Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Did they actually achieve de-entanglement and re-coherence here? It looks like it to me. But whaddooeyeno? G. B. Lesovik, I. A. Sadovskyy, M. V. Suslov, A. V. Lebedev, and V. M. Vinokur: Arrow of Time and Its Reversal on IBM Quantum Computer: "The arrow of time... within the framework of statistical physics... [is] the second law of thermodynamics... entropy growth proceeds from the system's entanglement with the environment.... Whether the irreversibility of time... might be circumvented.... While in nature the complex conjugation needed for time reversal is exponentially improbable, one can design a quantum algorithm that includes complex conjugation and thus reverses a given quantum state... on an IBM quantum computer... backward time dynamics for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity...

2. An excellent catch by Bonnie Kavoussi. Bonnie Kavoussi: "A one-third reduction in the rate of new business formation, together with a steady exit rate, means that, on average, firms are larger and older today while also representing an increased share of employment." @jasonfurman and @porszag: https://piie.com/system/files/documents/wp18-4.pdf...

3. Andrew Prokop: Game of Thrones season 8, episode 5: why Daenerys turning dark makes sense - Vox: "It’s been frequently foreshadowed in both the show and George R.R. Martin’s books...

4. Potemkin factories in Wisconsin: Josh Dzieza: Foxconn Is Confusing Tthehe Hell Out of Wisconsin: "Last summer, Foxconn announced a barrage of new projects in Wisconsin — so we went looking for them: It was summer in Wisconsin, and Foxconn seemed to be everywhere. But also: nowhere at all.... The trade war with China still looms, and Trump has personally called Foxconn CEO Terry Gou when the company wavers. This time, Foxconn can’t simply vanish without risking a backlash, but it also makes no sense for it to build what it initially promised. Shih thinks Foxconn is still figuring out what it’s going to do and that the infrastructure development, political attention, and insistence on a factory is painting the company into a corner...

5. This is, I think, 100% correct. And this is important enough that I think it now puts Larry on the short list for the Nobel Prize. IMHO, his career up until now has been worth at least 2 Nobel Prizes, but the problem is that his contributions have been spread out over eight different subfields of economics. But this is, I think, more than a home run—this is a grand slam: Lawrence H. Summers: Responding to Critiques: "No one from whom I have heard doubts the key conclusion that a combination of meaningfully positive real interest rates & balanced budgets would likely be a prescription for sustained recession if not depression in the industrial world...

6. Put me down as someone who thinks that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have not tried and are not trying hard enough to learn from the bank of Japan. They still do not seem to be at the point of understanding the relevance of Japan for themselves as well as Paul Krugman did two decades ago, when he wrote his Return of Depression Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0393320367, "Japan's Trap", and "It's Baaaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap". This is not a good situation to be in: Enda Curran and Toru Fujioka: BOJ's Never Ending Crisis Has Lessons for World's Central Banks - Bloomberg: "The underlying problems confronting the BOJ—slowing growth, tepid wage increases, lackluster productivity gains and aging populations—are becoming more pronounced in other developed economies. This increases the likelihood of more drawn out stimulus, pushing others down the same road as Japan. 'When Japan first confronted the problem of very low inflation, monetary economists pooh-poohed the problem, saying there was an easy fix', said Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and now a professor at the University of Chicago. 'After confronting the same issue in their own countries and showing an inability to deal with it, there seems to be a general consensus that the problem is harder'. Its latest experiment in yield-curve control... has drawn the attention of Federal Reserve Deputy Chair Richard Clarida amid an examination of strategy at the U.S. central bank...

7. Put me down as someone who thinks that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have not tried and are not trying hard enough to learn from the bank of Japan. They still do not seem to be at the point of understanding the relevance of Japan for themselves as well as Paul Krugman did two decades ago, when he wrote his Return of Depression Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0393320367, "Japan's Trap", and "It's Baaaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap". This is not a good situation to be in: Enda Curran and Toru Fujioka: BOJ's Never Ending Crisis Has Lessons for World's Central Banks - Bloomberg: "The underlying problems confronting the BOJ—slowing growth, tepid wage increases, lackluster productivity gains and aging populations—are becoming more pronounced in other developed economies. This increases the likelihood of more drawn out stimulus, pushing others down the same road as Japan. 'When Japan first confronted the problem of very low inflation, monetary economists pooh-poohed the problem, saying there was an easy fix', said Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and now a professor at the University of Chicago. 'After confronting the same issue in their own countries and showing an inability to deal with it, there seems to be a general consensus that the problem is harder'. Its latest experiment in yield-curve control... has drawn the attention of Federal Reserve Deputy Chair Richard Clarida amid an examination of strategy at the U.S. central bank...

