Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0hyYd_ySdCyLyX4IseQV6_I4A
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/noted-wolf-global-role-2020-10-31.pptx
2020-10-31

Martin Wolf: The Threat of Long Economic Covid Looms https://www.ft.com/content/f9a0c784-712e-4bf9-b994-55f8d63316d9: ‘Covid-19 has left many patients with debilitating symptoms after the initial infection has cleared. This is “long Covid”. What is true of health is likely to be true of the economy, too…. To meet the threat of a “long economic Covid”, policymakers must avoid repeating the mistake of withdrawing support too soon, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis. This danger is real, even if there remains much uncertainty about how the crisis will unfold…. We know that many businesses have been hurt, as demand for their output collapsed or they were locked down. The second waves of the disease now crashing on to many economies will make this worse.... But we also know that things could have been far worse. The world economy has benefited from extraordinary support from central banks and governments.... We know, nevertheless, that what has already happened is going to leave deep scars. The longer the pandemic continues, the bigger those scars will be.... Fiscal policy has to play a central role, as it alone can provide the necessary targeted support... Governments have to spend. But, over time, they must shift their focus from rescue to sustainable growth. If, ultimately, taxes have to rise, they must fall on the winners. This is a political necessity. It is also right…

.#noted #2020-10-30 <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/wolf-long-economic-covidnoted.html>

Donald Trump: 'In California https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1321548174427852801, you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It's a very complex mechanism. And they don't realize those germs, they go through it like nothing…

Video at: http://delongtoday.com

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-2020-10-30.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0N6bJBYfxAcdZMKxUYEc8q2gQ
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/2020-10-30-american-republicans-are-bad-economic-managersdelongtoday.html 2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

Today is an economic-analysis day:

• I will start with the large gap between economic performance under Democratic and under Republican presidents, and with Alan Blinder’s and Mark Watson’s puzzlement as to where it comes from

• I will then run through the history of what went wrong with Republican economic policy

• I will then point out the technocratic idiocies of economic policy under the Trump administration

• And I will then set forth my theory of where the performance gap—that American incomes grow 1.8%-points per year faster when Democrats are president than when Republicans are—comes from. Democratic politicians and legislators are willing, at least sometimes, to listen to their economists. Republican politicians and legislators will not even let their economists into the room where it happens until they have agreed that the politicians and legislators are already pursuing great policies.

.#forecasting #economicgrowth #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #2020-10-30

J. Bradford DeLong: The Economic Incompetence of Republican Presidents https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/democratic-administrations-historically-outperform-on-economy-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-10: In a United States rife with disinformation, one of the most persistent myths is that Republicans are better than Democrats for business and economic growth. In fact, Republicans have consistently under-performed on the economy for almost a century. One hears many strange things nowadays, not least because “they” (a complicated term) are flooding the zone with misinformation. Without a shared set of facts upon which to base ethical and policy debates, democracy inevitably breaks down. The system’s virtue lies in its unique ability to elevate and consider a broad range of ideas emanating from society. Ideally, through a good-faith exchange of arguments and a weighing of the alternatives, a majority of voters converges on the best course of action...

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delong-project-syndicate-2020-11-01.pdf https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/democratic-administrations-historically-outperform-on-economy-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-10 https://www.icloud.com/pages/0X3WOZxicKKMrstEB66_3N7eA https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0-wFK4esatnHmRMnSxPg-B8Lg https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/the-economic-incompetence-of-republican-presidents-project-syndicate.html
2020-10-30

We hear many strange things today. They—and it is a complicated “they”—are flooding the zone with misinformation. Why? For lots of reasons. But democracy breaks down under a flood of misinformation. Democracies’ excellences spring from its ability to consider ideas from different places in society, and converge on the good ones. But that requires that the flow of information into the public-sphere be reality-based—or at least that there be confrontations in which the people can watch Lincoln debate Douglas and decide who is trustworthy and correct and who is not. And we have lost that.

But we keep on trying. Here Sisyphus. Here rock. Here hill. And, as Camus wrote now long ago, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, with what he meant depending on which of the many possible ways we choose to read the word “must”.

