Equitable Growth Worthy Reads from October 4, 2018
Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth
One thing making me hopeful for our future is that as our technological powers and capabilities grow, our ideas of what people need to be fully included members of society grow as well to keep pace. Just think of how high-speed computer access is becoming something that it is obvious that all Americans—and especially all American children—very much need to have. The fact that we—or some of us, at least—think that the failure of us to make sure this is provided is a "gap" is something I at least, in historical perspective, find very heartening: Delaney Crampton: Why Accessibility To High-Quality Broadband Matters To U.S. Schoolchildren: "Nearly 5 million households with school-aged children in the United States lack high-quality broadband access at home... 31.4 percent of households earning an annual income lower than $50,000 with school-aged children... 40 percent of those with annual incomes lower than $25,000...
One might, naively, think that the economies of scale that companies like Wal-Mart possess should redound to the benefit of workers as well as consumers. More efficiencies from economies of scale should leave a bigger pie for everyone else, which would be shared, right? Apparently not. When a business earns more by selling to large buyers, its workers wages appear not to go up but to go down. Something to watch very closely. Sharon Nunn sends us to Nathan Wilmers: Sharon Nunn: Big Businesses Push Down Prices, and Perhaps Wages: "As large firms... command increasing market share in the retail industry, they narrow the field of buyers for companies that make and move consumer products.... [Nathan] Wilmers found that since the late 1970s... a 10% increase in [corporate] earnings that depend on larger buyers is associated with a 1.2% decline in wage growth...
Heather Boushey said wise things about distributional national accounts before the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee: Heather Boushey: Testimony Before the Joint Economic Committee: "The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases a new estimate of quarterly or annual GDP growth every month. Distributional national accounts would add to this release an estimate that disaggregates the topline number and tells us what growth was experienced by low-, middle-, and high-income Americans. Academics have already constructed such a measure. The so-called DINA dataset constructed by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman...
I was tremendously disappointed to find myself trapped in Berkeley and so I missed: Ellora Derenoncourt, David Grusky, Trevon Logan, and Kimberly Adams: Research on Tap: Economic mobility—The Impact of Race and Place: "Place-based disparities and structural barriers based on race shape economic outcomes...
This may well be the most interesting working paper we released last month: "wages certainly matter for outcomes like sleep and happiness, but schedules in our data matter much more": Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "Research... has overwhelmingly focused on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low and stagnant wages. But the rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules...
Worthy Reads Elsewhere:
Hal Varian: Bots vs. Tots: "US labor market is already beginning to tighten. Expect a tight labor market for the next 15-25 years. Retirees continue to consume. Robots don’t consume. Labor supply is growing more slowly than labor demand. Old intuitions no longer helpful...
Damon Jones: @nomadj1s: "ighlights from the #econlife panel 9/25/18. Questions & advice on The Job Market™. Featured panelists: @paulgp, @PJakiela, @seema_econ, & @NWPapageorge...
This may well be the most insightful thing I have read this year, at least as far as its definition of conservatism is concerned: Frank Wilhoit: The Travesty of Liberalism: "There is no such thing as liberalism—or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: "There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"...
SEC: Elon Musk Charged with Securities Fraud for Misleading Tweets: "On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted to his 22 million Twitter followers that he could take Tesla private at $420 per share (a substantial premium to its trading price at the time), that funding for the transaction had been secured, and that the only remaining uncertainty was a shareholder vote...
Matthew Yglesias: @mattyglesias: "In Bush v Gore, Citizens United, Shelby County, throwing out Medicaid expansion, etc the 21st Century SCOTUS has mostly been an accelerant of democratic decline rather than a safeguard and the sooner people realize that the better...
Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (9/17/18)
Jason Snell: The Dream of Converting Podcasts into Text: "While... machine translations aren’t readable, they are getting good enough to fuel search engines. A great proof of concept is this one from David Smith...
Bradley L. Hardy, Trevon D. Logan, and John Parman: The Historical Role of Race and Policy for Regional Inequality: "Contemporary racial inequality can be thought of as the product of a long historical process with at least two reinforcing sets of policies: First are the policies governing the spatial distribution of the black population, and second are the policies that had a disparate impact on black individuals because of their locations...
Very clever by Sedláček et al.. And this certainly looks right: 2% of GDP as the (ongoing) cost of the Boris Johnson BREXIT clown show: Benjamin Born, Gernot Müller, Moritz Schularick, and Petr Sedláček: £350 Million a Week: The Output Cost of the Brexit Vote: "The current cost of Brexit... counterfactual... a matching algorithm... combination of comparison economies best resembles the pre-referendum growth path of the UK economy.... The negative drag from the Brexit vote now appears to be roughly £350 million a week...
Are there transcripts for the Ezra Klein show?: Ezra Klein: The Ezra Klein Show: "Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?... Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics... Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy...
#hoist4edfromthearchives #noted #2019-10-04
