Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

**ED ROYCE**

District 39: Northern Orange County: 
Anaheim-Fullerton

Even: Safeness of Seat    
40%:  Percent of Returns   
7.6%: Percent of AGI   
$1.89 billion SALT in 2014

328,000 tax returns in 2014
$24.575 billion AGI in 2014
$1.8797 billion deduction amount in 2014

30.9%: Income <$50K/year
11.6%: Poverty Rate
42.4%: White Collar
9.6% : Income >$200K/year

**JEFF DENHAM** 

District 10: Middle Central Valley: 
Stanislaus-Modesto

Even: Safeness of Seat
30% : Percent of Returns   
5.3%: Percent of AGI   
$860 million SALT in 2014

294,000 tax returns in 2014
$16.264 billion AGI in 2014
$0.8552 billion deduction amount in 2014

47.1%: Income <$50K/year
19.1%: Poverty Rate
27.0%: White Collar
3.1% : Income >$200K/year

Should-Read: The very sharp Binyamin Applebaum had an interesting rant yesterday: Binyamin Applebaum: @BCAppelbaum on Twitter: "I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can’t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy...

Project Syndicate: Keeping US Policymaking Honest: Last month here at Berkeley I heard great optimism from the illustrious Alice Rivlin. What “technocracy” in the good sense the United States has—what respect is paid to sound analysis and empirical evidence in the making of policy—is due more to Alice Rivlin than to any other living human.

First of all, note that nine and only nine would sign on to this letter.

That is not a large number.

Second, note that they do not analyze the deficit-increasing tax bill on display, but rather something else:

Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz, and John. B. Taylor: How Tax Reform Will Lift the Economy: "In the foregoing analysis, we assumed a revenue-neutral corporate tax change...

...or, especially, after-tax real median growth. Or even 2%-ile income growth. Let alone well-being after cuts in public services.

You just can't. It doesn't add up at any level. As a matter of arithmetic...

Just too much of existing capital income flows to foreigners. Too much of extra production generated by a capital inflow would be credited to foreigners. And domestic savings supply is relatively inelastic. Even if you put both hands on the scale and lean hard, it just doesn't work, even without noting how much of payments to capital are monopoly rents and payments to other forms of capital that are not interest sensitive...

And Paul Krugman has been on fire this fall:

(Plus the salmon (on my machine) rectangle, minus the... what color is that? (on my machine) brownish-gold rectangle—that's the long-run change in U.S. national income from a budget neutral tax "reform" like that Trumpublicans are proposing. The effects of a deficit-increasing one are... less favorable.)

Attracting him a very great move by http://equitablegrowth.org, I must say...

Greg Leiserson has been killing it on tax policy this late summer and fall, most notably with The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But there is lots more good stuff as well:

Information from the very sharp Eric Toder: The House Ways and Means Tax Bill Would Raise the National Debt to 123 percent of GDP by 2037: "The Tax Policy Center estimates that the House Ways and Means Committee’s version of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA)...

...over the first decade... increases the deficit by 1.7 trillion dollars.... Between 2028 and 2037, the TCJA would reduce net receipts by 1.6 trillion dollars and add 920 billion dollars in additional interest costs. Over the entire 20-year period, the combination of reduced revenues and higher interest payments would raise the federal debt held by the public by 4.2 trillion dollars...

Politics in the Way of Progress: The seventeen—seventeen!—sustainable development goals are: No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-being, Quality Education, Gender Equality, Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Reduced Inequalities, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, Life Below Water, Life on Land, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, and "Partnerships for the Goals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals.

