Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Once again, not somebody who I see as underrated in the world at large. But the community in which he is well-known seems, once again, to have less overlap with it should with the community that reads here...

• Branko Milanovic, Senior Scholar

Storify: "Fighting with -------- on Twitter"!: A vice, best entertained not too often, but fun in small doses...

Sam Wang: Princeton Election Consortium — A First Draft of Electoral History. Since 2004:

• 2006-08-09: Discontinuities in Human History: Right now I'm annoyed that I cannot find an English translation of the early thirteenth century "Life of William Marshal," and that I will have to leave my eyrie eighty feet above the earth in this concrete-and-glass tower with its perfect view of the Golden Gate and walk a hundred yards to the library. Twenty thousand years ago one of my ancestors was worrying about (a) being hunted down by the nastier thugs to the south with better spears, (b) the fact that this northern land to which the band had fled was cold, and (c) that the bones of his children with darker skin did not seem to be growing straight. I think this tells us that the Singularity already happened...

Live from Data Journalism: Matthew Yglesias is perplexed:

Was anyone on the @FiveThirtyEight staff *really* prepared to place an even-money bet on Trump last weekend when the polls narrowed?

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 3, 2016

I don’t really understand the metaphysical status of a forecast that has this much volatility. pic.twitter.com/XK71ts9YwU

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 3, 2016

• 2006-08-02: Hoisted from Comments: Dan Tompkins Defends Thomas E. Ricks: Dan looks at the gap between what the White House wanted printed and what Ricks wrote in 2004, and concludes that Ricks "was doing a pretty good job." I look at the gap between what Ricks writes in Fiasco and what Ricks wrote in 2004, and conclude that White House pressure did a pretty good job of neutering Ricks: that he (and his Washington Post bosses) knuckled under.... The gap between the very good and very shrill Fiasco and the daily news stories [at the time] is, I think, the most remarkable thing here. The harder question and the better defense--but not one that any defender of Ricks has advanced publicly--is "If he'd written what he knew was going on, they'd have pulled his press pass. Ricks can't function without his press pass."

Must-Read: Giles Wilkes: How I learnt to love the economic blogosphere:

Static Chart Link--Production

Static Chart Link--Employment

• The Invisible College http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/07/the_invisible_c.html 2006-07-25: I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be really nice to have Paul Krugman three doors down.... The political scientists are too far away to run into by accident — somebody like Dan Drezner would be nice to have around (even if he does get incidence wrong sometimes). Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least...

Aceto: Review of: Cynthia Ozick: Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Lit...: I am the Problem:

Cynthia Ozick has written a collection of essays centered on criticism. Criticizing criticism is a thankless job. One gets oneself into all sorts of quagmire. She posits 'nothing is worth doing unless it has never been done before...', as one mode, then the other as '...the sweet value of ripeness.'

Live from Cyberspace: Welcome praise for J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation - Milken Institute Review: Hiccup ... or Endgame? Much appreciated. Thanks...

Paul Krugman: "Good Review by Brad DeLong: There are still real policy issues out there! The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation" https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT

Good review by Brad DeLong. There are still real policy issues out there! The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) July 23, 2016

• Lies from Colin Powell http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/07/lies_from_colin.html 2006-07-16: "But that's not what happened, is it? Powell and his chief-of-staff Wilkerson knew very well that what they were presenting to the U.N. was 'anything but an intelligence document'. It's no accident that Wilkerson calls his role in preparing the Feb. 14, 2003 U.N. speech 'the lowest point of my life'...

Live from the Internet: I must say, I am not impressed.

• The Pattern of Growth in Income Inequality http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/07/the_pattern_of_.html 2006-07-15: Greg Mankiw questions Paul Krugman.... The big rise in inequality in the U.S. since 1980 has been overwhelmingly concentrated.... The top 1% have gone from 8 to 16 times average income, the next 4% have gone from 3.2 to 3.7 times average income, and the next 5% have been stuck at 3 times average income. It's hard to attribute this pattern to a rise in the premium salary earned by the well-educated by virtue of the skills their formal education taught them.... It is especially hard because most theories of the rising education premium attribute it to skill-biased technological change generated by the high-tech computer industrial revolution.... The timing doesn't fit either.... If the New York Times were smarter, it would give Paul Krugman 2000 words every two weeks, rather than confining him to the straightjacket of 700 words twice a week...

