Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. We economists spend a lot of time looking at aggregates and averages—Trevon Logan likes to quote Robert Fogel on how counting is our secret game-changing analytical technique. But it is as important to get thick description of what happens to individual people's lives, so that you know what your aggregate and average numbers mean: Blythe George: “Them old guys... they knew what to do”: Examining the impact of industry collapse on two tribal reservations: "Using 46 in-depth interviews conducted on the Yurok and Hoopa Valley reservations...

2. GDP has its place in our national public-sphere conversation because a new number is released roughly once a month—each quarter of the year has its own GDP number, and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis releases "advance", "second", and "third" estimates for each quarter, and then there are benchmarking revisions. To attain an equal place in public-sphere consciousness, the distributional national accounts component would have to appear also once a month. And it is not clear to me how to do that: Equitable Growth: Measuring U.S. economic growth: "The measurement of GDP has fostered a national fixation on 'growing the pie' that ignores how growth is distributed...

3. Back in the 1990s we in the Clinton administration put Breyer on the Supreme Court in the belief that the Court needed somebody who genuinely understood antitrust. But the Republican justices have given him zero deference, even though he knows the issues and they do not. And this is an increasing problem: Fiona Scott Morton: [There is a lot to fix in U.S. antitrust enforcement today(https://equitablegrowth.org/there-is-a-lot-to-fix-in-u-s-antitrust-enforcement-today/): "Last month’s court decision allowing AT&T Inc. to acquire Time Warner Inc. is an example of the inability of our current system of courts and enforcement.... Judge Richard Leon demonstrated a lack of understanding of the markets, the concept of vertical integration, corporate incentives, and the intellectual exercise of forecasting what the unified firm would do... a poor decision...

4. It has always seemed to me that the sharp Josh Bivens is engaging in some motivated reasoning here: "[1] Putting pen-to-paper on trade agreements contributed nothing to aggregate job loss in American manufacturing. This is almost certainly true.... [2] The trade agreements we have signed are mostly good policy and have had only very modest regressive downsides for American workers. This is false." How am I supposed to reconcile [1] and [2] here?: Josh Bivens (2017): Brad DeLong is far too lenient on trade policy’s role in generating economic distress for American workers on Brad DeLong (2017): NAFTA and other trade deals have not gutted American manufacturing—period: "I could rant with the best of them about our failure to be a capital-exporting nation financing the industrialization of the world...

5. It seems highly likely that more money for teachers (and less money for financiers and specialists) would produce a richer and a happier America: Meg Benner, Erin Roth, Stephenie Johnson, and Kate Bahn: How to Give Teachers a $10,000 Raise: "While CAP believes that a new federal investment is necessary to dramatically improve teacher pay, other efforts at the federal, state, and local levels are essential to maximize compensation for all teachers...

1. I continue to fail to find a single credible competitor in terms of providing the highest quality daily tickler-to-read list than Mark Thoma: Mark Thoma: _Economist's View

2. At least as true now as it was when Galbraith began saying it half a century ago. John Kenneth Galbraith (1963): Wealth and Poverty: "The modern conservative... not even especially modern...is engaged... in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness...

3. Perhaps the biggest hole in growth economics is its inability to properly wrestle with the problem of how to build and entertain the communities of engineering practice that have the externalities that fuel so much of economic growth. The 2% per year rate of growth of labor efficiency seen over the past century comes from somewhere, after all. If it comes from activities like R&D and science that together consume 2% of national income, that is a 60%/year net rate of return on such activities. We badly need to understand more about them: Pierre Azoulay, Erica Fuchs, Anna Goldstein, Michael Kearney: Funding Breakthrough Research: Promises and Challenges of the "ARPA Model": "The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model for research funding has... spread...

4. What I call 'Bob Rubin's End-of-Meeting Questions'. Ask them! They really work!: Annie Duke: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts: "In fact, questioning what you see or hear can get you eaten. For survival-essential skills, type I errors (false positives) were less costly than type II errors (false negatives). In other words, better to be safe than sorry, especially when considering whether to believe that the rustling in the grass is a lion. We didn’t develop a high degree of skepticism when our beliefs were about things we directly experienced, especially when our lives were at stake...

5. We really do not know what effect a trade war would have on the global economy. All of our baselines are based off of what has happened in the past, long before the age of highly integrated global value chains. It could be small. It could be big. The real forecast is: we just do not yet know: Dan McCrum: Trade tension and China : "The war on trade started by the Trump administration is percolating through the world's analytical apparatus.... Tariffs could be bad for the global pace of economic activity, but only if the economic warfare escalates...

6. A very interesting paper. My first reaction is that the effect of salt iodization is just too large—that iodine deficiency in utero is highly unlikely to rob you of 11% of your lifetime income. Thus I suspect that something has gone wrong with the identification. But I cannot figure out what. Great kudos to Nguyen and company for being willing to put this out there for us to look at: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Steven Bednar, Anant Nyshadham, Teresa Molina, Quynh Nguyen: When It Rains It Pours: The Long-run Economic Impacts of Salt Iodization in the United States: "In 1924, The Morton Salt Company began nationwide distribution of iodine-fortified salt...

7. Nils Gilman: "A largely hereditary elite is anathema to the principles of meritocracy. But this much must be said: an elite that is secure in its prerogatives has a strong incentive to focus on the care and feeding of the system...

8. Tim Duy: Powell Wants to Create Some Mystery Around Fed Meetings: "A slower or faster pace of rate hikes, an extended pause, or even a cut are all possibilities at this point...

9. Yet another nail in the coffin of the idea that watching the lecture in-person can be made optional and education improved: Martin R. Edwards and Michael E. Clinton: A study exploring the impact of lecture capture availability and lecture capture usage on student attendance and attainment: "Lecture capture is widely used within higher education as a means of recording lecture material for online student viewing...

10. This, somehow, does not seem like it lies within the scope of economists' comparative advantage. But do psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists do better?: Roland Bénabou, Armin Falk, Jean Tirole: Narratives, Imperatives, and Moral Reasoning: "By downplaying externalities, magnifying the cost of moral behavior, or suggesting not being pivotal, exculpatory narratives...

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