Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. A nice instantiation of our WCEG's monthly summary of JOLTS. I would, however, quibble with the authors' claim that workers are now "confident". Yes, they are quitting at a much higher rate than they dared to do in the early years of this decade. But I remember 1998-2000: That was a confident labor market! How old were these authors in 1999, anyway? :-): Kate Bahn and Will McGrew: JOLTS Day Graphs: March 2019 Report Edition - Equitable Growth: "The quits rate held steady at 2.3% for the 10th month in a row, reflecting a steady labor market where workers are confident leaving their jobs to find new opportunities...

2. David H. Autor: Work of the Past, Work of the Future: "Urban non-college workers currently perform substantially less skilled work than in prior decades..... Automation and international trade... have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets... by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work—many of which are technological in origin—have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers...

3. I second this: The modern internet offers so much free ice cream that it is hard to justify paying for it. But IMHO Tressie Mcmillan Cottom is definitely worth it. For example, lead her on Lower Ed—on the predatory for-profit college grift: Juliane Stockman: @JulianeStockman: "If you haven't subscribed to @tressiemcphd https://thefirstand15th.substack.com, you need to.... I'm gonna have to journal about this months' essay. Hell, I'm probably gonna take it into therapy to process it. It packs a wallop...

4. Picking winners—seeing which are the industries in which subsidizing efficient producers will produce large externalities via the creation of communities of engineering practice—has never been that difficult. It has been actually winning that is difficult: creating the institutional and political-economic discipline so that the subsidies flow where they should, rather than where the politically powerful wish them to flow. What is nice about Cherif and Hasanov is that they show where and have some good suggestions as to how to make this more general than it has been: Andrew Batson: Rediscovering the Importance of Export Discipline: "The new IMF working paper on industrial policy, by Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov, has gotten a lot of notice, and indeed it is very clear, comprehensive, and useful. But for anyone who has already done some reading on the history of successful Asian economies, particularly Taiwan and South Korea, it is not exactly surprising.... Brad DeLong’s 2010 book with Stephen Cohen, The End of Influence: 'Americans like to say scornfully that industrial policy is about “governments picking winners.” Picking winner industries is not that hard—even for governments...

5. I have been waiting for this for a while: it's very good. David R. Howell and Arne L. Kalleberg: Declining Job Quality in the United States: Explanations and Evidence: "We group... explanations... into three broad visions... the competitive market model, in which supply and demand for worker skills in competitive external labor markets generates a single market wage by skill group... contested market models, in which... firms typically have substantial bargaining (monopsony) power; and social-institutional models, which... place greater emphasis on the public policies, formal and informal institutions, and the dynamics of workplace cultures and conflict.... The supply-demand explanation, which has focused on evidence of occupational employment polarization (driven by skill-biased production technologies) and the rise in the college-wage premium.... We conclude by summarizing policy recommendations that follow from each of these visions...

6. Lemin Wu (2015): If Not Malthusian, Then Why?: A Darwinian Explanation of the Malthusian Trap: "the Malthusian mechanism alone cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation.... Improvement in luxury technology... would have kept living standards growing...

7. Martin Wolf: ‘Global Britain’ is an Illusion Because Distance Has Not Died: "Why has distance not died and the world not become flat?... The nature of trade has changed and, in particular, it has become more control-intensive and time-dependent.... Regional trade arrangements also matter... because procedures tend to be far more reliable and efficient.... Regulatory and procedural harmonisation... was the price of integration.... There are only two possible explanations for the immense bias towards trade with the EU: either the preferential advantages of being within the EU are very large or the vital fact is that these are neighbours. Either way, the idea that there is a global alternative... is a delusion. It is the biggest of the many Brexit delusions...

8. Thomas Blanchet, Lucas Chancel, and Amory Gethin: Forty Years of Inequality in Europe: "Despite the growing importance of inequalities in policy debates, it is still difficult to compare inequality levels across European countries and to tell how European growth has been shared across income groups. This column draws on new evidence combining surveys, tax data, and national accounts to document a rise in income inequality in most European countries between 1980 and 2017. It finds that income disparities on the old continent have increased less than in the US and shows that this is essentially due to ‘predistribution’ policies...

9. Wikipedia: Alexei Kosygin: "Kosygin told his son-in-law Mikhail Gvishiani, an NKVD officer, of the accusations leveled against his co-worker Nikolai Voznesensky, then Chairman of the State Planning Committee (in office 1942-1949) and a First Deputy Premier (in office 1941-1946), because of his possession of firearms. Gvishiani and Kosygin threw all their weapons into a lake and searched both their own houses for any listening devices. They found one at Kosygin's house, but it might have been installed to spy on Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had lived there before him. According to his memoirs, Kosygin never left his home without reminding his wife what to do if he did not return from work. After living two years in constant fear, the family reached the conclusion[when?] that Stalin would not harm them...

10. I concur with Duncan Black here: Duncan Black: Jeffrey Goldberg: "The post-9/11 era was... really it's impossible to explain it to people who didn't live through it. And it was about a 5 year period, not a few weeks. It also made the careers of people who are still with us now. The wronger they were the more successful they have been! Such is The Discourse. The Atlantic is a bad magazine run by a bad person who occasionally runs good things by good people in order to cover for the fact that it is a bad magazine. My "favorite" post-9/11 nonsense was in the greatest of magazines, the New Yorker, which is known for its attention to detail and truth and its fact checking and the amount of shrooms someone must have eaten to have written this...

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