Comment of the Day: The estimable RJW has not been looking at our traffic numbers as much as we have. Tweetstorms appear to get much higher readership levels than do blog posts...

Robert Waldmann: Oh Noes!:

1. Tweetstorms are very strange
2. They occur when someone wishes to write more than 140 characters and chooses a medium with a 140 character limit.
3. The 'Mystery is Why the Very Sharp' Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman tweet storm (or is the verb form 'to storm tweets').
4. Another mystery is how does twitter often manage to present the stormed tweets in non-consecutive order
5. A third mystery is is why is 'Why' capitalized ? (I remember a time when the very sharp Brad DeLong was quite put out over my over use of capital letters).
6. it was in 1989.
7. but what would be a perfect tweet storm ?
8. I am waiting for an epic tweet poem in rhymed couplets.
9. see pseudo tweet 4 above.

Eleven free books in the mailbox this morning from last week--three of which look absolutely superb, and three of which look quite good. Here are the ones that look superb:

But it would take me nine hours to read just these three with proper attention, let along the three that look quite good...

Something's gotta give...

• Marc Levinson: An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy http://amzn.to/29z03li
• Matt Grossman and David Hopkins: Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Interest-Group Democrats http://amzn.to/29zzvxB
• Michael Tomasky, ed: Democracy: A Journal of Ideas: Tenth Anniversary Issue http://democracyjournal.org

John Scalzi: How Blogs Work Today: "My piece... on Clinton and Sanders blew up... with roughly 75,000 views over two days...

...This gave me an excuse to check my referrers and ego search on Google and see a bit of who was talking about the post and/or sending people my way. What I found: Facebook was by far the largest mover of visits and the place where the largest number of people were commenting on the piece, on their own wall or in the comments of others. Twitter was the next highest contributor of traffic/discussion. After that, and a bit down the scale, a couple of political sites, community sites like Metafilter or Reddit, and Google Plus, which, yes, apparently some people still use. But, interestingly, almost none of the conversation about/traffic to the piece was coming from personal blogs.

Live from the Time Machine: Duncan Black remembers fourteen years ago, and the days of Tony Blair trying to be clever...

Duncan Black**: The Hippies Could Have Told Them That At The Time: "One thing about that glorious era known as the run-up to the Iraq war...

Live from the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy That Is the Twitterverse: I confess that I am on the edge as to whether Twitter should live or die, because of things like this. NSFW. NSFP:

Live from the Stronghold of the Anonymous Flying Attack Monkeys: Storify: Gamergate Comes to Economics!: Noah Smith, Friends, and the 'Refreshing' EJMR...

Live from (Ω,𝓕,𝑷): Real poll-aggregation election forecasts!

538 is up and running: FiveThirtyEight: 2016 Election Forecast:

Live from the Twitterverse: Henceforth, at least two-thirds of my @-tweets will be "thx..." or "touché..." or ":-)"

That is all...

Cory Doctorow: How to Protect the Future Web from Its Founders' Own Frailty:

So, as you might imagine, I'm here to talk to you about dieting advice. If you ever want to go on a diet, the first thing you should really do is throw away all your Oreos.

It's not that you don't want to lose weight when you raid your Oreo stash in the middle of the night. It's just that the net present value of tomorrow's weight loss is hyperbolically discounted in favor of the carbohydrate rush of tonight's Oreos. If you're serious about not eating a bag of Oreos your best bet is to not have a bag of Oreos to eat. Not because you're weak willed. Because you're a grown up. And once you become a grown up, you start to understand that there will be tired and desperate moments in your future and the most strong-willed thing you can do is use the willpower that you have now when you're strong, at your best moment, to be the best that you can be later when you're at your weakest moment.

Another in my series of webloggers who I think are underappreciated--of people who, by accidents of chance and historical contingency, are just as smart (or more) and are as (or more) worth reading as I am. Richard Mayhew of Balloon Juice is doing some of the very most interesting blogging-from-the-trenches of our health care financing system.

Here's a baker's dozen of worthwhile reads:

• Richard Mayhew (2016): Evidence and Cost Curve Bends
• Richard Mayhew (2016): On-exchange profitability
• Richard Mayhew (2016): Cruzing for coverage

Must-Read: Storify: Gordon and Varian Approaches to Understanding the Ill-Named "Secular Stagnation": Tren Griffin and Friends...

