Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Excellent insight into police-community relations in America from a very observant and thoughtful peace officer: Patrick Skinner: "One of the questions I ask every class: When was the last time you had a positive encounter with a cop who didn’t know you were a cop in which she wasn’t telling you to do something (Traffic) or you weren’t asking something. The answer 100% has been ‘never’. That’s an issue.... I’m speaking to literally the most cop supportive group-other cops-and they can’t think of a positive voluntary encounter with a cop. The problem isn’t our neighbors. It’s us the cops. It doesn’t have to be this way. So, that’s my whole 1 day course kinda.... We need to train cops entirely as if they didn’t have a badge and a gun. And only at the end say ‘by the way, you have this authority, use it as a parachute.’ The badge gets you in the door. The rest is anti-drama. Act accordingly...

2. Jacob Levy: Democracy for Republicans: "American conservatism and market liberalism... overlook the deep relationship between democratic government and modern commercial capitalism.... The kind of positive-sum market economy that has transformed the world since 1800 through compounding productivity increases and economic growth is very different from the ancient Rome riven by class conflicts over zero-sum land distribution, but the Founders understood the Roman precedents better than they understood the world that was about to emerge. And that economic world emerged with, not against, the development of a kind of democratic government they also did not foresee, government by contending, permanent political parties alternating in power by competing for votes in a mass-suffrage society...

3. Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just technocratically efficient but politically popular: Simon Wren-Lewis: How to Pay for the Green New Deal: "Tackling climate change is resisted by powerful political forces that have in the past prevented the appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations being applied. Which is a major reason why the world has failed to do enough to mitigate climate change.... Just as proponents of a Green New Deal are savvy about the need to overcome the resistance of, for example, the oil and gas industry, they also realise that the Green New Deal needs to be politically popular. So the New Deal package has to include current benefits for the many, perhaps at the expense of the few.... If you cannot make the polluter pay, it is still better to take action to stop climate change even if future generations have to pay the cost of that action...

4. "A 'period'... could be three years, or it could be 20": Paul Krugman (May 1998): Japan's Trap: "The basic premise-that even a zero nominal interest rate is not enough to produce sufficient aggregate demand-is not hypothetical: it is a simple fact about Japan right now. Unless one can make a convincing case that structural reform or fiscal expansion will provide the necessary demand, the only way to expand the economy is to reduce the real interest rate; and the only way to do that is to create expectations of inflation. Of course, it is not necessary that Japan do anything. In the quasi-static IS-LM version of the liquidity trap, it appears as if the slump could go on forever. A dynamic analysis makes it clear that it is a temporary phenomenon-in the model it only lasts one period, although the length of a "period" is unclear (it could be three years, or it could be 20). Even without any policy action, price adjustment or spontaneous structural change will eventually solve the problem. In the long run Japan will work its way out of the trap, whatever the policy response. But on the other hand, in the long run...

5. Equitable Growth: Interview with Kyle Moore, Dissertation Scholar at Equitable Growth: "rResearch on racial stratification and stress-related morbidity among older Americans. See his bio on Equitable Growth's website for more information https://equitablegrowth.org/people/kyle-moore/...

6. James Felton: Nine days from ‘Brexit day’, does anyone have a clue what’s happening?: "We’re begging for an extension and seeking trade deals with the mighty Liechtenstein. Everything is fine.... It was admittedly quite funny that Theresa May is in the position of defending getting people to vote over and over again until she gets the result that she wanted.... After the announcement, some ERG members expressed dismay that they weren’t allowed to vote again (see how funny this is?) Strongly approve of Bercow making decisions based on how funny they are to people who retain the capacity for rational thinking)....If only they’d treated the meaningful vote more like a meaningful vote and less like tantric legislative foreplay before a full 29 March climax, but you live and learn.... So here we are. Nine days to go, hoping that 27 countries that May said would be crushed if they didn’t offer her a good deal are kind enough to all let us stay a little longer if we beg. If we’ve annoyed any one of them enough, say, by calling them Nazis or likening them to Soviet prisons for the past three years, they could veto our extension...

7. A brilliant paper. But I have a worry: those at the upper tail of the income distribution are, to a substantial degree, those whose broadly-construed portfolios are ludicrously risky who happen to be unusually lucky. I am not sure they have properly accounted for luck here: Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick: Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century: "Entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners...

8. Andrew Rilstone: The Opening of the Gospel of Mark: "I almost wish that Mark's Gospel could be presented in some kind of Tony Harrison pidgin: 'God-Is-Gracious dips people in the Desolation./God-Is-Gracious heralds dipping to change their minds and undo their near-misses./Everyone from Praise-Land comes!/Everyone from Peace-town!/They are all dipped in the Flowing/Acknowledging their near-misses...

