Sixteen Worthy Reads for August 30, 2018
Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:
IMHO, this is closely akin to William Julius Wilson's "the declining significance of race"—i.e., the rising significance of class: Robert Manduca: How rising U.S. income inequality exacerbates racial economic disparities: "In 1968... median African American family income was 57 percent of the median white American family income. In 2016, the ratio was 56 percent. The utter lack of progress is striking...
How much of this correlation is causal? And how much is associational? I do not think we really know, in spite of studies of the build-out of broadband in France. The U.S. is a very different country. Nevertheless, I for one think that it is long past time to put universal broadband in the same bucket as basic sanitation and rural electrification—as something that is part of the citizens' share of being an American: Delaney Crampton: Why accessibility to broadband matters in reducing economic inequality in the United States: "A strong correlation between household income and in-home connectivity—a pattern that persists across both rural and economically depressed urban communities...
Austin Clemens: Schumer and Heinrich Introduced a Bill to Create New Measures of Economic Growth: "Very excited.... @HBoushey and I have written extensively about the need to track growth not just for the economy as a whole but for Americans at every point along the income curve...
Kate Bahn sends us to NPR's Planet Money: Kate Bahn: My Girl Joan Robinson: "My girl Joan Robinson is discussed in this episode of @planetmoney on underrated economists https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/22/641002632/the-underrated-economists...
Newly-arrived at Equitable Growth, Will McGrew retweets Matthew Yglesias quoting Ryan Cooper: Will McGrew: Matthew Yglesias: "Ryan Cooper: 'There was no skills gap, nor an innovation shortage, nor an explosion of stay-at-home dads. There was a collapse in aggregate demand that was left to rot, while a lot of people who should have known better made things worse...'
Equitable Growth alumnus Nick Bunker reminds us of this WCEG working paper from a year and a half ago: Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman: Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries: "We combine tax, survey, and national accounts data to build a new series on the distribution of national income...
Worthy Reads Elsewhere:
Even though this is written by another member of the J. Bradford Alliance, I am not sure that "when U.S. multinationals are able to import talent or export R&D work, this reinforces US technological leadership". That is not how I read Shenzhen, at least: Lee Branstetter, Britta Glennon, and J. Bradford Jensen: The IT revolution and the globalisation of R&D: "US firms have begun shifting R&D investment towards non-traditional destinations such as China, India, and Israel...
This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new technology. There were people who strongly objected to printing, on the grounds that the only way to truly grok a book was to copy it out word-for-word by hand. In their view, printing produced a bunch of shallow intellectual poseurs who would have only a surface and inadequate knowledge of the books that they had not really read but only skimmed. And Sokrates's attitude toward writing as a greatly inferior simulacrum and inadequate mimesis that could not create the true knowledge obtained through real dialogue is well known. Nevertheless, we believe that we have managed to adapt to printing and indeed to the creation of manuscript rather than just the oldest oral master-and-apprentice intellectual technologies. Perhaps we will find different things to be true once we will have trained our information-technology networks to be our servants as trusted information intermediaries and intellectual force multipliers, rather than (as they know are) the servants of the advertisers that pay them and thus that try to glue our eyeballs and attention to screens whether having our eyeballs and attention so-glued helps us become more like our best selves or not. But as of now the empirical evidence has become overwhelming: Susan Dynarski: For better learning in college lectures, lay down the laptop and pick up a pen: "When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings...
Robert E. Litan and Ian Hathaway: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?: "William Baumol... idea... that may help explain America’s productivity slump. Baumol’s writing raises the possibility that U.S. productivity is low because would-be entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong kind of work...
Isabel Z. Martínez, Michael Siegenthaler, and Emmanuel Saez: The Myth of Intertemporal Labour Supply Substitution: "Macroeconomists tend to assume that people work more when their wages are temporarily higher...
Will Wilkinson: “Socialism” vs. “capitalism”: what left and right get wrong about the debate: "We need go-go capitalism to afford a generous welfare state...
I disagree with Simon here. He claims that "Alesina or Rogoff featured so much in... austerity... not because they were influential, but because they were useful to provide some intellectual credibility to the policy that politicians of the right wanted to pursue". It's not one or the other. They gave credibility. And because they gave credibility the media-political machine made them influential. And there influence was such that they neutralized the rest of us, who understood what was going on and were desperately trying to stop it: Simon Wren-Lewis: The biggest economic policy mistake of the last decade, and it had nothing to do with academic economists: "Reading the article brought back memories of my first year or two writing this blog, where I became part of a mainly US blog scene of mainstream academics opposed to austerity...
Cass R. Sunstein: It Can Happen Here: "In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew...
Justin Wolfers: Money Really Does Lead to a More Satisfying Life: "Lottery winners said they were substantially more satisfied with their lives than lottery losers.... These effects are remarkably durable... still evident up to two decades after a big win...
Justin Fox: Why German Corporate Boards Include Workers for Co-Determination: "One of the world’s most successful capitalist nations, Germany, currently requires 50 percent employee representation on the supervisory boards of large corporations, and that most countries in the European Union now also encourage or require some such form of employee 'co-determination'...
James Politi: US tariffs see small businesses plead for mercy as trade war bites: "One by one, they paraded before a panel of US administration officials this week to plead for mercy in the escalating trade war with Beijing, at a public hearing on the $200bn in new tariffs threatened by Donald Trump against imports from China...
