Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

1. Antitrust law and policy is probably the most "relatively autonomous" piece of our whole legal system. The laws as enacted by Congress and signed by the President change rarely and slowly. How those laws are enforced—and how business is then conducted in the shadow of the possibility of resort to the courts for antitrust cases—changes much more radically and substantially. It is a dance of intellectual fashion, some serious benefit-cost analysis, and a great deal of lobbying and lobbying-funded motivated reasoning. My view is that the answers to the three questions Michael Kades suggests the FTC examine are: yes, no, and no, respectively. But it is very good that the FTC is thinking about this: Michael Kades: In re: Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century: "Equitable Growth suggests that the hearings include the following three topics: 1. Is monopoly power prevalent in the U.S. economy?...

2. Paul Krugman writes: "As Greg Leiserson of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth points out, 'every month in which wage rates are not sharply higher than they would have been absent the legislation, and investment returns are not sharply lower, is a month in which the benefits of those corporate tax cuts accrue primarily to shareholders'. A tax cut that might significantly raise wages during, say, Cynthia Nixon’s second term in the White House, but yields big windfalls for stock owners with only trivial wage gains for the next five or 10 years, is not what we were promised..." See Greg Leiserson: Assessing the economic effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "Key takeaways: An assessment... should focus on the impact... on wage rates... [on] the return on business investment, and... [on] future federal budget deficits, as these will determine the impact... and the fiscal sustainability of the law....

3. Very much worth listening to: Heather Boushey, Helaine Olen, and Katie Denis: Americans vs. vacation: "Half of American workers didn’t take all the paid vacation days they were entitled to in 2017. Why are so many of us unwilling or unable to take the vacation days that we’ve earned?...

4. This was the first working paper the WCEG published. It did not get the attention it deserved then. So why not hoist it?: Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer: Pooling multiple case studies using synthetic controls: An application to minimum wage policiesh: "We assess the employment and wage effects minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2013 by pooling 29 synthetic control case studies...

5. Darrick Hamilton is asking the right questions. And he might have the right answers. But I suspect not. Yes, there is something very deep in America's culture that discourages public responsibility for the conditions of poor and especially poor black Americans, to the country's shame. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that: "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge... the people, should... be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged..." We today can replace his "greater part" with "substantial part", and it is still true. But I suspect that the health gaps between high-status, high-income, and high-wealth African Americans and their white peers have other origins—not that I know what those other origins are, mind you: Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans, as measured by education, still exhibit large health disparities...

Elsewhere than Equitable Growth:

1. Encyclopedia of Chicago (1899): Mr. Dooley Explains Our "Common Hurtage": "In the late 1890s, Finley Peter Dunne's newspaper columns in Irish dialect brought to life a fictional Bridgeport bartender, Mr. Dooley...

2. Economist: Why is macroeconomics so hard to teach?: "Mr Rowe remained... 'fairly low down the totem pole' as a researcher. But he became a thunderbird at conveying macroeconomic intuition...

3. Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand argument to people who are allergic to "supply and demand" with a spoonful of sugar. He has three types of housing: newly-built yuppie fishtanks, old housing that can switch between working-class and yuppie, and newly-built "affordable housing" unattractive to yuppies: Noah Smith: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand": "YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents...

4. Dick Schmalensee: Handicapping the Highstakes Race to Net-Zero: "Economists argue that a broadly applicable incentive-based system... could reduce emissions at a much lower total cost than any alternative regime. Incentives to reduce emissions could be produced directly by a tax on emissions or through... cap-and-trade system. But the argument for relying primarily on financial incentives has historically not been very persuasive.... Even in California and the European Union, where cap-and-trade systems for CO₂ have been established, so-called “ancillary” or “belt-and-suspenders” policies that target particular sectors or sources have also been deployed...

5. EG: Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Debora Revoltella, Jan Svejnar, Christoph Weiss: Dispersion in productivity among European firms: "This column uses firm-level data from all EU countries to explore how the dispersion of resources affects macroeconomic performance...

6. Scott Jaschik: Author discusses his new book on anti-intellectualism and fascism: "A country that is not fascist may still experience fascist politics... efforts to divide society and demonize groups.... How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley...

7. This is the most hopeful take on American productivity growth relative stagnation I have seen. I thought it was coherent and might well be right 20 years ago. I think it is coherent and might possibly be right today. But is that just a vain hope?: Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald (1997): Managing Our Way to Higher Service-Sector Productivity: "What electricity, railroads, and gasoline power did for the U.S. economy between roughly 1850 and 1970, computer power is widely expected to do for today’s information-based service economy...