9. Question: Howe long before internet searches for "Delong economist" come up not with me but with this guy?: Delong Meng: Optimal Mechanisms for Repeated Communication: "We consider a repeated communication model with a long-run sender and a long-run receiver.... A biased adviser who prefers policy θ + b, whereas the receiver wants to implement policy θ. The sender’s utility is u_S(a,θ) = -(a−θ−b)², and the receiver’s utility is u_R(a,θ)= −(a−θ)².... For the optimal mechanism the receiver chooses a function a(ht) that maximizes her expected payoff with respect to the sender’s incentive constraint.... We characterize the payoff set as the discount factor goes to one, and we analyze the rate of convergence to points on the frontier of this limit payoff set...

10. Save for white baby-boomers and pre-baby boomers who rode the post-WWII wave of government-sponsored housing finance and inflation on the one hand and union and white-collar defined-benefit pensions on the other, by and large the "middle class" in terms of wealth has always been a multi-generational phenomenon: what with keeping-up-with-the-joneses and the slings-and-arrows-of-fortune, several generations of middle-class incomes are required to build up anything that can be called a middle-class wealth stock. And racial discrimination has made it impossible for African-Americans to have such a run of security: Darrick Hamilton: Racial Equality Is Economic Equality: "Race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself. The 2017 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the typical black family has about 17,600 in wealth (inclusive of home equity); in contrast, the typical white family has about 171,000. This amounts to an absolute racial wealth gap where the typical black family owns only ten cents for every dollar owned by the typical white family!...

11. Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, newly-installed over at EPI, is doing a bang-up job: Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: These 5 Charts Show Inequality Is Bad for Your Health—Even If You Are Rich: "Pickett and Wilkinson kept coming back to a single uniting factor—inequality: 'What the research shows—not just ours but that of hundreds of researchers around the world—is that inequality brings out features of our evolved psychology, to do with dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority, and that affects how we treat one another and ourselves, it increases status competition and anxiety, anxieties about our self worth, worries about how we are seen and judged'.... Here are five charts from their presentation...

12. Dani Rodrik has, I think, a better way to frame the problems that he and Richard Baldwin are both thinking about this winter: Dani Rodrik: The Good Jobs Challenge: "[For] developing countries... existing technologies allow insufficient room for factor substitution: using less-skilled labor instead of skilled professionals or physical capital. The demanding quality standards needed to supply global value chains cannot be easily met by replacing machines with manual labor. This is why globally integrated production in even the most labor-abundant countries, such as India or Ethiopia, relies on relatively capital-intensive methods.... The standard remedy of improving educational institutions does not yield near-term benefits, while the economy’s most advanced sectors are unable to absorb the excess supply of low-skilled workers. Solving this problem may require... boosting an intermediate range of labor-intensive, low-skilled economic activities. Tourism and non-traditional agriculture... public employment ... non-tradable services carried out by small and medium-size enterprises, will not be among the most productive, which is why they are rarely the focus of industrial or innovation policies. But they may still provide significantly better jobs than the alternatives in the informal sector...

13. In response to a query from Nancy M. Birdsall on what are the most important contributions to feminist economics, Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn provides a shoutout to, among others, my college classmate Joyce Jacobsen of Wesleyan—who got me my first economics RA job: Kate Bahn: "Some good resources are Beyond Economic Man and Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics. I particularly like Joyce Jacobsen's essay on 'Some implications of the feminist project in economics for empirical methodology' in the latter...

14. The real lesson, I think, from AI-machine learning is that AI-machine learning is a lot like "human judgment"—we have remarkably little insight into what features decisions of the situation are salient to the mind or to the whatever that is actually making the deciding. Thus this is not just a cautionry tale for AI-machine learning, it is also a cautionary tale for human "experts": Andrew Hill: Amazon Offers Cautionary Tale Of AI-Assisted Hiring: "Amazon, one of the most innovative and data-rich companies in the world, leapt on that possibility as early as 2014. It built a recruiting engine that analysed applications submitted to the group over the preceding decade and identified patterns. The idea was it would then spot candidates in the job market who would be worth recruiting...

15. John Authers: Things Are Finally Looking Up for Theresa May: "EU... patience has run out and they do not want to waste more time waiting for the infuriating British to make up their minds.... EU leaders have decided that they are ready for a no-deal Brexit and could handle the consequences. This is probably not true of the U.K. And so the EU is prepared to risk forcing the issue, and forsaking the (still slim) chance that the U.K. might yet decide to stay. Thus, Theresa May, for whom personal support appears to have evaporated, might conceivably be in position to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat...

16. I agree. This is bending to reality. But the reality has only changed a little bit since last December: John Authers: Federal Reserve Bends to Economic Reality: "Looking at various recession indicators, several of which are produced by the Fed, it looks as though Powell may be bending to the evidence of economic trouble ahead and not, as many claim, bending to pressure from the financial markets...

17. Donald Tusk: "There is a special place in hell for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan": “According to our Pope, hell is still empty. It means there is a lot of space.” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker interjected: “Don’t go to hell!”...

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