At the Milken Review: When Globalization is Public Enemy Number One: The first 30 years after World War II saw the recovery and reintegration of the world economy (the “Thirty Glorious Years,” in the words of French economist Jean Fourastié). Yet after a troubled decade—one in which oil shocks, inflation, near-depression and asset bubbles temporarily left us demoralized—the subsequent 33 years (1984-2007) of perky growth and stable prices were even more impressive... Read MOAR at Milken Review

Alice Rivlin is speaking this afternoon at Berkeley's GSPP in honor of John Ellwood's retirement on EVIDENCE AND POLICY ANALYSIS IN THE AGE OF FAKE NEWS. A question I will not have time to ask:

Alice, I listen to you, and I think of Irving Kristol, who explained his “rather cavalier attitude” to technocratic questions of what economic policies would actually do thus:

Invocation

Over on the Twitter machine, the learned and incredibly sharp Owen Zidar writes, about the picky model-based incidence analysis points:

@omzidar: On Twitter: The number of tweets needed to describe this issue suggest more clarification/ a detailed step by step post would be useful...

My view is that in the end all this—Krugman (2017b) and (2017a); DeLong (2017d), (2017c), (2017b), and (2017a); Bernstein (2017); Furman (2017); and Mankiw (2017)—when unpacked, boils down to Econ 1-level tax incidence, and an algebraic mistake in calculating overelaborated and overcomplicated versions thereof.

I seem to have a disagreement with Jason Furman here:

@paulkrugman: Brad is right here: Mankiw et al have clearly made a math error

@jasonfurman: Not seeing the math error. Mankiw said static. His soln is right for static (defined as unchanged base)... And dynamic version is higher.

I was taught the definition of "static" by the Jedi Masters at OTA in the early 1990s...

Note to Self: Greg Mankiw Providing Backup for Kevin Hassett Department: Larry Summers One last time on who benefits from corporate tax cuts: "Mankiw’s blog is a fine bit of economic pedagogy...

INET Edinburgh Comparative Advantage Panel

Panel: Gains from Trade: Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged?:

Ricardo's Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0QMFGpAUFCjqhdfLULfDbLE4g

Ricardo believes in labor value prices because capital flows to put people to work wherever those things can be made with the fewest workers. This poses a problem for Ricardo: The LTV tells him that capitalist production should take place according to absolute advantage, with those living in countries with no absolute advantage left in subsistence agriculture.

I have just spent four hours on a plane to Edinburgh—four hours when I should have been sleeping—chasing my own analytic tail in a counterproductive way.

It was me demonstrating that I am indeed a Bear of Very Little Brain in ways too numerous to enumerate...

It started when I ran across an excellent twitter thread from Jason Furman:

Some talk lately of Ramsey models and their implications for wage increases under the Unified Framework (warning: irrelevant nerdy thread)...

In the middle of saying a number of smart things, Jason said something that confused me—that a calculation comparing Ramsey model steady—states suggested that a 200b corp tax cut [would bring a] 300b wage increase", at least in "Greg Mankiw’s toy example", which Jason wanted to "stipulate... is right..."

I did not understand where such a conclusion could come from.

Melissa S. Kearney: How Should Governments Address Inequality?: "In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century...

...an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent. Piketty predicted that without corrective action, the trend toward ever more concentrated income and wealth would continue, and so he called for a global tax on wealth. 

Live at Project Syndicate: Politics in the Way of Progress https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/populist-politics-block-development-goals-by-j--bradford-delong-2017-10: BERKELEY – There are 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to tackle problems including poverty, hunger, disease, inequality, climate change, ecological degradation, and many others in between. Clearly, 17 is too many. As Frederick the Great supposedly said, “He who defends everything defends nothing.” Similarly, those who emphasize everything emphasize nothing.

This points to the problem of forging goals through consensus: they can end up being a wish list for everything short of heaven on Earth. But, to be effective, goals should operate like turnpikes, which allow you to make progress toward a specific destination much faster than if you had taken the scenic route. The purpose of consensus building, then, should be to get us to the on-ramp, after which it becomes harder to make a wrong turn or reverse course... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Let me put a spotlight on the very sharp Brink Lindsey here...

Brink Lindsey believes utopia is in our grasp. Our problems today are, he thinks, at their root problems about the creation of truly human identities that people can embrace.