One piece of misinformation I see more and more these days is that on election day America faces a tradeoff. On the one hand, electing a Democrat means that America will no longer have a government that permanently kidnaps children just because it can. On the other hand, electing a Democrat “who will be radical and hurt the economy…”, as the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy “No Republicans Should Ever Stab Trump in the Back” Noonan puts it, before writing that “[Biden] should not be going out for ice cream in a mask like John Dillinger on the lam…” and that “[Kamala Harris] is embarrassing. Apparently you’re not allowed to say these things because she’s a woman…. I will not sweat it, I will be myself…. If you can’t imitate gravity, could you at least try for seriousness?…”

So let me give the microphone to economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, who write that: “The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous: it holds almost regardless of how you define success…. The performance gap… strains credulity…. 1.8 percentage points [per year]… from Truman through Obama…” And note that if they went back two more presidents—to Hoover-Roosevelt—the gap would be even bigger: about 3%/year.

Note that in this context Trump was an unusually good president as far as economic performance in his first three years was concerned. In teh first three years of his presidency the economy matched the 2.4%/year growth it achieved in Obama’s second term. Even matching the previous Democrat is something that Trump’s and only Trump’s, of all post-WWII Republican presidencies, has seen.

Blinder and Watson are flummoxed on where this performance gap comes from: greater fixed investment, more consumer optimism and thus spending on durables, fewer unfavorable oil shocks, and perhaps stronger growth abroad. But these can explain less than half of the gap. It is not that Democrats pursue overinflationary policies that borrow growth from the future and move it into the present.

When I first read Blinder and Watson, the oil factor jumped out at me. Both President George Bushes—and also Nixon and Ford’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—were deeply confused about whether the U.S. wanted a high or a low price of oil as far as boosting real income growth was concerned. Other presidents grabbed for chances to make or keep oil prices lower.

When we look back at history, it seems that Republican presidents and their administrations have little sense of what economic policies are likely to work. It simply never entered George W. Bush’s mind, or the mind of anyone in his administration, that a financial crisis could be produced by underregulation and would be a bad thing. It simply never entered Ronald Reagan’s mind, or the mind of anyone in his administration, that the big budget deficits they created gave America a choice between seeing investment collapse—slowing growth—or borrowing from abroad and in the process importing lots more manufactures—thus turning the Midwest into a rust belt. And Nixon’s belief that low interest rates plus wage-and-price controls could keep both inflation and unemployment low was hard to fathom either at the time.

Here we can say of Trump that he has played true to type. NAFTA: worst trade deal in American history. TPP: second worst. Add some TPP provisions to NAFTA and call it USMCA, and all of a sudden it makes America great again. A trade war with China: “good, and easy to win”. But the result has been no change in manufacturing employment, a widened manufacturing trade deficit, U.S. consumers suffering reduced real incomes because they, not China, have paid the tariffs. Why? Because Robert Lighthizer and company had no clue how to plan or fight a trade war.

Republican presidents with their repeated failures to understand how the economy works have been hurting it since at least 1928. There is no tradeoff here.

829 words

.#economicgrowth #highlighted #macro #politicaleconomy #projectsyndicate #2020-10-30<!--more-->

We hear many strange things today. They—and it is a complicated “they”—are flooding the zone with misinformation. Why? For lots of reasons. But democracy breaks down under a flood of misinformation. Democracies’ excellences spring from its ability to consider ideas from different places in society, and converge on the good ones. But that requires that the flow of information into the public-sphere be reality-based—or at least that there be confrontations in which the people can watch Lincoln debate Douglas and decide who is trustworthy and correct and who is not. And we have lost that.

But we keep on trying. Here Sisyphus. Here rock. Here hill. And, as Camus wrote now long ago, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, with what he meant depending on which of the many possible ways we choose to read the word “must”.

One piece of misinformation I see more and more these days is that on election day America faces a tradeoff. On the one hand, electing a Democrat means that America will no longer have a government that permanently kidnaps children just because it can. On the other hand, electing a Democrat “who will be radical and hurt the economy…”, as the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy “No Republicans Should Ever Stab Trump in the Back” Noonan puts it, before writing that “[Biden] should not be going out for ice cream in a mask like John Dillinger on the lam…” and that “[Kamala Harris] is embarrassing. Apparently you’re not allowed to say these things because she’s a woman…. I will not sweat it, I will be myself…. If you can’t imitate gravity, could you at least try for seriousness?…”

So let me give the microphone to economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, who write that: “The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous: it holds almost regardless of how you define success…. The performance gap… strains credulity…. 1.8 percentage points [per year]… from Truman through Obama…” And note that if they went back two more presidents—to Hoover-Roosevelt—the gap would be even bigger: about 3%/year.