8. Potsdam this year is 7F warmer than it averaged in the century before 1980. Berkeley is now Santa Barbara: Stefan Rahmstorf: Europe’s freak weather, explained: "Naive.... The smoothed curve shows... global warming... the scattering of the grey bars... random variations of the weather.... Slightly more than half of the 4.3 degrees would be due to global warming, the rest to weather. That... likely underestimates the contribution of climate change...

9. Thiemo Fetzer: Did Austerity Cause Brexit?: "The rise of popular support for... UKIP... strongly and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity since 2010...

10. Interesting. The question is always: do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be happy they bought, or do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be unhappy they bought—by grifting them? And what determines the balance of providing value vs. deception in selling commodities aimed at different income classes? I am not sure they have it right here. I am sure that this is very important: James T. Hamilton and Fiona Morgan: Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals: "How information is produced for, acquired by, and utilized by low-income individuals...

11. I concur with Noah Smith here that the biggest dangers of machine learning, etc., are not on the labor but on the consumer side. They won't make us obsolete as producers. They could make us easier to grift as customers: Noah Smith: Artificial Intelligence Still Isn’t All That Smart: "Machine learning will revolutionize white-collar jobs in much the same way that engines, electricity and machine tools revolutionized blue-collar jobs...

12. We keep looking for thoughtful intellectual voices on political economy and equitable growth to the right of the intellectual center of gravity of our organization. But they turn out to be remarkably hard to find, as we are learning again this week. Suggestions for interlocutors are very welcome: John Holbo: Do The Nordic Codetermination Moonwalk: "Amused: 'Matthew Yglesias: 'Every conservative institution in America appears to be simultaneously maintaining that @SenWarren’s codetermination proposal is economically ruinous but that Nordic countries, which have codetermination, are free market success stories'...

13. Claudia Sahm: Alice in Wonderland: "One year ago today, Alice Wu’s research about sexism at an online economics forum made the news...

14. Kimberly Adams: The disturbing parallels between modern accounting and the business of slavery: "The common narrative is that today's modern management techniques were developed in the factories in England and the industrialized North.... According to... Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong...

15. Really surprised that there is no evidence of boom-bust asymmetry here. I am going to have to dig into what reasonable alternatives are and how much power they have here: Adam M. Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jon Steinsson: Housing Wealth Effects: The long View: "We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles...

Worthy Readings from Equitable Growth:

1. The development of the ideas that economics—labor economics especially—needs to focus more on power; David Card, Alan Krueger, and Ben Zipperer: [Equitable Growth in Conversation(http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/equitable-growth-in-conversation-an-interview-with-david-card-and-alan-krueger/): Alan Krueger: "I think Orley [Ashenfelter]... set the tone for the Industrial Relations Section... used to like to tell a story, which I remember vividly, where he met with some restaurant group when he worked, I think, at the Labor Department. And they said, we’ve got a problem in our industry: The minimum wage is too low and we can’t get enough workers. And that’s inconsistent with the kind of view that the market determines the wage...Z"

2. Take a look at global corporate tax avoidance here: Gabriel Zucman, T. Tørsløv, and L. Wier: The Missing Profits of Nations

3. Kate Bahn: sends us to a guy who used to work here on fire in Twitter about how the Gig Economy is not (at least not yet) a big deal: John Schmitt: @nytimes: 'Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All': Maybe it is regular work (low pay and benefits, insufficient and unpredictable hours, lack of voice on the job, etc.) that is shaping the gig economy?...

4. Get up to speed on the puzzle of low wage growth going with low unemployment. Much worth reading from Nick Bunker: Nick Bunker: Puzzling over U.S. wage growth: "Hiring has not been particularly strong during this recovery...

5. Kim Clausing: How will the #TCJA Impact American Workers?: "(1) Overall, the benefits of the #taxcuts are skewed toward the wealthy. (2) When the tax cuts are eventually paid for, the vast majority of American households will be worse off..." https://t.co/1HaOwddUai https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dec5gBJWAAAghdc.jpg

Worthy Readings Elsewhere:

1. My review of the superb and extremely thought provoking: Richard Baldwin (2016): The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization http://amzn.to/2sIcr6C. Reviewed for Nature http:nature.com: The iron-hulled oceangoing steamships and submarine telegraph cables of the second half of the 19th century set off a first wave of economic globalization. The intercontinental transport of both staple commodities and people became extraordinarily cheap. The container of the second half of the 20th century made the transport of everything non-spoilable--and some things spoilable--essentially free. It set off a second wave of economic globalization...

2. I am confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "In Flint, Mich., over 35 percent of prime-aged men—between 25 and 54—are not employed...

3. How George Borjas p-hacked his way to his conclusion that immigrants have big negative effects on native-worker wages: Jennifer Hunt and Michael Clemens: Refugees have little effect on native worker wages: "Card (1990) found that a large inflow of Cubans to Miami in 1980 did not affect native wages or unemployment...

