Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Nico Schmidt: https://t.co/xeKxYpazgs?amp=1: "Facebook massively pressured EU experts to keep them from inquiring into whether the platform‘s business model enables disinformation, eventually leading to weak EU mechanisms on disinfo...

2. Noah Smith: Trump Plan to Lower Imports Risks Lowering Consumption Instead: "Stuff made overseas isn't the drag on growth Trump thinks...

3. Daniel Patrick Moynihan et al.: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action

4. Amit P. Mehta: Donald J. Trump, et al. Plaintiffs, v. Committee on Oversight and Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al.: "[Buchanan] maintained that the House of Representatives possessed no general powers to investigate him, except when sitting as an impeaching body...

5. Josh Barro: @jbarro: "So I’ve never watched this show before but I do like where Peter Dinklage picks up the illuminated manuscript like it’s POLITICO, only interested in what it says about him...

6. Maxine Berg (1980): The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 #books

7. Kevin Robillard and Igor Bobic: Vulnerable Republicans Who Backed Obamacare Repeal Aren't As Fired Up About It Now | HuffPost: "Incumbents facing reelection in 2020 are softening their rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act even as Trump seeks to strike down the law in court...

8. Tim Worstall: Open-Ended Bond Funds Can Cause Systemic Instability-In Extremis, They Can't Liquidate Fast Enough: "We know that banking itself is fragile as assets cannot be recouped as fast as depositors withdraw money-possibly. Closed-end funds don't suffer from this problem. Open-ended funds possibly can-it depends on the liquidity of the market they're invested in...

9. Willem Buiter and Catherine L Mann: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): "What's righte is not new, what's new is not right, and what's left is simplistic...

10. Wikipedia: Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges | La Cité Antique

1. The Gap asked researchers to quantify the benefits from offering its employees more regular schedules. The benefits are substantial: Alix Gould-Wirth: Retail workers' Unpredictable Schedules Affect Sleep Quality:: "Retail outlets of The Gap, Inc.... surprising connections between retail workers’ schedules and their sleep patterns.... Randomly assigned 19 stores to a treatment group to implement the intervention and nine stores to a control group that did not.... The intervention made a substantively (and statistically) significant impact on the sleep quality of workers...

2. One of the wisest people I have met on the internet: Jack Ayer: The Best Books on Bankruptcy: "If you see bankruptcy as a creditor’s remedy, you can understand the history of the word. There’s a founding legend—I’m not sure I believe it—that it comes from the Italian, ‘banca rotta’ which means a ‘broken bench.’ The theory is that if the debtor couldn’t pay his debts, you destroyed his trading place. It was only later that creditors began to realize that sometimes you could get more out of the debtor by encouraging his cooperation...

3. What does the left—the Democratic—wing of the Democratic Party find itself reading this winter? Well, it looks like it is reading, in part, me and my coauthor Steve Cohen. Admittedly, "tells much of the same story... in language even more accessible and unobjectionable to mainstream and centrist audiences" is not the most enthusiastic endorsement I have ever had. But I will take what I can get: Demond Drummer: New Consensus Reading List: "A new consensus in economic thought is emerging.... This reading list is designed with the goals of winning over people who–whether they’re progressives or centrists–are still entrenched in the old consensus of neoliberalism, and also providing converts with a deeper understanding of various aspects of the new consensus....  Bad Samaritans [by]... Ha-Joon Chang.... Concrete Economics [by Steve Cohen and Bard DeLong].... Made in the USA ... [by] Vaclav Smil.... Mariana Mazzucato _The Entrepreneurial State.... Kate Raworth['s] Doughnut Economics.... Rana Foroohar... _Makers and Takers.... [Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein.... Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Jacobs [Rethinking Capitalism].... Ha-Joon Chang [Economics].... Justin Yifu Lin [Against the Consensus].... The Public Banking Solution [by] Ellen Brown.... Ann Pettifor [The Production of Money].... The End of Alchemy by [Mervyn King].... Martin Wolf [The Shifts and the Shocks].... Mohamed El-Erian [The Only Game in Town].... +Freedom’s Forge [by Arthur Herman].... Mark Wilson’s Destructive Creation.... [When Small States Make Big Leaps) by Darius Ornston].... The Park Chung Hee Era [by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra Vogel].... MITI and teh Japanese Miracle [by Chalmers Johnson].... Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not [by Prassanan Parthasarathi]...