Note that in this context Trump was an unusually good president as far as economic performance in his first three years was concerned. In teh first three years of his presidency the economy matched the 2.4%/year growth it achieved in Obama’s second term. Even matching the previous Democrat is something that Trump’s and only Trump’s, of all post-WWII Republican presidencies, has seen.

Blinder and Watson are flummoxed on where this performance gap comes from: greater fixed investment, more consumer optimism and thus spending on durables, fewer unfavorable oil shocks, and perhaps stronger growth abroad. But these can explain less than half of the gap. It is not that Democrats pursue overinflationary policies that borrow growth from the future and move it into the present.

When I first read Blinder and Watson, the oil factor jumped out at me. Both President George Bushes—and also Nixon and Ford’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—were deeply confused about whether the U.S. wanted a high or a low price of oil as far as boosting real income growth was concerned. Other presidents grabbed for chances to make or keep oil prices lower.

When we look back at history, it seems that Republican presidents and their administrations have little sense of what economic policies are likely to work. It simply never entered George W. Bush’s mind, or the mind of anyone in his administration, that a financial crisis could be produced by underregulation and would be a bad thing. It simply never entered Ronald Reagan’s mind, or the mind of anyone in his administration, that the big budget deficits they created gave America a choice between seeing investment collapse—slowing growth—or borrowing from abroad and in the process importing lots more manufactures—thus turning the Midwest into a rust belt. And Nixon’s belief that low interest rates plus wage-and-price controls could keep both inflation and unemployment low was hard to fathom either at the time.

Here we can say of Trump that he has played true to type. NAFTA: worst trade deal in American history. TPP: second worst. Add some TPP provisions to NAFTA and call it USMCA, and all of a sudden it makes America great again. A trade war with China: “good, and easy to win”. But the result has been no change in manufacturing employment, a widened manufacturing trade deficit, U.S. consumers suffering reduced real incomes because they, not China, have paid the tariffs. Why? Because Robert Lighthizer and company had no clue how to plan or fight a trade war.

Republican presidents with their repeated failures to understand how the economy works have been hurting it since at least 1928. There is no tradeoff here.

829 words

.#economicgrowth #highlighted #macro #politicaleconomy #projectsyndicate #2020-10-30

DeLong: COVID Dashboard https://research.stlouisfed.org/dashboard/56322…

Ulrike Malmendier, Stefan Nagel, & Zhen Yan: The Making of Hawks & Doves: Inflation Experiences on the FOMC https://www.nber.org/papers/w23228.pdf...

Dan Froomkin: New York Times Nailed for Publishing Republican Propaganda—Yet Again https://www.salon.com/2020/10/23/new-york-times-nailed-for-publishing-republican-propaganda--yet-again/: ‘Two supposedly "average" voters in a Times story turn out to be hardcore Republicans. And it's happened before... It raises serious questions about whether Times editors and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign's propaganda…

Fox and Briar: Mediterranean Lamb Bowls https://www.foxandbriar.com/mediterranean-lamb-bowls/…

Marc Flandreau: How Vulture Investors Draft Constitutions: North & Weingast 30 Years Later https://us02web.zoom.us/w/86160838299?tk=duPA9Ka5nc9J1jZ0ZeuMESHoiEx_l54-alP8YvwejVE.DQIAAAAUD5YOmxZkLVd6UEtOZFFOU2pXZEJZblV5bHpnAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

George Dangerfield: The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-dangerfield-strange-death.pdf

Gaius Julius Caesar: The Civil War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-caesar-civil.pdf

Gaius Julius Caesar: The Gallic War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-caesar-gallic-war.pdf

Marcus Tullius Cicero: Letters to Atticus https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-i.pdf https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-ii.pdf https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-iii.pdf

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-marcus-aurelius-meditations.pdf

Sonam Sheth & Eliza Relman: Former Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain Has Died After Being Hospitalized for Coronavirus https://www.businessinsider.com/herman-cain-dies-after-being-hospitalized-for-covid-19-2020-7...

George Borjas (2016): EJMR https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000601/https://gborjas.org/2016/06/30/a-rant-on-peer-review/: ‘Janet Currie… takes an even easier approach to dismiss EJMR: sexism. I personally find the forum refreshing. There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex, and putting down “reg monkeys”… https://twitter.com/delong/status/750084264335544320

Women’s Untold Stories https://www.myscience.org/news/wire/berkeley_s_campus_community_explores_women_s_untold_stories-2020-berkeley: ‘In the 1970s, Berkeley economics professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson would endure derogatory treatment for being a woman... was told not to wear "tight jeans" while teaching, because it would make the "boys crazy." "There was a way in which my failure to recognize that economics was a male-dominated discipline for a long time really helped me," Tyson said in an interview with Berkeley’s economics department. "... But when I realized that there were likely to be very few women in my program, and that there were very few well-known women in economics, I started to have my doubts”…

https://share.mmhmm.app/d76c99fa29734fa2a9b2445ede510ba6

8.2.0. WWII & Cold War Intro Video: Econ 115

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-8.2.0-wwii-%26-cold-war-video-intro-10.0.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0LhfMB65IaKYZYESYgmuUqZhA
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/820-wwii-cold-war-intro-video-econ-115.html

10:00 :: 1100 words
2020-10-25

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-8.1-wwii-%26-cold-war-readings-note.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0SeHtO2Tno7Vf_ddUMm0dhAaw
2020-10-19

https://research.stlouisfed.org/dashboard/56322

Video at: http://delongtoday.com

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-2020-10-23.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0HswGhv7jKY3tBhwvoawH16iQ
2020-10-23

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/davies-lying-book-talk-2020-10-16.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0Y-8YsQfbZm3XA4JhpDYJ_4PA

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps02.ipynb
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/modeling-humanitys-economic-growth-watersheds-econ-115-problem-set-2.html

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps03.ipynb
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/the-unequal-world-has-resource-access-had-an-important-role-to-play-econ-115-problem-set-3.html

https://github.com/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps07.ipynb
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps07.ipynb
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/review-exponential-growth-dataframe-access-econ-115-problem-set-7.html

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/05yW08oQvx5uDpAZcxmObZsZA
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/deveng-215-2020-10-22.pptx
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/disaster-capitalism-deveng-215-2020-10-22.html

This incorporates-by-reference the readings & lectures from week 9 of Joeva Rock's Fall 2020 instantiation of GPP 115...

Daniel Davies: Book Talk—Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World https://watson.brown.edu/events/2020/book-talk-dan-davies-lying-money-how-legendary-frauds-reveal-workings-our-world...

Cities with More than 10000 Population https://www.evernote.com/l/AAHhz3j2xe1PY4XJUj0HaDcRMn0VD2bgtqcB/image.png...

Half the World Population https://www.evernote.com/l/AAETx7xhCWVPmbK_sKWWe2Nl2oc6ETuYnTEB/image.png...

Population Density https://www.evernote.com/l/AAFG80xx73hPrJ-o7SASlYf1AOAHSm_LndkB/image.png...

Sidney Kaplan (1976): The "Domestic Insurrections" of the Declaration of Independence https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-kaplan-domestic-insurrections.pdf...

Nisreen Alwan: What Exactly Is Mild Covid-19? https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-alwan-mild-covid-19.pdf...

Persi Diaconis & Frederick Mosteller: Methods for Studying Coincidences https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-diaconis-coincidences.pdf...

Stephen Pulvirent: Hodinkee Radio Episode 107: All About the Apple Watch https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/hodinkee-radio-episode-107-apple-watch-alan-dye: ‘A comprehensive deep-dive into Apple's latest smartwatch…

Anna Mikusheva & Jim Stock (2007): Weak Instruments https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-384-time-series-analysis-fall-2013/lecture-notes/MIT14_384F13_lec7and8.pdf: ‘Anderson-Rubin (1949) https://www.evernote.com/l/AAGO6SDBHehDP6AIs3ixnvRIAO0W38s2P10B/image.png https://www.evernote.com/l/AAH4RvtsQutIcoIV5gw7ku-orITWdgvgD-oB/image.png...

Arjun Jayadev & Mike Konczal (2010); The Boom Not The Slump: The Right Time For Austerity https://web.archive.org/web/20110802015309/http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/sites/all/files/not_the_time_for_austerity.pdf: ‘Such a conclusion is unmerited. The overwhelming majority of the episodes used by A & A did not see deficit reduction in the middle of a slump. Where they did, it o#en resulted in a decline in the subsequent growth rate or an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Of the 26 episodes that they identify as ‘expansionary’, in virtually none did the country a) reduce the deficit when the economy was in a slump and b) increase growth rates while reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio…

Plus

Mary Daly: Interview https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-wsj-interview-with-san-francisco-fed-president-mary-daly-11602788005 'The bridge… over the coronavirus depends considerably on fiscal agents doing the part that they need to do to…. Without that fiscal stimulus, my outlook is quite a bit more muted. And whether it’s next month or the month after probably doesn’t determine the outlook for the next couple of years, but it definitely does determine how much suffering and pain many American households face.

Wendy Edelberg & Louise Sheiner: What Could Additional Fiscal Policy Do in the Next Three Years? https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-could-additional-fiscal-policy-do-for-the-economy-in-the-next-three-years/: ‘We find that enacting all five of those illustrative policies and increasing federal spending by $2 trillion would raise the level of real (i.e, inflation adjusted) GDP by 0.2 percent in 2020, 4.0 percent in 2021 and 2022, and 1.6 percent in 2023 above the level it would otherwise be (authors’ calculations). If all five policies were enacted, economic activity would return to its projected path prior to the pandemic by the third quarter of 2021. Under current law, that return likely would not occur for perhaps as long as a decade…

Brad DeLong's weblog . Since 1999. Comments (mostly) welcome. Or email me at [email protected] with "delong-weblog" as the subject. RSS feed. Also on twitter @delong.

Comment on: Stephen Quinn & William Roberds: On the Evolution of Payments Systems

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0eqVET8B0fmqY2TM-T1XGpPIA
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/future-of-fintech-conference-2020-10-19.pptx
2020-10-19

At: http://delongtoday.com

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0if3STTNspC1rWVgx8Pkp6_dw https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-2020-10-16.pptx

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0S8zhpTx-pPo8Tln5WNl8fBWA https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/column-cowen-reject-great-barrington-noted.pptx 2020-10-16

Philippe Weil (1989): The Equity Premium Puzzle & the Riskfree Rate Puzzle https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-weil-1989-riskfree.pdf...

Donald Harris: Introduction to Bukharin: “Theory of the Leisure Class” https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-harris-bukharin-intro.pdf…

Constance L. Hunter: Economic Outlook: Riding the COVID-Coaster https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/presentation-hunter-covid-coasterpresentation-hunter-covid-coaster.pdf…

Joan Robinson: Rereading Marx https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-robinson-rereading-marx……

Vanessa Stovall: A Tale of Two Creons: Black tragedies, White anxieties, and the Necessity of Abolition https://medium.com/corona-borealis/a-tale-of-two-creons-black-tragedies-white-anxieties-and-the-necessity-of-abolition-4d1816ce3f7a...

Athol Fugard, John Kani, & Winston Ntshona: The Island (Play) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(play)

Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman: The Rise of Income & Wealth Inequality of America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Rise%20of%20Income%20and%20Wealth%20Inequality%20in%20America-%20Zucman.pdf...
 Scott Hanselman (2014): Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler https://youtu.be/UzyoT4DziQ4?t=94…

Plus:

I must say, the world-historical reception of Karl Marx would have been very different had he stuck to his initial word choices, and not substituted "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" for what he had originally called "Juden" and "Judentum" as labels for his concepts: Shlomo Avinieri (2019): Karl Marx: Philosophy & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-avineri-marx.pdf: ‘In German parlance of the time, Judentum also stood for commerce, trade, huckstering in general, just as the English verb “to jew” (now excised from the Oxford English Dictionary) used to mean “to cheat.” So when Marx says that American society is the apotheosis of the power of “Judaism” or that society should be emancipated from the thrall of “Judaism,” there is a subtext here: contemporary readers would recognize that he was not writing just about Jews. Fear of censorship might also have convinced Marx to use the colloquial Judentum rather than “capitalism.” Second, and ironically, Marx’s identification of Judaism with capitalism has a paradoxical literary origin. It appears for the first time in Germany in an article by Marx’s socialist colleague Moses Hess called “On Money” [Über das Geldwesen]…

Really, really not my favorite person. Someone who knows nothing at all about how market economies work, and yet thinks his political allegiance to something he calls "Marxism" makes him an expert. The U.S. in 2008-9 was—as anyone looking at interest rates would know—very far indeed from exhausting its debt capacity: David Harvey (2009): Why the U.S. Stimulus Package Is Bound to Fail https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/department-of-huh-in-praise-of-neoclassical-economics-department.html: ‘Any attempt to find an adequate Keynesian solution has been doomed at the start.... A Keynesian solution would require massive and prolonged deficit financing.... The problem for the United States in 2008-9 is that it starts from a position of chronic indebtedness to the rest of the world (it has been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten years or more) and this poses an economic limitation upon the size of the extra deficit that can now be incurred. (This was not a serious problem for Roosevelt who began with a roughly balanced budget). There is also a geo-political limitation since the funding of any extra deficit is contingent upon the willingness of other powers (principally from East Asia and the Gulf States) to lend…

Excellent to watch to see Michael Kades present his point-of-view on video: Michael Kades: Proposals to Strengthen the Antitrust Laws & Restore Competition Online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--jXAdjieTo…

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leak-the-atlantic-had-a-meeting-about-kevin-williamson-it-was-a-liberal-self-reckoning_n_5ac7a3abe4b0337ad1e7b4df: ‘Black writers... would be brought in... [to] give a view of black life that I felt like very few black people actually would recognize themselves in their own private spaces.... I got incredibly used to learning from people... who... were fucking racist.... I didn’t... have the luxury of having teachers who... saw me completely as a human being.... I couldn’t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us…

Neel Kashkari: Why I Dissented https://medium.com/@neelkashkari/why-i-dissented-feb698ae4d08: ‘We misread the labor market.... We heard repeatedly from businesses who complained that... we had a “historic worker shortage.”... [My] proposed language guards against the risk of underestimating slack.... We would only lift off... [after] core inflation... had... actually hit or exceed[ed] 2 percent...

God! He's long-winded: Joseph Schumpeter: Fiat Money & Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf...

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ‘THE TWO MEN WERE NOT ANTAGONISTS.... While Schumpeter considered all of Keynes' answers wrong, or at least misleading, he was a sympathetic critic…

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ‘Keynes, in turn, considered Schumpeter one of the few contemporary economists worthy of his respect. In his lectures he again and again referred to the works Schumpeter had published during World War I, and especially to Schumpeter's essay on the Rechenpfennige (i.e., money of account) as the initial stimulus for his own thoughts on money…

Bapu Jena & al.: Acute Myocardial Infarction Mortality During Dates of National Interventional Cardiology Meetings https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29523525/…

Tim Miller: Actually, Virtue Signaling Is Good https://thebulwark.com/actually-virtue-signaling-is-good/...

Kate Bahn: 'Unemployment Benefits Initial Claims https://twitter.com/LipstickEcon/status/1311648495300947968 [are] not good... have plateaued around 800,000 [per week] for the last 8 weeks... at the level and about the length (from my eyeballing) of the peak during the Great Recession.... It's just so bad…

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 1933 Inaugural Address https://www.c-span.org/video/?5792-1/president-roosevelt-1933-inaugural-address https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp…

Tim Duy: Trump Kills Fiscal Stimulus Negotiations https://blogs.uoregon.edu/timduyfedwatch/2020/10/06/trump-kills-fiscal-stimulus-negotiations/: ‘From a campaign perspective, it seems ludicrous.... Ultimately, I think McConnell just isn’t willing to get a deal done.... Interestingly, Trump’s abandonment of fiscal stimulus comes soon after the latest plea from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for additional support for what he sees as a still struggling economy...

Vladimir Lenin (1917): State & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lenin-1917-state-%26-revolution.pdf

Leon Smolinski: Lenin & Economic Planning https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-smolinski-lenin.pdf…

Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian (1998): Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy https://books.google.com/books?id=aE_J4Iv_PVEC

Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, & Sherry Fei Ju: The Transformation of Ant Financial https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/articler-mcmorrow-ant.pdf

Josef Schumpeter (1917): Fiat Money & the Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf

Mall History: Ku Klux Klan Rally http://mallhistory.org/items/show/175: ‘In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The organized event brought 25,000 members in full regalia to the city…

EPI: The Productivity–Pay Gap https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/…

Eric Lemieux: This Day in Labor History: July 28, 1932 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/liveblogging-history-july-28-1932-the-bonus-army.html: ‘On July 28, 1932, the U.S. Army 12th Infantry regiment commanded by Douglas MacArthur and the 3rd Calvary Regiment, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Major George Patton violently evicted the Bonus Army from their Washington, D.C. encampment. This violent action and horrible treatment of impoverished veterans shocked the American public and demonstrated the utter indifference of Herbert Hoover to the desperate poverty the nation faced…

Plus:

John Bellamy Foster: On the Laws of Capitalism https://monthlyreview.org/2011/05/01/on-the-laws-of-capitalism/#en19: ‘The Socialist Party of Boston wrote to the Harvard economics department, proposing a debate on capitalism and socialism.... The debate was held... with Sweezy and Schumpeter as the two protagonists, before a packed audience in Harvard’s Littauer Auditorium…. Leontief, as chair, summarized.... "The patient is capitalism. What is to be his fate? Our speakers are in fact agreed that the patient is inevitably dying. But the bases of their diagnoses could not be more different. On the one hand there is Sweezy, who utilizes the analysis of Marx and of Lenin to deduce that the patient is dying of a malignant cancer. Absolutely no operation can help. The end is foreordained. On the other hand, there is Schumpeter. He, too, and rather cheerfully, admits that the patient is dying. (His sweetheart already died in 1914 and his bank of tears has long since run dry.) But to Schumpeter, the patient is dying of a psychosomatic ailment. Not cancer but neurosis is his complaint. Filled with self-hate, he has lost the will to live. In this view capitalism is an unlovable system, and what is unlovable will not be loved. Paul Sweezy himself is a talisman and omen of that alienation which will seal the system’s doom...

Om Malik: Apple Watch’s Sensory Overload https://om.co/2020/09/15/apple-watchs-sensory-overload/: ‘Longtime readers are familiar with my theory around hyper-personalization, and Apple has brought that to a mass-produced product. Oh, and it also tells time!" || This Mirror with Sensors Points to a New Connected Future. Here Is Why https://om.co/gigaom/this-mirror-with-sensors-points-to-a-new-connected-future-here-is-why/: ‘By offering a uniquely/hyper personal experience, simplehuman can go from being an invisible brand to one that is center stage in our minds. Think of it this way—connectivity and sensors allow us  to turn any large-scale platform into a personal one. Call me crazy, by when we add a dash of connectivity to those omnipresent sensors then interesting and/or magical things can happen...

Comment of the Day: Alex Tolley: Growth, Globalization, & Political Economy in the North Atlantic, 1870-1914—Lecture https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/09/growth-globalization-political-economy-in-the-north-atlantic-1870-1914lecture.html#tpe-action-posted-6a00e551f080038834026be41082a6200d: ‘The claim that we could have a steampunk world of 7+ billion people with low economic growth seems unlikely to me. We needed a number of technologies to ensure that we could feed and distribute feed to this population. With low economic growth, more people would be on the land farming, farms would be smaller, and productivity lower. There would be far fewer jobs based on the growing economy, a need for huge cities to concentrate the labor for manufacturing and later services…

Wikipedia: Martha Gellhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn…

Martha Gellhorn: The Face of War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-gellhorn-face.pdf...

Yun Sheng: Little Emperors: Memoir of an Only Child https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors…

Evan Cheng & Sandi Khine: Over 100 Faculty Sign Open Letter Calling for Faculty Senate to Reconsider Hoover Institution’s Relationship with Stanford https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/09/23/over-100-faculty-sign-open-letter-calling-for-faculty-senate-to-reconsider-hoover-institutions-relationship-with-stanford/

Matthew Yglesias: One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827…

PAA DEI Committee: Demographics of Racial Violence https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pbVXnchhQtac5enVKSPzxw…

Ursula K. LeGuin (1973): The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/story-leguin-omelas.pdf...

Wikipedia: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas...

Gabrielle Bellot (2017): Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Defies Genre https://www.tor.com/2017/08/07/ursula-le-guins-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-defies-genre/...

Our World in Data: Coronavirus Pandemic https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus…

Wikipedia: Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie,_Duchess_of_Hohenberg…

Wikipedia: Vaso Čubrilović https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaso_%C4%8Cubrilovi%C4%87#World_War_II_and_later_life…

KJV: Revelation 6 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%206&version=KJV: ‘And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying: "Come and see!"…

Manton Reece: Micro.blog 2.0 Makes It Easier to Customize Your Blog https://news.micro.blog/2020/09/29/press-release-microblog.html…

Nic Newman: The Resurgence & Importance of Email Newsletters http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/the-resurgence-and-importance-of-email-newsletters/: ‘Email newsletters... are proving increasingly valuable to publishers looking to build strong direct relationships with audiences…

Noah Smith: The Late '10s Were Better for Incomes than the '90s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-23/median-household-income-grew-more-in-the-10s-than-the-90s...

