Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. John Ostrower: The World Pulls the Andon Cord on the 737 Max: "Lion Air 610 should never have been allowed to get airborne on October 29.... The plane simply was not airworthy.... PK-LQP's Angle-of-Attack sensors were disagreeing by 20-degrees as the plane taxied for takeoff. A warning light that would have alerted the crew to the disagreement wasn't part of the added-cost optional package.... A guardrail wasn't in place.... Erroneous Angle-of-Attack data collided with an apparently unprepared crew with tragic consequences as the MCAS system repeatedly activated, driving the jet's nose into a fatal dive...

2. I must confess that my knee-jerk reaction given my socialization into the neoliberal cult when young to paid leave programs is to worry that loading responsibility for providing social insurance onto employers is a hazardous activity—it is not the 1920s, and we are not the tarry-eyed Edward Filene certain that paternalistic companies engaged in welfare capitalism can do more to enhance societal well-being than the ardent socialists and social democrats. But evidence is piling up from the laboratories of social insurance that are the states that my knee-jerk reaction is wrong: Heather Boushey: Increasing Evidence of the Benefits of Paid Leave Means Congress Needs to Consider a Federal Program like the FAMILY Act: "The existing state programs—the oldest, in California, dates back to 2004—have provided a laboratory for researchers to study labor and health outcomes for individuals, performance and productivity outcomes for firms, and broader macroeconomic outcomes of paid family and medical leave. This work builds on a considerable body of research from long-established programs in some European countries. The answers to many questions are already coming into focus...

3. Frances Coppola: Tether's U.S. Dollar Peg Is No Longer Credible: "Tether does not have 100% traditional currency backing for its reserves. It has 'cash equivalents'... has become an unregulated fractional reserve bank. It’s a very risky fractional reserve bank, too. Loans that you can’t sell, can’t pledge for cash, and may or may not be able to call are not by any stretch of the imagination 'reserves'.... Tether may regard one USDT as the same as one U.S. dollar, but without either the reserves or the central bank backing to guarantee this, its words are empty. The Fed isn’t going to step in and bail it out. Remarkably, though, crypto markets still believe Tether’s guarantee...

4. Ed Luce: Dublin’s Irish-American Trump Card: "Richie Neal... Massachusetts’ congressman... ally of Sinn Féin... could block any trade deal Trump plans to negotiate with Britain. Indeed, he has vowed to do so if Britain jeopardises the open border between the republic and Northern Ireland.... A hard deal Brexit would trigger an equally hard Irish-American roadblock. Why jeopardise peace in Ireland (and therefore Britain) in quest of a US trade deal that’ll hit instant roadblocks in DC?... From what I can tell, the Brexiters have done precious little homework on any aspect of a no-deal Brexit. Let me save them some time on the American end: no US-UK trade deal can emerge from the ashes of the Good Friday Agreement. There. I’ve got it off my chest...

5. Edward Luce: Why America Cannot Fly Alone: "Trump’s Boeing reversal is a teachable moment for the America First president.... No black box is needed to discover why. The biggest factor is falling global trust in US institutional probity. Mr Trump’s budget this week proposed a cut to the FAA in spite of the fact that its air traffic control system remains years behind many of its counterparts. Moreover, the FAA lacks a chief. Mr Trump nominated his own pilot, John Dunkin—the man who flew Trump planes, not Air Force One—to head it. When the Senate laughed him off as unqualified to lead an 18bn agency, Mr Trump failed to come up with a new name. The FAA has been flying without a pilot, so to speak, for more than a year. Little surprise America’s partners have lost trust in its direction. Much the same could be said of US diplomacy...

6. Chris Grey: This Is What a Politics Based on Lies Looks Like: "Underlying all the chaos and confusion... what is being tested to destruction is a set of propositions made in the Vote Leave campaign about how Brexit would be quick, simple, easy, would cause no damage (either economically or politically) and indeed would be beneficial in every respect...

7. This looks about half a percentage point high to me for both the first and the second quarters. And beyond that—who knows?: Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: March 15: "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.4% for 2019:Q1 and 1.5% for 2019:Q2...

8. J. M. Keynes (1937): The General Theory of Employment: "I am more attached to the comparatively simple fundamental ideas with underlying my theory than to the particular form in which I have embodied them, and I have no desire that the latter should be crystallized at the present state of the debate. It’s a simple basic ideas can become familiar and acceptable, time and experience and the collaboration of a number of minds will discover the best way of expressing them...

9. Joseph A. Schumpeter (1947): History of Economic Analysis: "Analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a pre-analytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort. In this book, this pre-analytic cognitive act will be called Vision... Factual work and ‘theoretical’ work... will eventually produce scientific models.. to which increasingly more rigorous standards of consistency and adequacy will be applied. This is indeed a primitive but not, I think, misleading statement of the process by which we grind out what we call scientific propositions...

10. Via Bob Reich: Harry S Truman (1952): Batavia, New York: Rear Platform: "Senator Taft... explained that the great issue in this campaign is 'creeping socialism'. Now that is the patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people...

11. Dominic Gates: Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing and FAA Certified the Suspect 737 Max Flight Control System: "Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.... The safety analysis: Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document. Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward. Assessed a failure of the system as one level below 'catastrophic'. But even that 'hazardous' danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.... Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday.... Citing a busy week, a spokesman said the agency was 'unable to delve into any detailed inquiries'.... Boeing... is 'unable to comment... because of the ongoing investigation' into the crashes, Boeing did not respond directly to the detailed description of the flaws in MCAS certification, beyond saying that there are some significant mischaracterizations'...

12. Amy Davidson Sorkin: The Magical Thinking Around Brexit: "Scornful shorthand for all that the Brexiteers promised voters in the June, 2016, referendum and cannot, now or ever, deliver. An E.U. official, referring to what he saw as the U.K.’s irrational negotiation schemes, told the Financial Times that 'the unicorn industry has been very busy'.... 'A lot of the people who advocated Brexit have been chasing unicorns now for a very long time', Leo Varadkar, the Prime Minister of Ireland, said last week in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. His visit coincided with a series of votes in Parliament that were meant to clarify the plans for Brexit but which did nothing of the kind. Instead, the next two weeks will test how deeply a nation can immerse itself in self-delusion...

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