8. David Autor: Polanyi’s Paradox: Will It Be Overcome?: "Jobs are made up of many tasks.... While automation and computerization can substitute for some of them, understanding the interaction between technology and employment requires thinking about more than just substitution. It requires thinking about... how human labor can often complement new technology... price and income elasticities for different kinds of output.... The tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly. I referred to this constraint above as Polanyi’s paradox. In the past decade, computerization and robotics have progressed into spheres of human activity that were considered off limits only a few years earlier—driving vehicles, parsing legal documents... agricultural field labor. Is Polanyi’s Paradox soon to be at least mostly overcome, in the sense that the vast majority of tasks will soon be automated? My reading of the evidence suggests otherwise...

9. Nice to finally see the red-meat throwing Republican senators admit that those of their Democratic colleagues who voted for ObamaCare created something that has, on balance, been a good thing for America. May their consciences weigh on them every morning when they ask themselves why they didn't do this ten year ago: Tony Leys: "Grassley, who opposed Obamacare, isn’t now pressing to replace it. 'Quite obviously, more people have health insurance than would otherwise have it, so you got to look at it as positive', he says. via @pw_cunningham...

10. Put me down as someone who thinks that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have not tried and are not trying hard enough to learn from the bank of Japan. They still do not seem to be at the point of understanding the relevance of Japan for themselves as well as Paul Krugman did two decades ago, when he wrote his Return of Depression Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0393320367, "Japan's Trap", and "It's Baaaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap". This is not a good situation to be in: Enda Curran and Toru Fujioka: BOJ's Never Ending Crisis Has Lessons for World's Central Banks: "The underlying problems confronting the BOJ—slowing growth, tepid wage increases, lackluster productivity gains and aging populations—are becoming more pronounced in other developed economies. This increases the likelihood of more drawn out stimulus, pushing others down the same road as Japan. 'When Japan first confronted the problem of very low inflation, monetary economists pooh-poohed the problem, saying there was an easy fix', said Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and now a professor at the University of Chicago. 'After confronting the same issue in their own countries and showing an inability to deal with it, there seems to be a general consensus that the problem is harder'. Its latest experiment in yield-curve control... has drawn the attention of Federal Reserve Deputy Chair Richard Clarida amid an examination of strategy at the U.S. central bank...

11. On the one hand, apparently permanent low interest rates do produce a lot of reaching for yield–which means a lot of people taking risks they do not understand for low expected returns, and a lot of people figuring out how to take advantage of the cognitive biases of those who take risks they do not understand. On the other hand, as long as the bills are paid and as long as the investors are risking money they can stand to lose, the Fyre Festival Economy does push us closer to full employment. Thus I find myself genuinely perplexed here it's: Izabella Kaminska: GMO's Montier on the Rise of the Dual Economy: "This week's installment of The entire economy is Fyre Festival (TEEIFF).... To recap... we made the argument that the rise of mystic job titles like 'chief vision officer'... was indicative of corporates having lost their purpose... to make or provide stuff people wanted so much they were prepared to pay for it.... In the modern corporate sphere the desire to make profits, however, has been replaced with the desire to achieve growth at any cost... [because] products and services are so visionary and forward thinking that we the customers can't yet understand... [yet[ one day in the future... we will eventually be prepared to pay top dollar for them. The second justification is that if you hook enough customers to your brand you will eventually be able to sell them something they will be prepared to pay for. What that thing is doesn't necessarily have to be determined yet, and may or may not be determined in countless corporate pivots that follow onwards. This is why the mystic vision officer is so important. Establishing a vision of what tomorrow's needs may be, rather than what today's needs actually are, is essential to keeping the investment case alive.... And it's all very believable because this is exactly how a selection of today's most profitable technology stocks have made it...

12. Trump's policies are not boosting economic growth. So the Trumpists—paid, and those who hope to cash in—are preparing the battlespace by arguing that economic growth isn't a good thing anyway—just as we have shifted from "no collusion!" to "collusion isn't illegal!" To his honor, Michael Strain pushes back: Michael Strain: Right-Wing Populists Are Wrong About Economic Growth - Bloomberg: "Oren Cass... the Manhattan Institute... argues that the results from decades of policies designed to encourage GDP growth are 'embarrassing' and have 'steered the nation off course'. Michael Anton... Claremont... questioning the presumption that technological and economic progress is desirable and that innovation is 'per se good.... [But] growth doesn’t just help low-income and working-class households in the short term. Over longer periods, seemingly small changes in the growth rate have large consequences.... A rising tide does not lift all boats equally, and it doesn’t lift them instantaneously. But over time, all boats do rise considerably...