4. In large part, this desire to resort to high marginal tax rates is a counsel of despair: an admission that we cannot think of policy tools that would command congressional assent and that would restructure the economy that would "predistribute" income in a significantly more egalitarian way. But to the extent that people assign market prices some special moral status—as what you "earn"—this may well be a moral-philosophical mistake, even if it is not a utilitarian-economic mistake: Dylan Matthews: How to Tax the Rich, Explained: "It’s no accident that the Democratic Party went from wanting a 39.6 percent top tax rate to wanting much more. The 1990s Democratic Party made friends with the rich. The 2008 Democratic Party was eager to bail them out. The 2019 Democratic Party seems ready to declare war.... The Democratic urge to tax the rich isn’t a wholly new development. In the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton embraced Sanders’s proposal for a 65 percent top estate tax rate, and both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were able to raise the top income tax rate by a few points...

5. Given how much cars are used for commuting, it always seemed to me that much of the case for Uber was based on a refusal to note the peak time demand problem. But I concur with the conclusion here: the S-1 is devoid of meaningful information because the meaningful information is bearish: Ben Thompson: Uber Questions: "What an alluring pitch it remains! The fundamental idea of paying tens of thousands of dollars (more or less) for a large metal box that sits idle the vast majority of the time, doing nothing but depreciating in value, doesn’t really make much sense in a world where everyone carries Internet communicators that let you call up a ride when—and crucially, only when—you need it.... Here’s the problem, though: it’s impossible to tell if theory matches reality..... Uber’s S-1 is particularly lacking.... This is at best disappointing, and at worst feels like a cruel trick on retail investors.... Uber may still be worth the investment: the theory of the company remains plausible, and the company is decreasing its losses.... However, if I bought individual stocks... I would be out: this S-1 is so devoid of meaningful information (despite its length) that it makes me wonder what, if anything, Uber is trying to hide. If I am going to be taken for a ride I want at least some idea of where I am going—isn’t that the point of Uber in the first place?...

6. Find a community, gain a special skill within that community, build something worthwhile that may outlast you, play your position, find people who will respect your work. Is this the answer to how it is that people are able to work together constructively in groups? These are Michael Nielsen's ideas, and I think they are good ones. I think that they apply to students just as much as or more than they do to researchers and to political communities: Michael A. Nielsen: Extreme Thinking: "Three principles that I believe are critical to success in any tough learning situation.... Balance three activities... development of a common understanding with... people with whom one is later able to feel a common sense of community... development of abilities which are not common to your community... making a creative contribution to your community, to something larger than yourself. To develop effectively, we need to balance all three of these.... Effective learning requires long-term vision.... The example of kids playing soccer.... Create a social environment that will support and reinforce the change...

7. Ezra Klein: 2020 Democrats Need a Power Agenda, Not Just a Policy Agenda: "Concentration of power is the problem, so redistribution of power is the policy.... The Roosevelt Institute’s manifesto-ish new paper, 'New Rules For The 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of the American Economy'.... Concentration of power is the problem, so redistribution of power is the policy.... TThe traditional economic analysis is that growth comes from innovation, innovation comes from competitive markets, and competitive markets come from government getting the hell out of the way. The Roosevelt authors say we’ve gotten that dead wrong. Yes, growth comes from innovation, and innovation comes from competitive markets, but competitive markets—be they economic or political—don’t come from a laissez-faire government. They come from policymakers breaking up concentrations of power, because the last thing power wants is competition...

8. Scott Lemieux: The Latest Selective Campus PC Panic: "Yglesias has a very good explainer on the campus PC panic du jour. A few points: Paul has already explained why the claim that criticizing Sullivan—who is not a public defender or professional defense attorney—for taking on Weinstein somehow undermines the Sixth Amendment is silly.... The critical point here is that Sullivan could have represented Weinstein and continued to hold one of the most prestigious and well-compensated jobs in American academia. What was not renewed was his contract to be a quasi-ceremonial RA at an undergrad residence hall. Much of the discourse around Sullivan is built around treating losing a side gig as a glorified RA as if it presented the same issues as losing a tenured position.... As I’ve already argued with respect to Saint Christakis, if PROVOKING undergraduates is very important to your identity as an academic, it strikes me that 'being head of an undergraduate dorm' is not the side gig for you. Relatedly, the argument that it’s outrageous that undergraduates should have a say in who supervises their residences is farcical on its face...

