Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Ben Thompson: Apple’s Earnings, Google’s Earnings, Amazon Earnings: "Available evidence strongly suggests that iPhone demand in China is very elastic: if the iPhone is cheaper, Apple sells more; if it is more expensive, Apple sells less. This is, of course, unsurprising, at least for a commodity, and right there is Apple’s issue in China: the iPhone is simply less differentiated in China than it is elsewhere, leaving it more sensitive to factors like new designs and price than it is elsewhere...

2. It's not a disconnect between utility and happiness, its a disconnect between revealed preference and happiness. And a disconnect between revealed preference and happiness is properly solved via educating people to become their best selves—I do not think it poses grave philosophical conundrums: Noah Smith: What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy: "Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook). This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility—more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy. But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward...

3. Half of the opening paragraphs of War and Peace are in French: Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace: "Еh bien, mon prince. Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous previens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j'y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n'etes plus mon ami, vous n'etes plus мой верный раб, comme vous dites. Ну, здравствуйте, здравствуйте. Je vois que je vous fais peur, садитесь и рассказывайте...

4. In the absence of global warming such a 95%-ile cyclone would have a maximum windspeed at landfall of 220 km/hr rather than 240: Hilzoy: "'With winds expected to be 240 kilometers per hour (150 mph) at landfall,: Tropical Cyclone Fani would be the strongest storm to hit the region since a similar system struck Odisha in 1999, resulting in at least 10,000 deaths.... A storm surge in excess of 6.5 feet is likely to occur in some locations, with the surge affecting millions in low-lying areas. The Bay of Bengal is notorious for allowing storms like this one to pile huge amounts of water into highly populated areas'...

5. Professional Republican economists against Moore: Mankiw. Professional Republicans for Moore: Lindsey, Siegel, Taylor (secondhand). Staying silent on Moore was, I think, a damaging vice signal—and a lot of people were willing to send it. Opposing Moore was not a virtue signal or even an exercise of virtue but rather a no-brainer: only Mankiw would do it: Reuters: Moore Withdraws for Consideration from Fed Post: Trump - Reuters: "U.S. President Donald Trump’s pick to fill a seat on the Federal Reserve has withdrawn from consideration... Trump said on Twitter.... Just hours earlier, Moore had told Bloomberg TV that he was “all in” and that he expected to be nominated within three weeks...

6. Dan Drezner: Let’s Grade the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning on Her Grand Strategy Musings!: "Once upon a time, the director of policy planning for the State Department was a pretty prestigious job.... Brian Hook, the director of policy planning under Rex Tillerson, was granted a tremendous amount of authority but stumbled badly. He was a relative neophyte attempting to counsel a complete neophyte on the ins and outs of the job. He did... poorly. When Mike Pompeo came on, he hired Kiron Skinner.... She has thought about this stuff for a while. She has the academic credentials and publishing record.... Since coming on in September of last year, however, Skinner has made some odd statements...

7. Sam Bell recalls this from two years ago. The Bernanke and the Yellen Feds are, I think, going to be judged as harshly as the Burns Fed of the 1970s for assuming that they knew the state and structure of the economy. The more tentative, more willing to gather information Greenspan Fed of the 1990s looks much much better in retrospect: Sam Fleming: Is It Finally Time For a Pay Rise for American Workers?: "John Williams... San Francisco Fed president, says that while inflation may have been weak recently, this should not detract from the bigger picture. “It’s not like inflation is moving in the wrong direction or is out of sync with what you’d expect for where the economy is,” he said last month. 'We have gotten rid of all the slack'...

8. From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Silicon Valley to account—to get the social media companies to thin of themselves as informaiton utilities rather than misinformation utilities: Carole Cadwalladr: My TED Talk: How I Took on the Tech Titans in Their Lair: "Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter... saying that Nazism was 'hard to define'.... They needed to go 'deep'.... Anderson gave credit to Dorsey for actually showing up. And it’s true he did. He showed guts for doing what Zuckerberg and Sandberg would not. But... what came across... was the complete absence of emotion–any emotion–in Dorsey’s face.... Dorsey appeared–and I can’t think of any other way of saying this–insentient.... Dorsey can see the iceberg but doesn’t seem to feel our terror. Or understand it. In an interview last summer, US journalist Kara Swisher, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg how he felt about Facebook’s role in inciting genocide in Myanmar–as established by the UN–and he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer...

9. Paul Krugman: The Zombie Style in American Politics: "Russia didn’t help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. O.K., it did help him, but the campaign itself wasn’t involved. O.K., the campaign had a lot of Russian contacts and knowingly received information from the Russians, but that was perfectly fine.... We’re not even talking about an ever-shifting party line; new excuses keep emerging, but old excuses are never abandoned...

10. Chye-Ching Huang: Fundamentally Flawed 2017 Tax Law Largely Leaves Low- and Moderate-Income Americans Behind: "The fundamental flaws of the 2017 tax law: 1) it ignores the stagnation of working-class wages and exacerbates inequality; 2) it weakens revenues when the nation needs to raise more; and 3) it encourages rampant tax avoidance and gaming that will undermine the integrity of tax code.... The 2017 tax law largely left behind low- and moderate-income Americans—and in many ways hurts them.... A restructuring of the law can fix these flaws...

11. Robert Waldmann: "I think their contributions to thought about methodology would be worth zero if correctly assessed, but are worth much less due to their influence. This is more true of Prescott, but I think I explain how Lucas's efforts are worth less than nothing here https://t.co/6fJuiQRVRk...

1. Wikipedia: Russian Conquest of Central Asia

2. Wikipedia: Russian Nobility

3. Measuring Worth: Logarithm of US Real GDP Per Capita (2012 Dollars)

4. Measuring Worth: Logarithm of UK Real GDP Per Capita (2013 Pounds)

5. A. K. Cairncross: Review of "Business Cycles in the United Kingdom, 1870-1914" by J. Tinbergen

6. NIESR: The UK Business Cycle–Dating and Implications

7. Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics: An updated graph that Claudia Goldin had me make two and a half decades ago. The nonfarm unemployment rate since 1890...

8, Joshua Yaffa: Putin’s Russia Wrestles with the Meaning of Trotsky and Revolution

1. Wikipedia: New Economic Policy

2. Britannica.com: Fasces

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