets Earful in Return: "Negotiators have been drafting MOUs.... Trump told gathered reporters that the memorandums would 'be very short term. I don’t like MOUs because they don’t mean anything. To me, they don’t mean anything'.... Lighthizer then jumped in to defend the strategy, with Trump looking on. 'An MOU is a binding agreement... detailed.... It’s a legal term. It’s a contract'.... But the president, unswayed, fired back at Lighthizer. 'By the way I disagree', Trump said. The top Chinese negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, laughed out loud...

Jerry Wang: Decrypting Crypto: The Evolutionary Biology Behind Blockchain-Backed Currencies:

I am told that somewhere on the internet there was once an exchange where Scott Winship told Matthew Yglesias that Winship's strategy was to become famous and influential by concern-trolling progressive researchers and analysts. Anybody know where it is? Don't give him oxygen. And no, I have never here anybody ever say "Scott Winship values integrity above nearly all else": Scott Winship: "I recently accused researchers at the Center for American Progress of an 'amateur-hour' mistake.... I had been accused of double-counting in the debate that drove me off Twitter.... I never suggested the CAP researchers were trying to mislead anyone. People who know me—even those who regularly disagree with me and who don't like me, I think—know that I value integrity above nearly all else.... For reasons that end up being technical... I was wrong in my specific charge of double-counting against the CAP researchers.... I do believe that other statements in the report I criticized and a comment by CAP president Neera Tanden in the Vox.com piece that highlighted the report do in fact double-count in the way I (incorrectly) said that a specific chart did. And I have other criticisms...

Marcy Wheeler: How Amy Berman Jackson Got Roger Stone to Step in It and Then Step in It Again: "Here’s what she did.... Impose a gag that a Twitter account bearing Stone’s name may have violated within an hour. Get Rogow and Stone on the record explaining why the terms of her gag won’t impact Stone’s ability to make a living, undercutting a significant part of the First Amendment claim they’ve been making. Provide a basis for the gag that Rogow did not anticipate, which may be far harder—and politically more difficult—to challenge. Provide an opportunity for both the prosecution and herself to catch Stone in multiple sworn lies (which, again, I’m sure the FBI is busy at work proving now), which if charged as perjury would lead to Stone’s immediate jailing...