9. I should long ago have told people to read this pinned tweetstorm from Equitable Growth's Will McGraw. A great many people who should know better—especially people on the ideological right—do not understand that when one assesses factors, one wants to control only for those complications that confound the effects you are trying to study, and that you have no business controlling for those complications that mediate the effects you are trying to study: Will McGrew: "Some claim that the wage gap disappears if you control for all relevant variables. This is 100% false. According to the evidence, workplace segregation and discrimination are the largest causes of the wage gap faced by Black women...

10. It is pretty clear that the post-2008 U.S. labor market is such that it totally deranged the unemployment rate as a meaningful measure of labor market slack, and we now need to look at primate-age EPOP. But it also deranged prime-age EPOP—only not as badly: Josh Bivens: Predicting Wage Growth with Measures of Labor Market Slack: It’s Complicated: "Why have wages grown so slowly in recent years despite relatively low unemployment rates? This puzzle has dominated economic commentary.... Since 2008, the share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 who are employed (or the 'prime-age EPOP') has predicted wage growth better than the unemployment rate. But even the prime-age EPOP has done a poor job at predicting wage growth since 2008 compared with both its own predictive power pre-2008 and the predictive power of the unemployment rate in earlier periods...

11. Gareth Campbell, Richard S. Grossman and John Turner: Before the Cult of Equity: New Monthly Indices of the British Share Market, 1829-1929: "We splice our blue-chip capital gains index with the Financial Times 30 (FT30) index to create a new blue-chip index that covers nearly two centuries, 1829 to 2018. By 1940, our blue-chip index is below its 1829 level, but during the next six decades it experiences an almost 80-fold increase.... There have been at least seven sharp contractions in the stock market over nearly 200 years and that most of these have been associated with major economic downturns.... During our sample period, investors earned an average nominal return of about five per cent per year, which suggests the existence of a modest equity risk premium by modern standards. This indicates that the emerging phase of UK stock market development was not associated with particularly high returns. Almost all of the gains experienced by investors arose from dividends, suggesting that profitable nineteenth century firms returned their gains to shareholders via dividends, in contrast to modern firms, which are more likely to return to shareholders through capital gains while smoothing dividends...

12. Economist: What to Do If The Usual Weapons Fail: "If the usual weapons fail, there are plenty of new policy responses for governments to turn to. From the robots that help care for an ageing population to holographic pop stars, the future always arrives early in Japan. Economic policy is no exception. When the massive Japanese financial bubble of the 1980s imploded, the Bank of Japan (BOJ)... tested many of the policies, such as QE, that would enter the toolkit of other central banks during the financial crisis. Yet Japan was seen as an example of central-bank incompetence, until smug Western central banks discovered after 2008 that getting an economy to perk up when interest rates were near zero was harder than it looked...

13. In England, at least, if "middle class" as defined as not-rich who can nevertheless expect some support from their parents and pass a nest egg down to their grandchildren, there was no real, lsubstnail, and numerous "middle class" in the twentieth century: Neil Cummins: The Missing English Middle Class: Evidence From 60 Million Death And Probate Records: "Using a combination of old-fashioned archival research, mass scripted downloading, optical character recognition, text parsing, and sets of algorithmic programming tools, I have digitised every individual entry, 18 million records with estate values, from the Principal Probate Calendar from 1892 to 1992. To this I have added all 60 million adult English deaths.... This simple finding is quite stark: despite the great equalisation of wealth over the 20th century, most English have no significant wealth at death...

14. In a time of bubble, raising interest rates and restricting the lending of regulated institutions may be counterproductive if there are unregulated institutions as well. This is an old lesson. We forgot it, and relearned it yet again in the 2000s: Itamar Drechsler, Alexi Savov, and Philipp Schnabl: How Monetary Policy Shaped the Housing Boom: "Between 2003 and 2006, the Federal Reserve raised rates by 4.25%. Yet it was precisely during this period that the housing boom accelerated, fueled by rapid growth in mortgage lending. There is deep disagreement about how, or even if, monetary policy impacted the boom. Using heterogeneity in banks' exposures to the deposits channel of monetary policy, we show that Fed tightening induced a large reduction in banks' deposit funding, leading them to contract new on-balance-sheet lending for home purchases by 26%. However, an unprecedented expansion in privately-securitized loans, led by nonbanks, largely offset this contraction. Since privately-securitized loans are neither GSE-insured nor deposit-funded, they are run-prone, which made the mortgage market fragile. Consistent with our theory, the re-emergence of privately-securitized mortgages has closely tracked the recent increase in rates...

