Note to Self: Working on Today...:

• Computer Literacy: An Educational Experiment http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/an-educational-experiment.html
• Last semester's grading
• Oxford Proposal: Macroeconomics: A Very Short Introduction
• Equitable Growth
• Books- Martha Wells- The Murderbot Diaries https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0OCCvTnS2wOyEF3hrNUALf0dQ

Alexandra Petri: Rules for babies on the Senate floor: "With babies present, senators may be held to a higher standard than previously...

Best shadow graduation speech I have seen in quite a while: Simon Kuper: My life tips for graduates: embrace your ignorance: "You are graduating almost entirely ignorant. This isn’t your fault...

• 8 of 35 Monarchs of England from 1066 to 1850 dead in war or murder: 23%...

• 7 of 44 Queens of England from 1066 to 1850 dead and childbirth: 16%...

I am somewhat surprised: I had thought childbed would be a higher risk than war/murder. (But then there are Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard who get murdered... Are there any more?)

British governance appears at least as bad today as American governance even though they are not helmed by an unstable and corrupt kleptocrat: Simon Wren-Lewis: Delusions of National Power: "Inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM)...

My real problem is that my normal daily cycle is about 23 hours. So the last hour or two before going to sleep is a zero for any purpose. So I’m always tempted to just go to bed, and hope I will have extra energy to recoup the following morning. And so I wake up too early and find myself suffering from bio rhythm upset.

I do not know what to do to get out of this—except for drinking lots of coffee in the evening. But I want to preserve the effect of coffee on my attention span for serious emergencies.

I am stuck...

Those of us who do digital economics owe Suzanne Scotchman a lot as we stand on her gigantic shoulders. Those of us who seek a free and equal society are deeply indebted to Suzanne along other dimensions as well...

Remembering Suzanne Scotchmer

20th century British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan is most known not for anything he did but for a witty letter that he wrote to Dick Cressman, Director of Psychological Warfare at Allied Forces Headquarters in the Mediterranean…

"Greeks to Their Romans"-The Twentieth Century Superpower Succession

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/greeks-to-their.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/harold-macmillan-greeks-to-their-romans-document-on-the-twentieth-century-imperial-succession.html

RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

And now David Brooks decides that it is time for him to triangulate by making false, flimsy, and flagrantly spurious pro-Trump arguments: Yastreblansky: No More Mister Nice Blog: It takes a thief: "David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug!...

No, the Roman Republic did not fall because its leaders like wild parties. Any further questions?...

Misapplied History-Aye Yie Yie!

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/misapplied-history-aye.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/niall-ferguson-fetch-the-purple-toga-emperor-trump-is-herehttpswwwthetimescoukarticlefetch-the-purple-toga-e.html

Terminator, if the Terminator were incredibly shy, were addicted to watching soap operas, and were genuinely driven to protect and serve. Martha Wells is making very interesting comments on artificial intelligence, human connection, and narrative and cognition here: Martha Wells All Systems Red: "I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites...

...It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure. I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, and hoping Dr. Volescu and Dr. Bharadwaj finished their survey soon so we could get back to the habitat and I could watch episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon...

John Taylor is not just wrong, but wrong in a way that it is impossible to be if you are attempting to argue in good faith from any coherent set of economic principles and models: Miles Kimball: Contra John Taylor: "[Taylor] is just wrong...

...The Fed is promising to shift the demand curve for assets in the future and thereby get to a particular equilibrium interest rate. This is not at all like rent control. The right analogy is... getting rents to come down by reducing making it easier to get a building permit, or by subsidizing the building of new apartments.... There is a world of difference between a market intervention in which the government contributes to supply and demand and a price floor or ceiling. By buying assets, and promising to buy them in the future, the Fed is lowering an equilibrium interest rate. The details of the pattern of buying assets and promising to buy them in the future tends to keep the equilibrium interest rate at a certain level. The fact that the Fed acts by changing the equilibrium interest rate matters, because John’s claim that lowering the interest rate will reduce the quantity of investment would hold only if what the Fed is doing really did act like an interest rate ceiling that makes asset demand lower than asset supply...

#shouldread

The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...

Tyler Feder: I've never had so many people: "

accuse me of spying on them before hahaha:

By judiciously muting and blocking people you can create a truly useful individual Internet feed. The problem is that that does nothing to produce a truly useful functioning intellectual community. And that is what we really need...

Your Own Private Intellectual Elysium

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/your-own-private.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/creating-your-own-private-internet-intellectual-elysium.html

In Keynes’s General Theory the question of why “it seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself…” is left hanging. The question of how a “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment“ is to be implemented is left hanging as well. There are remarkably a few references to “fiscal policy” in any form. So will somebody please explain to me why “fiscal policy” plays such a small part in the General Theory, while playing such a large part in mindshare perceptions of “Keynesianism”?...

Keynes's General Theory Contains Oddly Few Mentions of "Fiscal Policy"

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/keyness-general-theory.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/keyness-general-theory-contains.html

RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

Weekend Reading: John Quiggin: Hackery or heresy: "Henry’s recent post on the irrelevance of conservative intellectuals reminded me of this one from 2013, which concluded...

...Conservative reform of the Republican party is a project that has already failed. The only question is whether the remaining participants will choose hackery or heresy.

Overwhelmingly, the choice has been hackery (or, a little more honorably, silence).

Project Jupyter: JupyterLab is Ready for Users: "We are proud to announce the beta release series of JupyterLab, the next-generation web-based interface for Project Jupyter. tl;dr: JupyterLab is ready for daily use (installation, documentation, try it with Binder)..."

#webtech #acrossthewidemissouri

Well, you write documentation for the you that is writing the code. You don't write documentation for the enormous idiot who will read and have to try to understand the code—i.e., the you two years into the future https://twitter.com/economeager/status/986797153183035392:

Rachael Meager: Me trying to read code I wrote 2 years ago:

Folks this code is documented. The problem is you write documentation from a biased perspective...

#ontwitter #shouldread #datascience

Matthew Yglesias: "You have to understand the growing prominence of overt racism in conservative politics as reflecting the collapse-without-replacement of the other parts of the program...

... The Trump economic agenda is not actually different from the Bush agenda even as it implicitly recognizes that Bushism is not tenable anymore. On cultural issues, the whole elaborate framework around blocking marriage equality while touting marriage as a poverty cure has evaporated but again replaced with nothing at all or what amount to irritable mental gestures about bakeries..."

#shouldread #ontwitter #livefromtheorangehairedbabooncage

Matthew Yglesias: "In defense of Trump,: I learned in my deductive logic class that any conditional statement with a false predicate is true."

A great many tears and a great deal of terror have been created by the fact that formal logic has called its two state values true and false rather than 1 and 0, grue and bleen, or even T and F...

#ontwitter

Steve M.: NEEDY, RAGE-FILLED TRUMP IS THE PERFECT CANDIDATE FOR CONSERVATIVES NOW: "Past presidents, most of whom were emotional adults, knew they'd be attacked and tried to appear above the fray...

David Frum: Trump: Unfit to Command: "With the president in an agitated state, preoccupied with his legal troubles, this is no time for war...

How can this possibly end other than with the bulk of the administration in jail?: https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/985692703626326017 Caroline O. @RVAwonk: "NEW: Trump reportedly raged at staffers when the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats was announced. He was so furious about the # of diplomats & about the U.S. being portrayed as taking a tough stance on Russia that he screamed expletives at WH officials." https://t.co/3VZMYexrWW

livefromtheorangehairedbabooncage

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Sam Harris convinces me that he is not part of what Charles Murray calls the "cognitive elite": Vox: The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate - Vox: "Sam Harris: [In] your last piece, you have this whole section on the 'Flynn effect' and how the Flynn effect should be read as accounting for the black-white differences in purely environmental terms. Well, even Flynn rejects that interpretation...

On Twitter: Doctrine Man: "Looking for a secret lair with 94 acres of lakeside property? Fort Montgomery is up for sale... for a cool $3 million:

@quantian1: Fortifications built on major trade routes are the only true inflation hedge, to paraphrase @delong, so this is a steal at $3mm...

