Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. H. W. Singor Spartan Land Lots and Helot Rents

2. Aristotle: Politics §1270: "One might censure the Spartan institutions with respect to the unequal distribution of wealth. It has come about that some of the Spartans own too much property and some extremely little; owing to which the land has fallen into few hands, and this has also been badly regulated by the laws.... As a result... although the country is capable of supporting fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand heavy-armed troopers, they numbered not even a thousand. And the defective nature of their system of land-tenure has been proved by the actual facts of history: the state did not succeed in enduring a single blow, but perished owing to the smallness of its population. They have a tradition that in the earlier reigns they used to admit foreigners to their citizenship, with the result that dearth of population did not occur in those days, although they were at war for a long period; and it is stated that at one time the Spartiates numbered as many as ten thousand. However, whether this is true or not, it is better for a state's male population to be kept up by measures to equalize property...

3. Equitable Growth: Staff

4. R. Kaufmann, H. Kauppi, and J. Stock: The Relationship Between Radiative Forcing and Temperature: What Do Statistical Analyses of the Intrumental Temperature Record Measure?

5. Stephen Moore: March Madness & NCAA Basketball: "Back to the NCAAs. Here's the rule change I propose: No more women refs, no women announcers, no women beer venders, no women anything. There is, of course, an exception to this rule. Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant. Bonnie Bernstein should wear a halter top. This is a no-brainer, CBS. What in the world are you waiting for?...

6. Glory Liu: Rethnking the "Chicago Smith" Problem: Adam Smith the Invisible Hand, 1929-1980

7. Mentimeter: Interactive Presentation Software

8. Vik's Chaat

1. Mohamed A. El-Erian: Economy: The Missing Elements for a Market 'Melt Up': "Stronger global fundamentals need to underpin elevated asset prices, and the Fed must maintain a tricky policy balance as the U.S. continues to outperform advanced countries.... The argument for a melt up (involving a pile on by investors who don't want to be left on the sidelines during a market rise regardless of any change in market fundamentals) essentially extrapolates forward the impact of central bank liquidity support in the context of the notion of investment portfolio underexposure to stocks and the continued proliferation of index products. This is also known as the FOMO, or fear-of-missing-out, effect...

2. As I understand it, the big difference between Auten and Splinter's inequality estimates and those of other researchers are that Auten and Splinter (a) have not harmonized their estimates with the components of the System of National Accounts, (b) assume low-income business owners evade a greater share of the taxes they owe than do high-income business owners, (c) do not assign undistributed pension earnings to their ultimate owners, (d) assume that the corporate tax is largely borne by low-income current retirees, and (e) define the top 1% by summing the incomes of all earners in the family but calculate their earning by dividing income by the number of adults in the family (see PSZ: "Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States Data Appendix"). I do not, given the random audit studies, understand why they do (b). And I think that (e) is simply wrong. (e) has a big effect on inequality trends because of increasing female paid employment and decreasing marriage rates among the non-rich. Thus at the moment at least I find myself strongly on the side of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman in this disagreement—and not just because two of those three work down the hall from me. But I do strongly share Auten and Splinter's dissatisfaction with the concept being measured here by the standard estimates. I want to see inequality defined as the lifetime distribution fo economic and social power, and I would very much want to see Piketty, Saez, and Zucman—and others—try to lay out how they think of getting from the income estimates they report to an assessment of the inequality concept we really want to see: Austen Clemens: Progress Toward Consensus on Measuring U.S. Income Inequality: "The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development... the team from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis... Gerald Auten... and David Splinter at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation... Thomas Piketty... Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.... All... attempt to quantify changes in income inequality after taxes and transfers...

3. Randall Munroe: Physicists

4. Michael Nielsen: Six Rules for Rewriting: "Write freely, and then... rewrite.... Six rules that help me recognize the bad bits in my own writing.... Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward.... Every paragraph should contain a striking idea.... The most significant ideas should be distilled into the most potent sentences possible.... Use the strongest appropriate verb.... Beware of nominalization: A common way we weaken verbs is by turning them into nouns, and then combining them with weaker verbs.... None of the above rules should be consciously applied while drafting.... Only once you are done should you... rewrite...