This is a remarkable shift.

Previous human societies have had very different problems:

Should-Read: Anton Howes: Why study Economic History?: "What is Economic History? It is about asking some of the biggest and most interesting questions imaginable... https://medium.com/@antonhowes/why-study-economic-history-ef747767be25

Apropos of Janet Napolitano's : The future of NAFTA and the state of U.S.-Mexico relations: "A forum hosted by the University of California and Tecnológico de Monterrey..." https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/initiative/uc-mexico-initiative/nafta-conference...

My present thoughts about NAFTA:

Nearly a quarter century ago, early in the Clinton administration, I was one of the leads on the team responsible for constructing estimate of the economic impact of NAFTA. And I definitely have some explaining to do.

And now, moving from the twenty-first century back 2500 years to a much earlier age of information technology: John Ma https://twitter.com/Nakhthor/status/908024914011193344—much peace and strength attend him!—reminds me of his "accessible edition of some letters of a member of the Achaimenid elite, the actual satrap of Egypt", Prince Arshama, quite possibly the great-grandson of King of Kings Darayavush I, writing in the late 400s B.C. to various of his subordinates http://arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:

• the Persian Artavanta on the ground on Egypt, who appears to be serving more-or-less in a public law capacity—recognizing property rights, and inflicting and remitting punishments.
• the Egyptian Nakhthor, bailiff of Arshama in more-or-less a private management capacity.
• the Persian Armapiya, commanding armed forces in Egypt, concerning his unwillingness to follow the instructions of Psamšek, who appears to be another of Arshama's bailiffs in Egypt.
• plus some others, and a few letters from others to Nakhthor as well...

Just look at this:

Kansas is—in some strong sense—unbelievably loony.

No sooner does Sam Brownback manage to plant his behind in the Governor's chair in Topeka, KS than does Kansas's share of American nonfarm jobs and people start to drop like a stone.

Jeebus, Greg. Context, please!

The whole point of inheritance—financial, cultural, sociological—is precisely not to give everyone "the same shot". Inequality of Result + "inheritance" = Inequality of Opportunity. And that's not a good thing. Unless, that is, you think that you choose your parents, and should benefit if you were smart enough to choose them wisely...

Hoisted from February 12, 2007: May I Have My Context Back, Please? http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/02/may_i_have_my_c.html:

Hoisted from 2010: What Do Econ 1 Students Need to Remember Most from the Course? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/what-do-econ-1-students-need-to-remember-most-from-the-course.html: Economics deals with those things that we want but that are "scarce".

• Gavin Wright: Review of "Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development": https://eh.net/book_reviews/slaverys-capitalism-a-new-history-of-american-economic-development/

• Stephanie McCurry: Slavery and economics http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/slavery-economics/

Hoisted from the Archives: More Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging for 2007's Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/01/more_dred_scott.html: Mark Graber has gotten himself to the right of John C. Calhoun. This is a position painful and ludicrous for a twenty-first-century American legal academic to assume.

It is a position so painful and ludicrous that it should induce any twenty-first-century American academic to undertake an agonizing reappraisal—particularly over Martin Luther King holiday weekend. But Mark Graber doesn't. Let's turn the mike over to him:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/universities-in-the-age-of-trump-by-j--bradford-delong-2017-07: Let me take a break in this column from our usual economics to worry about our institutions: What have we to say—to hope and fear—about the role and the future of the independent—ideologically and intellectually—university?