13. John Authers: Federal Reserve Interest-Rate Cut Odds Drop: "Male employment is clearly lower.... The recovery... has still left male unemployment worse than at any point post-war before the Great Recession. So yes, the macro-data do indeed suggest that there are many men who are less productive than their fathers, and have reason to feel angry. That said, women have reason for unhappiness as well.... Women are still putting up with [non-]employment rates 10 points higher than for men. And so it does indeed seem possible, from my extremely swift look at the top-down data, that gender dynamics help explain why improving employment is not making many Americans happier...

14. Chris Lee: Photons Dance Along A Line Of Superconducting Qubits: "Computation relies on more than just having and preserving qubits; you also need to control their interactions.... Nature beat us to it Perhaps the most interesting part of random walk quantum computers is that they already exist, and we would not exist if it didn't work.... Photosynthesis works because light creates a quantum particle called an exciton that has to travel to a reaction center before it decays away to nothing. The only way that it can do this is by traveling all possible paths simultaneously. Through the power of constructive interference (or, if you prefer, quantum computing), the exciton survives about a 1,000 times longer than it would otherwise be expected to, allowing it to reach the reaction center. Since photosynthesis takes place at room temperature, it gives me hope that, eventually, the quantum computer will move out of the helium dilution fridge...

15. Macroeconomic policy management and nowcasting according to Robert A. Heinlein: Robert A. Heinlein (1948): Beyond This Horizon https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1625793146: "'Not "about time"—it is time. I had just completed the first inclusive run when you arrived. Want to see it?' He stepped to the machine, pressed a stud. A photostat popped out. Monroe-Alpha undipped it and handed it to Hamilton without looking at it.... Hamilton examined the photostat. The reinvestment of accumulated capital called for an increase in the subsidy on retail transfers of consumption goods of three point one percent and an increase in monthly citizens’ allowance of twelve credits—unless the Council of Policy decided on another means of distributing the social increment. ‘"Day by day, in every way, I’m getting richer and richer,"’ Hamilton said. 'Say, Cliff, this money machine of yours is a wonderful little gadget. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg...

16. Masoud Mohseni, Patrick Rebentrost, Seth Lloyd, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik: Environment-Assisted Quantum Walks in Photosynthetic Energy Transfer: "Energy transfer within photosynthetic systems can display quantum effects such as delocalized excitonic transport. Recently, direct evidence of long-lived coherence has been experimentally demonstrated for the dynamics of the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein complex.... We demonstrate that for the FMO complex an effective interplay between free Hamiltonian and thermal fluctuations in the environment leads to a substantial increase in energy transfer efficiency from about 70% to 99%...

1. Chowhound: Basic Steamed Lobster Recipe

2. Marianne Johnson: Buchanan's Dominance of Wicksell's Unanimity Rule: "This paper identifies the extent to which James Buchanan's interpretation of Knut Wicksell's unanimity rule, as spelled out in the second essay in "Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen" (1896), has come to dominate the public economics literature despite competing with the interpretation offered by Richard Musgrave. A brief summary of the differing interpretations is offered. Citation analysis is used to examine the frequency with which Wicksell is cited and by whom. The sociology of the economics profession and avenues for the dissemination of ideas are examined to understand the dominance of Buchanan's particular interpretation and application of the unanimity rule...

3. Wikipedia: Elizabeth Cooper: "In 1930, at the age of 16, Cooper met the American General Douglas MacArthur, then commander of all U.S. troops in the Philippines.... Cooper became his mistress in Manila, a fact the 50-year-old MacArthur hid from his 80-year-old mother.... He bought her a ticket on a ship to arrive after him. She arrived in Washington and ended up ensconced in an apartment.... In 1933, when the secret affair threatened to become public, MacArthur brought it to an end, reportedly giving her 15,000 and a ticket back to the Philippines. She did not use the ticket and never returned to the Philippines...

4. Wikipedia: Richard Musgrave

5. Fish Restaurant in Sausalito

6. Murray Circle Restaurant: Dinner Menu

7. Rachael Ray: Cape Cod Reuben

8. Seared Tuna with Avocado and Salsa Verde Recipe

9. Wikipedia: Monday's Child

10. Google Ngram Viewer: Picaro

11. Hayek and the "Shut Up and Be Grateful You Were Even Born!" Argument

#noted #weblogs