Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (February 28, 2019)

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  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


  1. 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...

  2. 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...

  3. 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...

  4. 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?...

  5. 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...

  6. 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...

  7. 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...

  8. This came out last November 26. Is there anybody—anybody—who 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...

  9. 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'...


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