4. Larry plumps for nominal GDP targeting: Lawrence Summers: Why the Fed needs a new monetary policy framework: "A monetary framework... should... [have] enough room to respond to a recession... nominal interest rates in the range of 5 percent in normal times...

5. Would faster productivity growth raise wage growth? That is, would other things stay not equal but at least not become more adverse? Probably: Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summer: Productivity and Pay: Is the Link Broken?: "Since 1973 median compensation in the United States has diverged starkly from average labor productivity...

6. Joe Gagnon is right here: Listen to him: Joseph Gagnon: There Is No Inflation Puzzle: "Inflation is behaving exactly as the Phillips curve would predict...

7. So you think you want to become an economist..." Masayuki Kudamatsu: tips4economists

8. The parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression remain a very fruitful area to think about: Noah Smith: "How many parallels can we think of? Interestingly, it's the very existence of all those parallels that lets us see how differently the 21st century is unfolding, compared to the 20th. We staved off the worst of the Great Recession. But this time, unlike before, we elected a xenophobic authoritarian President. What would 20th century American history had looked like if we had gone off the gold standard early, but then elected Lindbergh instead of Roosevelt? Maybe we're about to find out!..."

9. Opposition to Medicaid expansion was one of the cruelest deeds of reactionaries in the 2000s: Ralph Northam: "As a doctor, I believe ensuring all Virginians have access to the care they need is a moral and economic imperative. This budget expands Medicaid and will empower nearly 400,000 Virginians with access to health insurance, without crowding out other spending priorities..."

10. Long-run changes in the nature of work and jobs happen, but they happen in the long run. In the short run in which we live, low-pressure and high-pressure economies dominate. Why do people find this surprising?: Larry Mishel: "One reporter told me there’s quite a ‘furor’ over the new BLS Contingent worker data. Not sure why that should be, except if you bought the hype about a rapidly changing nature of work and an explosion of freelancing and gig work. @EconomicPolicy..."

11. I still have a hard time believing the U.S. is launching a trade war that no domestic interest group wants: Barry Eichengreen, Sean Randolph, and Jonathan R. Visbal: A War of Trade? Protectionist Policies Under Trump: "1,300 Chinese products... a 25% tariff... over $46 billion worth of goods. In response, China produced its own list...

12. Yes, Europe may well be facing another crisis: Olivier Blanchard, Silvia Merler, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer: How Worried Should We Be about an Italian Debt Crisis?: "Two conditions... that rising interest rates reflected economic recovery; and... that the Italian government would be prepared to cooperate with European authorities... no longer hold...

13. If you believe Robert Barro and his posse, we ought to be seeing annual-rate investment spending suddenly and discontinuously leaping upward by $800 billion this year. We are not: Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Tax cuts fail to boost corporate investment plans, Fed survey shows: "Trump claimed the tax bill would lead to a huge boost in business spending—but there's no sign of it yet...

14. A very interesting study of what appears to be highly successful job search assistance in Nevada: Day Manoli, Marios Michaelides, and Ankur Patel: Long-Term Effects of Job-Search Assistance: Experimental Evidence Using Administrative Tax Data: "Administrative tax data... examine the long-term effects of an experimental job-search assistance program operating in Nevada in 2009...

15. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is only one of many organizations that took Paul Ryan at the estimation of his communications staff. We have a significantly less responsible federal budget as a consequence: Michael Grunwalde: Paul Ryan's Legacy of Red Ink: "The speaker of the House’s reputation as a budget hawk has somehow survived his actual record...

#noted
#weblogs
#worthy

This File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/06/a-year-ago-on-equitable-growth-twenty-worthy-must-and-should-reads-from-the-past-week-or-so-june-14-2018.html

Alexandra Petri: The Zuckerberg Hearings, Condensed: "Senator 1: Mr. Zuckerberg, we hear that you started Facebook in your dorm room...

Note to Self: WTF?!?! At a ten-percent pre-tax social return to investment, that would require a 1 trillion—a 5%-point of national income—permanent upward jump in the annual flow of investment into America. Given that it looks like Trump is raising the annual deficit by 400 billion, that would require a 1.4 trillion—a 75-point of national income—permanent upward jump in the sum of annual private savings plus the annual trade deficit. On what planet and on what definition of "reasonable" is it "reasonable" to argue that Trump's tax cuts are going produce such a thing? Greg Mankiw: The Bad Economics Behind Trump's Policies: "One might reasonably argue that Trump’s tax cuts will increase growth over the next decade by as much as half a percentage point per year...

That is the current question—would (small) minimum wage increases have no effect on employment because labor-supply curves are steep, or would they boost employment by curbing employers with monopsony power from pushing both wages and employment below their competitive equilibirum values? Yet you would not know it from the very sharp and good-hearted ex-New York Times labor beat reporter Steven Greenhouse. What is he doing? He is, I think, reflexively saying "both sides!": Steven Greenhouse: "Some argue that it's foolish to support a higher minimum because it could reduce employment. But there's a huge debate among economists on this. One school—see David Neumark—finds that a higher minimum reduces employment. The other—see Arin Dube—finds little effect on employment...