5. Carole Cadwalladr: @carolecadwalla: "Oh wow. This is what happened after my talk at #TED2019. This bit is not in the video. @TEDchris invited @facebook to respond. ‘We will make time for you,’ he said. Instead, they made an official complaint about what I said. And then: silence...

6. Sally Albright: @SallyAlbright: "I called it. Bernie ran the exact same scam that lost Jim Wright his Speakership and cost Newt Gingrich $400k in fines, but from campaign donations, not from lobbyists. And sadly, it's legal. Unethical af, but legal: 'Bernie spent $444k of campaign dollars on his own books in 2015...

7. It is interesting to note that Adam Smith's one explicit use of the phrase "Invisible Hand" in his Wealth of Nations is not a situation in which the competitive market equilibrium is Pareto-optimal. It is of a situation with two market failures—a home bias psychological failure among the merchants of Amsterdam, and agglomeration economies for mercantile activity in Amsterdam. And the two offset each other: if merchants were rational, the free-market equilibrium would ternate an inefficient sacrifice the agglomeration economies. If the agglomeration economies were absent, psychological home bias would lead to an inefficient concentration of activity: Glory Liu: How the Chicago School Changed the Meaning of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’: "For Friedman and Stigler, economics’ scientific power came from its ability to predict outcomes based on two central insights... in The Wealth of Nations... self-interest... [and,] of course, the invisible hand.... Few economists were as successful as Friedman in spreading this interpretation of Smith’s ideas to the public... populariz[ing] this interpretation of Smith’s invisible hand for an overtly conservative political agenda.... What makes the Smith of Milton Friedman and George Stigler so... problematic... is that they 'economized' Smith in a way that obscured if not precluded the relevance of his moral philosophy and political theory.... Whether his political value stems from the idea that he is an economist or moral philosopher or something else, however, is something that we—Smith’s readers—get to decide...

8. This is absolutely brilliantly done, and striking in the size of the effect found!: Forced exile and migration producing a durable human-capital culture among ethnic Poles: Sascha O. Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya: Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers: "World War II, the Polish borders were redrawn... migration... from the Kresy territories in the East (taken over by the USSR) and were resettled mostly to the newly acquired Western Territories, from which Germans were expelled.... Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today. Descendants of forced migrants have on average one extra year of schooling, driven by a higher propensity to finish secondary or higher education.... Since Kresy migrants were of the same ethnicity and religion as other Poles, we bypass confounding factors of other cases of forced migration.... Survey evidence suggests that forced migration led to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in a mobile asset–human capital. The effects persist over three generations...

9. Well worth your time chasing the links from this review of work Equitable Growth has published over the past several years on women's roles. At the root, I think, is that a great many of our economic and societal practices reflect gender reality as it stood 50, 100, or 150 years ago—and both biological and even more societal reality as it stood then was hardly conducive to the empowerment of women. Recall that two centuries ago an overwhelming proportion of women became mothers, that the typical mother stood a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbed, and that the typical mother (if she survived) would spend twenty years eating for two—pregnant or nursing—in a world in which childcare-by-non-relatives was a thing for only the upper class. Legacy institutions from that time are unlikely to serve today's women—or men—well: Equitable Growth: Equitable Growth’s History of Focusing on Women’s Role in the Economy: A Review: "How women are reshaping the American economy.... Gender wage inequality.... Paid family and medical leave.... Women... [and] family economic security.... The gender gap in economics.... The link between bodily autonomy and economic opportunity.... The wages of care.... Motherhood penalties...

10. Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier: Information Attacks on Democracies: "Democracies, in contrast, are vulnerable to information attacks that turn common political knowledge into contested political knowledge. If people disagree on the results of an election, or whether a census process is accurate, then democracy suffers. Similarly, if people lose any sense of what the other perspectives in society are, who is real and who is not real, then the debate and argument that democracy thrives on will be degraded. This is what seems to be Russia’s aims in their information campaigns against the U.S.: to weaken our collective trust in the institutions and systems that hold our country together. This is also the situation that writers like Adrien Chen and Peter Pomerantsev describe in today’s Russia, where no one knows which parties or voices are genuine, and which are puppets of the regime, creating general paranoia and despair...

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