Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Andrés Velasco: The Challenge of Monetary Independence: "By shadowing the US Federal Reserve so closely, Latin American countries are foregoing the policy flexibility that their floating exchange-rate regimes are intended to allow. They also risk relying too heavily on possible US interest-rate cuts to boost their economies, and not enough on deeper, long-term reforms...

2. Tim Ross, Robert Hutton, and Ian Wishart: This Is the New Brexit Deal Theresa May Got From the EU: "Juncker says it’s this deal or U.K. might never leave EU. May, Juncker agree new legal texts on Irish border backstop.... Three new documents... includ[ing] a 'unilateral declaration' setting out how the U.K. believes it can escape the backstop....Wording in a legally binding joint statement goes as far as the EU says is possible in reiterating that the backstop—an insurance policy that effectively keeps the U.K. in a customs union with the EU—is only meant to be temporary. And it gives the U.K. some authority to walk away if the EU doesn’t do enough to replace it with a full trade deal.... The independent arbitration panel (comprising senior judges) could rule that the EU is acting in such a way as to make the backstop last indefinitely.... 'Persistent failure' to comply with a ruling 'may result in temporary remedies'. This doesn’t go as far as meeting the demands of Attorney General Geoffrey Cox....But the joint document does go on to say that the U.K. (or EU, for that matter) would 'ultimately' have the right 'to enact a unilateral, proportionate suspension of its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement' including the backstop.... The U.K. also published a separate document, 'interpreting' the joint statement in its own wording but with the tacit consent of the EU...

3. Alberto Nardelli: The EU Is Telling European Leaders There Are Only Three Reasons They Should Allow Brexit To Be Delayed: "The European Union will advise EU leaders that delaying Brexit makes sense only... to give more time to prepare for no deal, to complete ratification of the withdrawal agreement or if the UK decides to hold an election or a referendum. The assessment is contained in an internal memo... which sets out the thinking at the highest level of the European Commission following Theresa May’s heavy defeat on her revised Brexit deal in parliament.... Ultimately, it will be a political decision for the EU’s 27 leaders...

4. Please let me be your neighbor Wigner's friend. It's Everett's many-worlds universe, and we just live in it: Massimiliano Proietti, Alexander Pickston, Francesco Graffitti, Peter Barrow, Dmytro Kundys, Cyril Branciard, Martin Ringbauer, and Alessandro Fedrizzi: Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World: "The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observa- tions is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities. While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an ex- tended Wigner’s friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, exper- imentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not...

5. The ERM system of a generation ago was in one important respect vastly superior to the Euro mechanism. THE ERM system had a fiscal backstop that the Euro mechanism lacked, and Europe today is much the poorer for it: Giancarlo Corsetti, Barry Eichengreen, and Galina Hale: The Euro Crisis in the Mirror of the EMS: How Tying Odysseus to the Mast Avoided the Sirens but Led Him to Charybdis: "What explains the longer and deeper downturn after 2009?.... Six lessons of the ERM-euro crisis comparison...

6. And here is the launch explanation of the analytical perspective that the brand-new group Economists for Inclusive Prosperity hopes to take. It is good. Perhaps we at Equitable Growth should steal it?: Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman: Economics After Neoliberalism: "Economists of the real world... understand that we live in a second-best world rife with market imperfections and in which power matters enormously.... The competitive model is rarely the right benchmark.... This requires an empirical orientation, an experimental mind set, and a good dose of humility to recognize the limits of our knowledge.... Throughout [our] proposals is the sense that economies are operating well inside the justice-efficiency frontier, and that there are numerous policy 'free-lunches' that could push us towards an economy that is morally better without sacrificing (and indeed possibly enhancing) prosperity...

7. Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein: Universal Basic Income in the US and Advanced Countries: "Advanced economies... [have] well developed, if often incomplete, safety nets... a framework... compare various UBIs to the existing constellation of programs...

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