@Gangst_A_dOGe: you're gunna have to man the battlements tho, when the peasants start rioting ur gunna need some guys to throw rocks and oil to repel them...

On Twitter: Nicholas Weaver: "Of all the ridiculous tropes in the cryptocurrency space, 'But Moore's Law will solve the Bitcoin power consumption problem' is perhaps the most ridiculous."

OWWW! MY BRAIN!!!

Can you self-concuss by banging your head on your desk too many times? And how long should the noncognitive bedrest recovery period be? Asking for a friend...

Note to Self: "White Ethnicists" and Boston in the 1980s: Whenever I look at pictures of America’s “white ethnicists“ (one thing they certainly ain’t is American nationalists) on parade, from the openly neo-Nazi to the more "genteel" Atlantic Monthly “the Democrats triggered this by pushing civil rights too far” and all the flavors in between, I am, quite frankly, gobsmacked:

Should-Read: This is... what... thirty-five years since there were credible rumors that Harvard Hall knew that Jorge Dominguez had told an associate professor that her tenure case was toast unless she came across? And in between then and now he has had big budgets and a vice provostship? Drew Faust and her predecessors have some explaining to do: Susan Dynarski retweeted: The Harvard Crimson: "The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has filed a formal Title IX complaint against Government Professor Jorge I. Dominguez, according to correspondence obtained by The Crimson..."

Should-Read: Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain’s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...

Should-Read: Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.

@JeffFlake: To say that "Democrats want no borders" is inaccurate. Every senate Democrat voted for bipartisan immigration legislation in 2013 that included $40+ billion for border infrastructure, personnel & technology. Both sides of the aisle want reform. Let's do it.

Should-Read: A Category 3 storm has winds of 111-129 mph. A Category 4 storm has winds of 130-156 mph. A Category 5 storm has winds of 157 mph or more. That's not just "a wind in our face". Interesting that McConnell starts the paragraph wanting to take about "headwinds" and ends it talking about major hurricane damage—we East African Plains Apes are really not very good at keeping our true views hidden, are we?: Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

I swear, when this showed up in my inbox—sent by somebody who wishes me ill—I really did think it was an April Fools Day parody...

Back up. As the eminent and intelligent John Scalzi says: to play the video game of life—"a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time"—as a straight white male in America is to play it on the lowest difficulty setting: on level one, so to speak.

Everybody else faces bigger obstacles and more distractions. Thus one should not be proud of one's “score“, however one likes to keep score. One should not pat oneself on the back as being in any way "superior" for what one has accomplished. And one should not whinge about how hard one's life is, and about how many obstacles one faces.

And if one starts whingeing—especially if start whingeing when people point out that one has been playing on level one—if one says one is being oppressed by sexist anti-sexists and racist anti-racists because somebody points out that one's score is at the top primarily because one was playing on level one, and that one is actively assisting others of one's ilk in playing on level one...

Well, one should be embarrassed: Such a fragile ego! Such an unwillingness to contemplate the reality in which one is cushioned! Such a sensitive snowflake!

Why, it is positively unmanly...

Memo to Self: Now that John Williams is heading to become President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Vice Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, who should take his place as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco?

• Mary Daly?
• Christie Romer?
• Glenn Rudebusch?
• Thinking outside the box, Takeo Hoshi?
• Thinking way outside the box, Enrico Moretti?
• Thinking way way outside the box, Raj Chetty?

Ideal candidates should I think, be in their early 50s, and should be prepared to lead an analytical and operations orientation of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank toward one or more of:

• Financial system safety-and-soundness regulation
• Financial system consumer finance regulation
• Asia and its place in the global financial system
• Tech and its place in the global financial system
• Regional economic development issues..

Should-Read: Leszek Kolakowski (1974): Main Currents of Marxism: "http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1974_Kolakowski.pdf: Your letter contains some personal grievances and some arguments on general questions...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: “Navarro Meant”: "@AlexRowell: Wow. One of Trump's closest economic advisers, Peter Navarro, argues that the #GOPTaxScam will put 'downward pressure on wages'...