15. I would not say that new technologies were "geared toward maintaining the role of human labor in value creation". I would say that new technologies required microcontrollers—and the human brain was the only available microcontroller—and software 'bots to manage materials and information flows—and the human brain provided the only available 'bot hardware. Now neither of these are the case: Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo: The Revolution Need Not Be Automated: "For centuries after the Industrial Revolution, automation did not hinder wage and employment growth, because it was accompanied by new technologies geared toward maintaining the role of human labor in value creation. But in the era of artificial intelligence, it will be up to policymakers to ensure that the pattern continues...

16. Paul Krugman: Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages: "Participants just assumed that robots are a big part of the problem—that machines are taking away the good jobs, or even jobs in general. For the most part this wasn’t even presented as a hypothesis, just as part of what everyone knows.... So it seems like a good idea to point out that in this case what everyone knows isn’t true.... We do have a big problem—but it has very little to do with technology, and a lot to do with politics and power.... Technological disruption... isn’t a new phenomenon. Still, is it accelerating? Not according to the data. If robots really were replacing workers en masse, we’d expect to see the amount of stuff produced by each remaining worker—labor productivity—soaring.... Technological change is an old story. What’s new is the failure of workers to share in the fruits of that technological change...

17. Made me want to very much read a book I had not gotten to. Now I have. It's excellent. I endorse Noah's review: Noah Smith: Book Review: The Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri: "Social media, Gurri asserts, has both empowered and emboldened the public, freeing it from the control of centralized, hierarchical push-media.... The public's goal is negation-denunciation of respected leaders, derailment of political programs, overthrow of parties or governments, discrediting of institutions, etc.... The usefulness of this book is in drawing parallels between a bunch of things that might seem unrelated.... If Gurri is right, these things are fundamentally about a technology-social media-and the way it changes power relations between the public and elites, then we can expect today's explosions of anger to be followed by others tomorrow, and then others the day after tomorrow, and on and on and on. Gurri may not convince you-in fact, if he does, you're probably not enough of a skeptic-but he will give you a new framework with which to usefully think about the political chaos of the modern world...

18. Another old piece, but more true than ever. On the left, the talking heads the media puts on the TV as economists are economists. On the right, they are grifters who play economists on TV. My recent encounter with Steve Moore at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club has erased any doubts I might have had: Paul Krugman (2015): On Econoheroes: "I gather that some readers didn’t get what I was driving at in declaring that Joe Stiglitz and yours truly are the left’s 'econoheroes', but the likes of Stephen Moore and Art Laffer play that role on the right.... What I meant—I thought this was obvious—is that Joe and I do tend to get quoted, invoked, etc. on a frequent basis in liberal media and by liberals in general, usually with (excessive) approbation. And the thing is that while there are people playing a comparable role in right-wing discussion, they tend not to be highly cited or even competent...

19. It is not at all clear to me that quantum computers will ever be practical devices for anything other than simulating quantum-mechanical systems, at which I agree they will have an enormous edge over classical devices. Although "simulating" is perhaps the wrong word: "mirroring" or "modeling" would be better. As Scott Aaronson rightly says, they will be useful for broader purposes only to the extent that the interference properties can be harnessed for our use, as in Childs et al.: Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: "Every quantum algorithm is... trying to choreograph things in such a way that for each wrong answer to your computational problem... the paths... cancel each other out, whereas the paths leading to the right answer should all be ‘in phase’ with each other.... If you can mostly arrange for that to happen, then when you measure the state of your quantum computer, then you will see the right answer with a large probability.... So nature... gives you a very bizarre ‘hammer’....People always want to... [say] the quantum computer just tries all of the possible answers at once. Bt the truth is that if you want to see an advantage, you have to exploit... interference...

