Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Fifteen Worthy Not on Equitable Growth:

1. I am looking for somebody else to highlight who serves as a good aggregator. I am failing to find anybody currently posting links who I judge to be in Mark Thoma's class. So, once again, from the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma's Economists' View continues to be the single best link aggregator in economic policy and theoretical economics: read him, and the things he links to, and in addition read:

2. If you do not make the Roosevelt Institute one of your trusted information intermediaries, you are doing it wrong. Badly wrong.

3. Nils Gilman: "Radical individualism produces anomie. But is traditional-social-hierarchy-based (e.g. right-wing, repressive) communitarianism really what people prefer? People for centuries have been voting with their feet to escape such situations..."

4. I am confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "The Eastern Heartland['s]... relative G.D.P. would have been more than 50 percent higher had it grown at the rate of America’s Coastal statesThe earned-income tax credit has been effectively promoting employment for over 40 years, but its design makes it poorly suited to fighting the ocean of male joblessness..."

5. Arithmetically, the big increases in price inflation in the 1970s came from (i) the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and (ii) the productivity growth slowdown. Milton Friedman tried to claim that those were both the result of too-rapid money growth permitted by the Fed, but was never convincing. Yet the folk memory of the 1970s is that... the big increases in price inflation in the 1970s came from too-rapid money growth permitted by the Fed that pushed the unemployment rate well below the NAIRU. Simply not true. Go figure: Noah Smith: Don’t Raise Rates Just to Keep Wages in Check: "Policy makers and macroeconomic analysts should rethink the basic mental model that they use to evaluate the state of the economy.... Rising wages don’t seem to trigger a wage-price spiral... not at moderate levels of wage growth.... If those experts keep relying on the conventional wisdom imparted from the 1970s and 1980s, big mistakes could result..."

6. Scott Lemieux: The Stickiness of the Medicaid Expansion: "Good Democratic policy that provides important benefits to people may not benefit the Democratic Party, and in Arkansas it hasn’t at either the state or federal level. But the policies themselves tend to be sticky, and that’s important in itself! And while universal programs in some cases are more desirable on policy grounds, it’s simply not true that programs that predominantly help the non-affluent are never popular or robust..."

7. Authors Alliance: "Authors Alliance promotes authorship for the public good by supporting authors who write to be read. We embrace the unprecedented potential digital networks have for the creation and distribution of knowledge and culture. We represent the interests of authors who want to harness this potential to share their creations more broadly in order to serve the public good..."

8. Patrick Iber: How Neoliberalism Changed the World: "Neoliberalism often connotes a form of liberal politics that has embraced market-based solutions to social problems.... The [interwar Austrian] neoliberals sought, Slobodian writes, to 'encase' markets... a global system that sufficiently ordered the world so that capitalism would be safe from certain forms of political interference.... The things that neoliberalism has trouble seeing are, at the present, far more consequential: deep inequalities, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of being left behind by a global system that operates with no regard for the interests or voice of the majority..."

9. Ernie Tedeschi: Will Employment Keep Growing? Disabled Workers Offer a Clue: "A seemingly inexorable economic trend has changed direction in the past few years, as people who cited health reasons for not working are returning to the labor force..."

10. Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark: Stabilising the real economy increases average output: "DeLong and Summers (1989)... argue that (demand) stabilisation policies can affect the mean level of output and unemployment...

11. Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...

12. Noah Smith: The Rich Get the Most Out of College: "Tim Bartik... Brad Hershbein... the college earnings premium—the lifetime difference in earnings between those who get a bachelor’s degree and those who only finish high school—was substantial for people from all income backgrounds...

13. It seems to me more likely than not that the Federal Reserve's current fear of a high-pressure economy is based on a misreading of a historical experience now a generation and a half past: Neel Kashkari: The Fed should not move too quickly to raise rates: "The US recovery took place after the Federal Reserve undertook extraordinary monetary policies...

14. Paul Krugman attempts to summarize the state-of-play on the slack-and-wages puzzle: Paul Krugman: Opinion | Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "The unemployment rate... suggest[s] an economy pretty much at full employment...

15. Adam Tooze: "Do you think Italian bond markets maybe had been dozing a bit? Its politics sure, but sovereign debt markets ARE political..."

#noted #weblogs #hoistedfromthearchives

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