Live from Cyberspace: Storify: DeLong: Tweets Worth Noting: June 12-16, 2016:

Storify: The Daily Trump!: June 15, 2016: Seriously: there's enough each day for a feature...

Live from Cyberspace: What this misses is that the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party does not--or maybe should not--want its candidate to win the nomination. Unless you like presidents like Richard M. Nixon, a Democratic candidate has to have an effective reach and appeal that includes the muddled and confused blancmange that are the swing voters of America. The best self of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party wants to run another McGovern in a general election about as much as the best self of their Republican counterparts wants to run another Goldwater:

Zeynep Tufekci: The Disruption Is Digital: "Insurgents like Bernie Sanders have been the rule, not the exception...

...From Eugene McCarthy to Jesse Jackson, the [Democratic] Party’s left wing regularly broke ranks to run on quasi-social democratic platforms. But with the exception of George McGovern in 1972, these challengers all fell short of the nomination, partly because they lacked the money to effectively organize and advertise. The party establishment had a virtual monopoly on every political tool needed to win.

Storify: Europe: Too Little Democracy, or the Wrong Kind of Democracy? (with images, tweets) · delong · Storify: Dani Rodrik, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Me, and Others...

Storify: DeLong: Tweets Worth Noting: June 7-June 11, 2016 (with images) · delong · Storify:

Storify: Varieties of Macroeconomics: A Conversation with Noah Smith and Others: Useful, Coffee-House, Useless, Grifter, and STUPID

• Noah Smith: Economics Struggles to Cope With Reality - Bloomberg View
• J. Bradford DeLong: Macroeconomics, Fantasy, Reality, and Intellectual Utility...

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Digby (June 18, 2015): Yes, he's a right-wing blowhard. But he's rich & famous, and his kooky ideas fit snugly in the Tea Party mainstream: "The GOP race for the presidency has been upgraded from a clown car to a three-ring circus...

...with the official entry of Donald Trump into the race. After daughter Ivanka delivered a stirring introduction... the audience waited expectantly for the great man to appear. And it waited. And waited. Finally after several long moments, the great man finally emerged above the crowd on the mezzanine level of the glittering Trump Tower building waving as if he were Juan Peron (or the Queen of England). As Neil Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World’ continued to play over and over again, he then descended to the stage on an excruciatingly slow-motion escalator and began his speech by insulting his fellow Republican candidates for failing to know how to put on a competent political event.

Sam Wang (Jan 7, 2016): Does Trump’s ceiling matter?: "Ross Douthat... says Trump is doomed because he will hit a ceiling of support around 30%...

Live from the Self-Made Gehenna That Is Twitter: Terry Teachout: Twitter, in Four Sentences:

1. How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important!

2. If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.

3. You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.

4. Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.

Live from the Self-Made Gehenna which is Twitter: Verb. sap.:

Anderson: ThusTweeted:

I have created this beautiful thing for you all. pic.twitter.com/EcXrc8PbYl

— Phillip Bastien (@PABastien) May 25, 2016

A month ago I wrote:

"You are not doing enough in the way of promiscuous link-sluttage", my conscience says to me, occasionally. "You are not doing enough in the way of making people who come to your weblog aware of very smart people whom they ought to be paying attention to--but are not. You have an obligation not only to punch up, but to extend a hand down--to promote people who, by accidents of chance and historical contingency, are just as smart (or more) and are as (or more) worth reading as you are."

"So what can I do?" I say.

Live from Twitter's Incomprehensible User Interface: Timothy B. Lee: Twitter replies are broken, and Twitter has a great plan to fix them: "Twitter's handling of replies might be the platform's most confusing feature...

Live from the Self-Made Gehenna That Is Twitter: Matt Bruenig is a very smart man. When not on Twitter, Matt Bruenig is almost always very much worth reading. When on Twitter--that wretched hive of scum and villainy--not so much:

Kevin Drum: The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained: "Lefty gadfly Matt Bruenig got into a Twitter fight with Joan Walsh yesterday morning...

Live from the Banks of the Wide Missouri: I adopted a "block and ban on sight" policy on Twitter and in my comments section for racists, misogynists, Stalinists, and BernieBros.

Since then both of these feeds have become of much higher quality--and not just with respect to those groups' particular hobbyhorses.

Wingnuttery in one area appears to greatly raise the chance of offensive wingnuttery in other areas...