Brad DeLong: （経済教室）グローバル化を巡る攻防(下)偏りない成長で不安払拭　市場経済の経験を生かせ　Ｂ・デロング　カリフォルニア大学バークレー校教授　　：日本経済新聞 http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGKKZO19272800W7A720C1KE8000/

(Battle over globalization (down) Uneasy with unbiased growth Leverage the experience of market economy)

When I read this by David Glasner, I wonder whether the shift in Hayek's beliefs between the 1930s and the 1980s was an improvement. In the 1930s, he believed in big depressions—"secondary deflation"—as a way of breaking "nominal rigidities", which I understand as the power of labor to resist being forced to accept declines in real wage rates. By the 1980s, he seemed to believe in shooting people like me in soccer stadiums, and throwing them out of helicopters into the South Atlantic. See: Pinochet, Augusto

David Glasner: Hayek, Deflation and Nihilism: "Hayek argued that... neutral money was... constant total spending (MV)... https://uneasymoney.com/2017/07/23/hayek-deflation-and-nihilism/

...Once the downturn started to accelerate, causing aggregate spending to decline by 50% between 1929 and 1933, Hayek, totally disregarding his own neutral-money criterion, uttered not a single word in protest of a monetary policy that was in flagrant violation of his own neutral money criterion. On the contrary, Hayek wrote an impassioned defense of the insane gold accumulation policy of the Bank of France, which along with the US Federal Reserve was chiefly responsible for the decline in aggregate spending.... Hayek’s policy advice was... relentlessly pro-deflation. Why did Hayek offer policy advice so blatantly contradicted by his own neutral-money criterion?...

The puzzle about just how and why the brain eater ate Clive Crook's brain—how it was that, starting about a decade ago, one of the most interesting (and intelligent) of the Tories simply lost his grip on reality—remains, to me at least, a mystery.

Here I am hoisting from one of the first full-blown signs of it in 2007.

A little background: By 2008 the brain-eating was overwhelming. For example we had Clive Crook on the "huge success" of the nomination of Sarah Palin—meaning, that is, that she was highly qualified to be Vice President and would attract lots of new votes to the McCain-Palin ticket:

Clive Crook (2008): Democrats must learn some respect: "The problem in my view is less Mr Obama and more the attitudes of the claque of official and unofficial supporters that surrounds him... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/09/democrats-must-learn-some-respect/8803/

Clueless DeLong Was Clueless: Hoisted from February 2007: The Domestic Macroeconomic Outlook: February 28, 2007 http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/02/the_domestic_ma.html: It looks like I'm not going to get to give my short talk on the domestic macroeconomic outlook up at Lake Tahoe this weekend:

That's too bad, because such talks quickly grow stale.

One of the major points of my schtick is that the macroeconomic outlook rarely changes suddenly, so that 90% of the time it is perfectly OK to say, "things are like they were, only three months ago." Nevertheless such talks have a very short half life: people like to know how the most recent news affects things, even if the usual answer is "not much"--except, of course, for those turning points where things do change a great deal, and which we usually see clearly only in retrospect.

I was going to hit three big points:

The night watchman state that supports the fully-developed market economy is one of the most strange and significant historical development in political economy. Any analysis of it requires that one view hit in perspective—that one examine other the other alternative forms that state power and authority can and do take and have taken.

And the greatest sociologist-political scientist-historian of our age analyzing such things is James C. Scott. I have often wished that I had a reading list on Scott-stuff to hand. And I wish somebody would construct an annotated one:

Here are my thoughts:

China and Economic Growth: Hoisted from the Archives (What I Am Thinking About Right Now Department) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/china-and-econo.html: Hoisted from the archives: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/china_and_econo.html: A somewhat different take on Ben Friedman's Moral Consequences of Economic Growth than the review I wrote for Harvard Magazine. Written for Caijing:

Notes for the July 11, 2017 Research on Tap http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/equitable-growth-research-on-tap-after-piketty-tue-jul-11-2017-at-500-pm.html event:

• Ryan Avent (2016): The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century http://amzn.to/2t9TtWe
• Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality http://amzn.to/2t9UI7y

Meditations on Ryan Avent:

Ryan Avent: What will happen to 'The Wealth of Humans'? http://www.aei.org/publication/the-wealth-of-humans-a-qa-with-ryan-avent/: "This really dramatic technological change... the digital revolution... is adding hugely to the amount of effective labor that’s available to firms.... A lot of routine tasks in factories and in offices... [to] be automated.... High-skilled jobs... use these new technologies to do work that used to require a lot more people to do and in the process are displacing workers... enormous, abundant labor.... Employer[s] with... huge reservoir[s] of willing workers at very low wages... say.... "I don’t need to invest in this labor-saving technology.... replace my cashiers with automated checkout... replace the people moving boxes in the warehouse with robots". And so you get this sort of self-limiting technological change.... The more powerful the digital revolution... the more people... looking for low-wage work... the less of an interest firms have in using machines to replace them..."

Research on Tap: July 11, 2017: After Piketty

Loews Madison Hotel: 1177 15th St. NW, Washington DC: 5-7 PM

Run of Show:

5:15 PM – VOG announces that the program is going to start and for the audience to begin congregating closer to center stage

5:19–5:24 PM–Alyssa Fisher to introduce Ryan Avent (The Economist), and Heather Boushey (Washington Center for Equitable Growth): "Ladies and Gentleman, please welcome Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Heather Boushey, and Senior Editor and Economics Columnist for The Economist, Ryan Avent"...

Equitable Growth: Research on Tap: After Piketty: "Join us on July 11 to kick off Equitable Growth’s new Research on Tap conversation series... https://www.eventbrite.com/e/research-on-tap-after-piketty-tickets-35521433564

Introduction to: After Piketty: The Research Program Starting from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://delong.typepad.com/2016-08-31-piketty-volume-intro_hb052516.pdf

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an astonishing, surprise bestseller.

Its enormous mass audience speaks to the urgency with which so many wish to hear about and participate in the political-economic conversation regarding this Second Gilded Age in which we in the Global North now find ourselves enmeshed.1 C21’s English-language translator Art Goldhammer reports (this volume) that there are now 2.2 million copies of the book scattered around the globe in 30 different languages. Those 2.2 million copies cannot and should not but have an impact. They ought to shift the spirit of the age into another, different channel: post-Piketty, the public-intellectual debate over inequality, economic policy, and equitable growth ought to focus differently. We have assembled our authors and edited their papers to highlight what we, at least, believe economists should study After Piketty as they use the book to trigger more of a focus on what is relevant and important.

Link to: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality

Read MOAR

Globalization and Inequality

J. Bradford DeLong :: U.C. Berkeley, WCEG, and NBER http://bradford-delong.com [email protected] @delong

.pages: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0_H9kCtNY6cZglaYpa4IRw2pQ | .key: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0a1YIQGu-i9__uHwnHA0thhTg | .html: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/economic-policy-challenges-in-the-us-and-japan-panel.html

Globalization and Inequality

• Moderator: Naoyuki Haraoka
• Brad DeLong
• Francis Fukuyama
• Yoriko Kawaguchi
• Hideichi Okada

Thank you very much.

Let me follow the example of our Lord and Master Alpha-Go as it takes the high ground first.

Let me, therefore, take the hyper-Olympian and very long run historical point of view.

The human brain is a massively parallel supercomputer that fits inside half a shoebox.

Project Syndicate: J. Bradford DeLong: Where US Manufacturing Jobs Really Went: In the two decades from 1979 to 1999, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States drifted downward, from 19 million to 17 million. But over the next decade, between 1999 and 2009, the number plummeted to 12 million. That more dramatic decline has given rise to the idea that the US economy suddenly stopped working–at least for blue-collar males–at the turn of the century...

Harvard Class of 1982 35th Reunion :: Science Center B :: Saturday, May 27, 2018, 10:45-12:00 noon

• Seth Lloyd, MIT: Moderator
• Brad DeLong, U.C. Berkeley
• Ivonne Garcia, Kenyon
• Noel Michele Holbrook, Harvard
• William Sakas, CUNY
• Carol Steiker, Harvard

In the spring of our freshman year, then-young economics professor Richard Freeman came to Ec 10 to tell us that going to Harvard would not make us rich.

