Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

1. I am confident that there will be jobs. I am much less confident that there will be enough middle-class jobs: Adam Ozimek: Robots and Jobs: A Check on Fear: "When it comes to discussing the effects of automation on labor markets, I see far too much partial equilibrium thinking...

2. If you take the appropriate measure of labor market tightness to be the prime-age employment rate, there is no wage growth puzzle. So why does the Federal Reserve take the unemployment rate as the relevant labor market tightness variable and wring its hands about the wage-growth puzzle, rather than taking the prime-age employment rate as its relevant labor market tightness variable? It is a mystery: Adam Ozimek: Wage growth is right on target folks!

3. I have always thought that this is a genuinely key insight into social science and about which road leads toward utopia—not just about the "dance of commodities" that is the market economy, but also that this is how "human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions... a bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market": Cosma Shalizi (2012): In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: "There’s lots to say about Red Plenty as a work of literature; I won’t do so.... There is a passage in Red Plenty which is central to describing both the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, and vision we are trying to awake into. Henry [Farrell] has quoted it already, but it bears repeating...

4. In my view, successful economic communication of facts in a useful way starts with an anecdote—about, say, Cosette—which is then followed by "Cosette's experiences are typical", and then the numbers: Stefanie Stantcheva: The Fog of Immigration: "Surveyed 22,500 native-born respondents from France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US. We concluded that much of the political debate about immigration takes place in a world of misinformation...

5. The rise of the factory—shift from home production to production under the eye of a boss, at a workplace—was underway long before mechanization in numeric calculation as well as in craft piecework: Lorraine Daston (2017): Calculation and the Division Of Labor, 1750-1950: "On an August morning in 1838, the seventeen-year-old Edwin Dunkin and his brother...

6. Successful place-based policies require what we used to call "local boosters". One problem with so much of the so-called "Red States" is that the local rich are no longer boosters for their communities—indeed, no longer feel a part of the community in any meaningful way: Noah Smith: How to Save the Troubled American Heartland: "James Fallows and Deborah Fallows... notice a number of common approaches among towns that are on the mend. Two of these... universities and immigration...

7. I find myself wishing that Ricardo had given us some numbers here: How much in the way of resources has the government raised from society via its inflation? And how have those resource flows declined since the 2015 decision to monetize the fiscal deficit?: Ricardo Hausmann: The Venality of Evil: "Inflation in Venezuela... [at] 1,000,000% by year’s end... GDP... 45% below its 2013 level by the same time...

8. Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand argument to people who are allergic to "supply and demand" with a spoonful of sugar. He has three types of housing: newly-built yuppie fishtanks, old housing that can switch between working-class and yuppie, and newly-built "affordable housing" unattractive to yuppies: Noah Smith: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand": "YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents...

9. This point is absolutely cognitive science-statistics-philosophy of probability gold!: Judea Pearl, Madelyn Glymour, and Nicholas P. Jewell (2016): Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (New York: John Wiley & Sons: 978119186847>) : "Inquisitive students may wonder why it is that dependencies associated with conditioning on a collider are so surprising to most people—as in, for example, the Monty Hall example. The reason is that humans tend to associate dependence with causation...

10. Cosma Shalizi (2017): Review of Collins and Evans, Why Democracies Need Science: "This book has two big themes... that the scientific enterprise rests on certain values, which are attractive and should be pursued, and are consonant with a democratic polity and society...

#noted
#hoistedfromthearchives
#equitablegrowth
#weblogs