Live from Evans Hall: Stig Abell: The FT's "Page not found" message is unimprovable](https://twitter.com/StigAbell/status/728901515574972417):

http://tinyurl.com/dl2061222a

My paper for the Notre Dame conference on "public intellectualism" is finally making its way through the publication process...

I. The Salience Today of the Economic

Sit down some evening and watch the news on the TV, or scan the magazine covers in the supermarket, or simply immerse yourself in modern America...

A. Elements of Public-Square Gossip

If you are like me, you will be struck by the extent to which our collective public conversation focuses on seven topic areas:

1. The personal doings of the beautiful, the powerful, and the rich – and how to become more like them.
2. The weather.
3. Local threats and dangers, especially to children.
4. Amusements – usually gossip about the past or about our imaginary friends, frenemies, etc. (it is amazing how many people I know who have strong opinions about Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen1 – many more than have any opinions at all about her creator George R.R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels on which “Game of Thrones”2 is based).
5. How to best procure necessities and conveniences.
6. Large scale dangers (and, rarely, opportunities): plagues, wars and rumors of wars, the fall and rise of dynasties, etc.
7. “The economy”: unemployment, spending, inflation, construction, stock market values, and bond market interest rates.

Now out of these seven topic areas, the first six are found not just in our but in other societies as far back as we have records. They are common in human history as far back as we have been writing things down, or singing long story-songs to one another around the campfire.

What, after all, is the story of Akhilleus, Hektor, and Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad but a combination of (1), (4), and (6)?3

Aristotle: On Trolling

Journal of the American Philosophical Association: copyright American Philosophical Association doi: 10.1017/apa.2016.9

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S2053447716000099

How to cite this article: Rachel Barney [Aristotle], "On Trolling". Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Available on CJO 2016 doi:10.1017/apa.2016.9

That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear.

Daniel Davies (2009): Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all: "I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism...

...So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.

• : interfluidity » Moral heuristics, public policy, and self-defeating tribalism
• Interfluidity :: Krugman's "hangover theory", revisited.
• interfluidity » Tragedy of the technocrats
• interfluidity » Hangover theory and morality plays

Yesterday I wrote:

"You are not doing enough in the way of promiscuous link-sluttage", my conscience says to me, occasionally. "You are not doing enough in the way of making people who come to your weblog aware of very smart people whom they ought to be paying attention to--but are not. You have an obligation not only to punch up, but to extend a hand down--to promote people who, by accidents of chance and historical contingency, are just as smart (or more) and are as (or more) worth reading as you are."

Over at Equitable Growth: First, everybody needs to start here: Christina and David Romer: Senator Sanders's Proposed Policies and Economic Growth.

OK. Finished?

Paul Krugman weighs in, with another point for model-building as an intuition pump rather than as a filing system--if the model doesn't produce the results you want and think belong in your filing system, you should worry rather than simply throwing it out and getting another model. Plus a bunch of other issues--empirical, methodological, political, and--alas!--moral. Read MOAR

Live from Soda Hall: Hugh Hancock: 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script "Interestingly, there's another mystical summoned creature...

...that fits rather well here: the homunculus. After all, what are MOOCs doing but creating a small version of the magus (or professor) you wish to consult, and thus enabling the magus themselves to be in many more places at once, using their knowledge to do many more things?"

"You are not doing enough in the way of promiscuous link-sluttage", my conscience says to me, occasionally. "You are not doing enough in the way of making people who come to your weblog aware of very smart people whom they ought to be paying attention to--but are not. You have an obligation not only to punch up, but to extend a hand down--to promote people who, by accidents of chance and historical contingency, are just as smart (or more) worth reading than you are."

"So what can I do?" I say.

"Periodically put up a post praising somebody, and providing a baker's dozen of links", it--she--he--I guess my conscience is not strongly gendered at all--says.

"I keep on thinking I should", I say. "But I forget!"

"Then publicly commit to doing it on the 24th of each month. Then you will be humiliated if you miss one. And that will provide you with motivation!"

So, guys, who on the internet should be first? Who receives less attention than they would in a world with a just internet?

And if the 24th of next month goes by without me living up to this promise... I expect to hear from all of you...

FT Alphachat Podcast: Brad DeLong and Cardiff Garcia: Three Underrated Moments in Economic History:

http://aca.st/9e0d52

Live from the Hay-Adams: Erik Loomis: The End of Journalism as a Middle Class Job: "This month’s Sidney winner is on the downsizing of journalists and how what was once a middle-class job...