20. Scott Alexander: Who By Very Slow Decay: "After a while of this, your doctors will call a meeting with your family and very gingerly raise the possibility of going to 'comfort care only', which means they disconnect the machines and stop the treatments and put you on painkillers so that you die peacefully. Your family will start yelling at the doctors, asking how the hell these quacks were ever allowed to practice when for God’s sake they’re trying to kill off Grandma just so they can avoid doing a tiny bit of work. They will demand the doctors find some kind of complicated surgery that will fix all your problems, add on new pills to the thirteen you’re already being force-fed every day, call in the most expensive consultants from Europe, figure out some extraordinary effort that can keep you living another few days...

21. Against Raj Chetty et al.'s belief that school quality—rather than the fabric of society—is a key mechanism creating and blocking possibilities for upward mobility: Jesse Rothstein (2017): Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income: "Commuting zones (CZs) with stronger intergenerational income transmission tend to have stronger transmission of parental income...

22. Irwin Collier: Chicago. Monopoly Course Proposal by Abram Harris with George Stigler's (Dis)approval, 1961: "[TO:] Al Rees, Chairman [DEPARTMENT:] Economics [FROM:] George J. Stigle [IN RE:] propose 200 level course in the College by Abram L. Harris. Dear Al: This new course of Abe Harris arouses no enthusiasm on my part. It sounds like a protracted bull session, in which large ideas are neither carefully analysed nor empirically tested. Even if this is a correct prediction, it leaves open the question of our listing it. Abe is a nice guy, only about 3 years from retirement, and it serves no good purpose to hurt his feelings. My own inclination would be (1) to list it, with explicit proviso that it is only for as long as he teaches it, and (2) advise our majors to forget it...

23. Abram L. Harris (1961): Countervailing Power, Monopoly, and Public Polic: "Combine theoretical analysis in a survey of the ideas of some leading economists who have dealt with the problem of market imperfections and monopoly along with discussions of the early trust movement.... A technical mastery of theoretical economics is not a prerequisite. One main purpose of the course is to stimulate undergraduate interest in theoretical economics, the history of economic ideas, and the relation of these ideas to current economic policy issues. The course should be open to beginning majors in economics, students who are undecided about a major in the social sciences, and to those who are just curious.... The Concept of “Countervailing Power”: Old wine in new bottles? Chamberlain... Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Marshall.... John Bates Clarke and his student, Thorstein Veblen.... The Standard Oil and U. S. Steel cases and federal anti-trust legislation. Recent anti-trust cases: administrative interpretation and application of federal legislation. Marx’s thesis concerning industrial concentration.... The extent and measurement of industrial concentration.... A term essay will be required of all students who take the course for credit. The essay may take the form of a review, e.g., Berle’s Twentieth Century Capitalist Revolution, Mason’s The Corporation in Modern Society, Chamberlain’s Labor Union Monopoly or may deal with some topic... selected by the student in consultation.... P.S. The content of the course may appear be heavy and, probably, cannot be entirely covered in a single quarter. The layout will have, no doubt, to be tailored as we proceed to give the course for the first time...

24. :I. W. Gabriel Selassie: Abram Lincoln Harris Jr. (1899-1963): "Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr., the grandson of slaves, was the first nationally recognized black economist... a Marxist.... The Black Worker was recognized as the foundation for future economic histories and assessments of the black condition. The Negro as Capitalist argued that non-racial economic reforms were the key to solving black fiscal woes. He also argued that capitalism was morally bankrupt and that employing race consciousness as a strategic way to enlighten a public was self-defeating.  W.E.B. DuBois described Harris as one of the 'Young Turks' who challenged the then existing historical theories about blacks in a capitalist society while insisting upon using modern social scientific methods to further his analyses of African American life...

1. The Free Dictionary: Idioms: Outside My Wheelhouse

2. Wikipedia: The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

3. Josh Marshall: Josh’s Epic List of Books

4. David Dyer-Bennet: "Federal Service" in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers | James Gifford: The Nature of “Federal Service” in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

5. Charlie Stross: CMAP #16: Book Title Blues: "Here are the rules for book titles these days: Make it memorable and pronouncable... unique.... Have a series title waiting in the wings.... While your snappy, unique title is the lede, feel free to add a colon or semi-colon separated list of potential series titles and cover blurbs, so that folks searching Amazon for Regency-setting dragon shifter hentai romance with talking starships will still be able to find your novel...

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