Should-Read: Remember this negative singularity of idiocy? I am still unaware of any "I'm sorrys" or any "I have had to rethink my vision of the Cosmic All" from any of the signers, and it has been more than seven years: Michael J. Boskin, Charles W. Calomiris, John F. Cogan, Niall Ferguson, Kevin A. Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, David Malpass, John B. Taylor, and others not worth mentioning: (November 15, 2010): Open Letter to Ben Bernanke: "We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called 'quantitative easing') should be reconsidered and discontinued...

Live from the Antebellum Plantation: Brian Fennessy: "Gavin Wright keeping the slave-capitalism debate lively: slavery was profitable to slaveholders but it kept the region underdeveloped and claims about its centrality to US Econ growth are exaggerated! #DukeMonumentsSymposium...

Note to Self: Be the Twitter you want to see in the world...

On Twitter: Author: Don't mind me: The real me is just locked in a room receiving incomprehensible messages and then sending out replies constructed via a rule book that I do not understand. There is no real intelligence at home in here...

@dsquaredigest: The first of those two.

@NewYorker: Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? http://nyer.cm/IKb7eMF

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Wikipedia: United States House of Representatives Elections, 2016:

Majority party: Paul Ryan: 49.9%

Minority party: Nancy Pelosi: 47.3%

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was well past his sell-by date and rotten to the core the day he started: Scott Lemieux: It's Just A Question Of What Your Red Lines Are: "Elite opinion editors talk a good game about 'diversity'...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: David Corn: Top Republican Lawyer: No One’s Asking to Be on Trump’s Legal Team: "Ted Olson turned down a chance to represent the president. He says none of his colleagues have asked for a referral...

Ask the Internet: Was the phrase "The Queen of Air and Darkness" really coined by A.E. Houseman in 1922? I can find no earlier references...

Graydon Saunders has “committed book” again. The Human Dress is live at Google Play Books. If this is the kind of thing you like, you will like this thing—I like it very, very much. Vikings and zombies and magicians and dinosaurs and much much much more.

From The Fall and Rise of the Smithian Economy https://www.icloud.com/pages/0T3bT42JX6K1UcyTZT0kVUVGg | https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0IrNvoyDNCe6k7FuDAxsKllFQ | https://www.icloud.com/pages/0ytOBbemlXLZtytkJqlvb_gXw: I am very happy to be here this morning, giving the Suzanne Scotchmer Memorial Lecture.

I am happy even though I was mousetrapped into doing this.

A couple of years ago I discovered that Toulouse had a Suzanne Scotchmer Memorial Lectrure. My first response was to blather on the Internet: how come Berkeley, where she worked for the bulk of her career, did not have such a lecture? Paul Seabright took advantage of this, saying: “Well, then, you have to come to Toulouose to deliver such a lecture!” And lo and behold here I am—and very happy.

Caffeine: Better Living Through Chemistry

As the semester wears on...

• Nov 1-Jan 14, 2018: no caffeinated coffee drinks
• Jan 15-Feb 14, 2018: one latte before afternoon lectures (64 mg.)
• Mar 14, 2018: one double latte before afternoon lectures (128 mg.)
• Mar 15-Apr 14, 2018: one large coffee before afternoon and after morning lectures (192 mg.)
• Apr 15-May 14, 2018: ?????

What drink—and how many—should I switch to on April 15?

Live from the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton: I wonder if he got affinity program points for his stay?: Erik Schatzker: Alwaleed Reveals Secret Deal Struck to Exit Ritz After 83 Days: "So you were not harmed or mistreated in any way?

Live from: "It Was Not Just a Mistake—It Was a Crime...: Duncan Black: Eschaton: Heckuva Job: "There were the evil bastards, and then there were the Model UN debate team crowd, young boy blunders putting on their first big boy suits writing for big boy magazines...

Wakanda and the Resource Curse: Wakanda’s prosperity is based on its possession of vibranium, a stable transuranic elements with unique And extraordinary chemical properties. Yet those of us who have studied the history of emerging markets with powerful natural resource advantages would fear for the present and future of an emerging market country that based its prosperity on such a road so very vulnerable to the “resource curse“.