He was wrong.

Hoisted from March 2016: The Benefits of Free Trade: Time to Fly My Neoliberal Freak Flag High! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/03/the-benefits-of-free-trade-time-to-fly-my-neoliberal-freak-flag-high.html: I think Paul Krugman is wrong today on international trade. For we find him in “plague on both your houses” mode. On the one hand:

After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality http://amzn.to/2q0TevJ

Themes worth noting from the After Piketty CUNY launch event—that I missed, being on the wrong coast.

I was about to post this to celebrate the publication of our After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality http://amzn.to/2ptneiD—the last thing Meltzer wrote I ever read. I think it is how he would like to be remembered. I think it speaks for itself:

Allan Meltzer (2014): The United States of Envy: "Support for the alleged social benefits of setting much higher marginal tax rates on the highest incomes...

...has now been endorsed by the International Monetary Fund, based heavily on research by two French economists named Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez. The two worked together on the faculty at MIT, where the current research director of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, was a professor. Like Piketty and Saez, he is also French...

This is the illustration Meltzer chose for his piece:

Inclusive AI: Technology and Policy for a Diverse Urban Future https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inclusive-ai-technology-and-policy-for-a-diverse-urban-future-tickets-31896895473: Wed, May 10, 2017 10:30 AM - 5:30 PM

Panel 3: The Future of Work: Automation and Labor

• Ken Goldberg
• Brad DeLong,
• James Manyika
• Costas Spanos
• Laura Tyson
• John Zysman

Today is our publication day!

Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, eds.: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality http://amzn.to/2qgPIRE (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 0674504771).

Let's see if I can maintain a post an hour today on this, shall we?

Here is my amazon review:

As one of the co-editors of this book, I know it very well. I am greatly pleased with how this project came out—we have very serious people, as Bob Solow would put it, writing very serious takes on what Thomas Piketty has accomplished, where he has gone wrong, and what gaps remain to be investigated by others. Social scientists thinking of citing on, working along lines related to, or drawing on Piketty should certainly read this book. People who have read Capital in the Twenty-First Century who are curious about how serious people are reacting to and assessing the book should read it as well.

Milken Institute: Globalization in the Crosshairs: Tuesday, May 2, 2017 / 2:30 pm-3:30 pm: Beverly Hills Ballroom http://www.milkeninstitute.org/events/conferences/global-conference/2017/panel-detail/6801

• Moderator: Gillian Tett, U.S. Managing Editor, Financial Times
• Steven Ciobo, Minister for Trade, Tourism, and Investment, Australia
• J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Weblogger, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
• John Hagel, Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP; Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge
• Alejandro Ramirez Magaña, CEO, Cinépolis
• Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, Blackstone

Excerpt from J. Bradford DeLong, Heather Boushey, and Marshall Steinbaum: After Piketty http://amzn.to/2paJ5LA: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Three Years Later http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-three-years-later/: "Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century... [C21], is a surprise best seller of astonishing dimensions.

Its enormous mass audience speaks to the urgency with which so many wish to hear about and participate in the political-economic conversation regarding this Second Gilded Age in which we in the Global North now find ourselves enmeshed. C21’s English-language translator, Art Goldhammer, reports in Chapter 1 that there are now 2.2 million copies of the book scattered around the globe in thirty different languages. Those 2.2 million copies will surely have an impact. They ought to shift the spirit of the age into another, different channel: post-Piketty, the public-intellectual debate over inequality, economic policy, and equitable growth ought to focus differently.

Project Syndicate: J. Bradford DeLong: Where US Manufacturing Jobs Really Went: In the two decades from 1979 to 1999, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States drifted downward, from 19 million to 17 million. But over the next decade, between 1999 and 2009, the number plummeted to 12 million. That more dramatic decline has given rise to the idea that the US economy suddenly stopped working – at least for blue-collar males – at the turn of the century... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate