Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. 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...

2. 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...

3. 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...

4. 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...

5. 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...

6. 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 that 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...

7. 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...

8. 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...

9. Also very sorry to miss: 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...

10. The Kentucky Strain of American nationalism: 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’...

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