Claudia Foroni, Massimiliano Marcellino, & Dalibor Stevanovic: Forecasting the COVID-19 Recession & Recovery https://voxeu.org/article/forecasting-covid-19-recession-and-recovery: ‘Adjusting for forecasting errors made during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 better aligns the COVID forecasts with observed data. The results suggest a slow recovery to pre-COVID-19 levels, lasting several years…

Plus:

George-Marios Angeletos & Chen Lian: Confidence & the Propagation of Demand Shocks https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-angeletos-%26-lian-confidence.pdf: 'Intertemporal substitution in production... rational confusion (or bounded rationality) in consumption. The first element allows aggregate supply to respond to shifts in aggregate demand.... The second introduces a “confidence multiplier,” namely a positive feedback loop between real economic activity, consumer expectations of permanent income, and investor expectations... [that] amplifies the business-cycle fluctuations triggered by demand shocks (but not those triggered by supply shocks); it helps investment to comove with consumption; and it allows front-loaded fiscal stimuli to crowd in private spending...

Duncan Dowson & Bernard Hamrock (1980): History of Ball Bearings https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810009866: ‘The familiar precision rolling-element bearings of the twentieth century are products of exacting technology and sophisticated science. Their very effectiveness and basic simplicity of form may discourage further interest in their history and development. Yet the full story covers a large portion of recorded history and surprising evidence of an early recognition of the advantages of rolling motion over sliding action and progress toward the development of rolling-element bearings. The development of rolling-element bearings is followed from the earliest civilizations to the end of the eighteenth century. The influence of general technological developments, particularly those concerned with the movement of large building blocks, road transportation, instruments, water-raising equipment, and windmills are discussed, together with the emergence of studies of the nature of rolling friction and the impact of economic factors. By 1800 the essential features of ball and rolling-element bearings had emerged and it only remained for precision manufacture and mass production to confirm the value of these fascinating machine elements...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0NS1CC0oX3WwfiGNVGIuNYsGA https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-economy-recovery-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-10

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0n4PwgGO6FAEEAqRG6I72oXtg https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/grasping-reality/fama-volcker-disinflation-denialism.pdf

What is the state of America's political economy now in the fall of 2020?

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0_P3LUekmZdA6DQN660lR_GEQ

This is very much worth watching—very much subscribing for:

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0d2ynI15JBBHNdu1j90_0i1pQ

Out-of-Africa explosion 50KY ago, & patriarchal collapse of male (but not female) effective population size 8KY ago…

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0TSPFIGJUsBJHWm0UMAqLe6UQ

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0IS373XctkfIDo6Py2-Upe9pQ
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/deveng-215-2020-10-08.pptx

This incorporates-by-reference the readings & lectures from week 7 of Joeva Rock's Fall 2020 instantiation of GPP 115...

DeLongToday: We 10:00/07:00 EDT/PDT http://delongtoday.com

This is significantly better in terms of the employment report than I was expecting to see. It heartens me about the economy for the third quarter and maybe the fourth. But it depresses me about 2021, as it seems to indicate a lot of the country’s decision makers are not taking the virus as seriously as they should Perhaps this week will change their minds:

Heather Boushey: New Employment Data https://twitter.com/HBoushey/status/1312007393480511490: ‘The economy added 661,000 jobs in September.... We are still down 10.7 million jobs.... People searching for work for 27 weeks or more rose by 781,000 to 2.4 million. Regular unemployment benefits end after 26 weeks. Congress will need to act to extend the # of weeks for these benefits.... Given that the pandemic isn't over, the change in this # concerns me: "22.7 percent of employed people teleworked in September because of the coronavirus pandemic, down from 24.3 percent in August." Employers brought folks back to work in September: Of those who are no longer unemployed, 1.5 million of them had been on temporary layoff. Yet, at the same time, 345,000 people transitioned from temporary to permanent layoff…

Link to Interactive Recording: https://share.mmhmm.app/674d81473029474195eb45ef0445a2c3 5:37

• Link to pptx with rough transcript: https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-5-2.0-intro-video.pptx
• Watch: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933): Inaugural Address https://www.c-span.org/video/?5792-1/president-roosevelt-1933-inaugural-address https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp

DevEng 215 Week 6 https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1497096

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/deveng-215-2020-10-01.pptx

Incorporate by reference: https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1497095/modules#module_2202193

deveng-215-2020-10-01