Now this is simply wrong. The majority of economists believe that raising the minimum wage from its current level would significantly boost the incomes of the working poor and have little adverse effect on employment. A large minority of economists believe that raising the minimum wage would actually increase employment—that employers currently use their monopsony power to push wages and employment below their competitive equilibrium values, and that a higher minimum wage would reduce their ability to do this and so boost both. The majority and the large minority all, however, agree that there is uncertainty here. It is only a small minority of economists who follow David Neumark on this—who are confident that a higher minimum wage now would have a noticeable negative effect on employment. Thus Steve gets it wrong.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Cheney wanted new cold war with China: "Cheney used various bureaucratic techniques to deal with each of these national security issues. He lost on China. He won on Iraq. He won on Afghanistan. He won on Iran, but he didn’t win on Iran by getting a presidential decision; he won on Iran by exploiting the dysfunctionality of Condi Rice, the national security adviser...

Seth Zimmerman: How Elite Universities Shape Upward Mobility: "Graduates of top universities hold a large share of leadership positions in big firms. At the same time, elite universities are aiming to expand access to middle- and low-income students...

Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...

William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...

Ashlie Jensen (2013): Mendoza is Dismissed from Court: "In 1583 Queen Elizabeth I hosted her last Spanish Ambassador.... It became known to Elizabeth's intelligence network that Bernardino de Mendoza was conspiring.... He was ordered to leave England... [because] his involvement in the Throckmorton Plot [had] 'disturbed the realm of England'. Directly before his departure, Mendoza ordered the English officials seeing him off to go and, 'tell your mistress that Bernardino de Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms, but to conquer them'...

1. Michael Bröning: Germany’s Socialism of Fools: "By adopting a program based on "identity and solidarity," Germany's far-right AfD is harking back to classic National Socialism. It is likely to be a winning formula in this month's state elections in Bavaria and Hesse...
2. Anjana Ahuja: Climate catastrophe warnings were greeted with global silence: "hortsighted folly of ignoring the IPCC will lead to drastic future policies...
3. Brad W. Setser: Russia, China, and (the Absence of) Global Funding of the U.S. Fiscal Deficit…
4. Robert Wilde: The Chevauchée: Organised Medieval Murder 5, N.S. Gill: Rome 1st Century B.C. Chronology
5. Wikipedia: Legio X Equestris
6. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility
7. Timur Kuran and Dani Rodrik: The Economic Costs of Erdoğan : "For more than a decade, financial markets gave Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the benefit of the doubt and supplied the Turkish economy with easy credit. Such debt-fueled growth almost always ends badly, and now it has...
8. Wikipedia: Peace of Westphalia
9. William Shakespeare: The Second part of King Henry the Fourth
10. Daniel W. Drezner (20070: The New New World Order
11. (2004): Eric Alterman Told Us So
12. Matthew Buckley: @physicsmatt: "Are we going to do anything about our allies murding a journalist? No, because a) Prince Jared still needs a loan, and b) murdering journalists is a GOP party plank now. All the US will do is ask the Saudis for how-to tips...

"You don’t get to claim that you’re not attacking the university when your first few sentences read like that. It suggests a lack of clarity in the argument—a sentence I would have written if I had been asked to peer-review this essay". Dan Drezner mocks the anti-humanities industry, and, boy, is it mockable: Daniel Drezner: A Paper That Would Never Have Gotten Past Peer Review Criticizes the Academy. Film at 11: "Last year scholars James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian proudly declared that they had hoodwinked a peer-reviewed journal into publishing nonsense.... That... was riddled with problems, not the least of which was that the journal they had hacked was a pay-for-play scam...

Nathaniel Rakich: A Big Blue Wave Could Overwhelm The GOP’s Advantage In The House: "A switch is thrown at D+8 that causes actual Democratic seat gain to go from behind their popular-vote gain pace to well ahead of it. So what happens at D+8? Republicans’ structural advantage in how districts are drawn (gerrymandering, as well as the phenomenon of self-sorting, whereby Democrats tend to cluster in cities, which are already heavily Democratic) begins to erode. That advantage normally allows Republicans to keep control of the House while still losing the popular vote by a modest margin. But if Republicans lose the popular vote by too much, their firewall might break all at once, and Democratic gains could multiply...

Oh, f---! It was only a bunch of bottles of wine, and some undesired asset liquidations. It was a pretty big deal in terms of social power, but not of human well-being, or lives. It was ultimately a very funny story—until now; Laura Noonan: Assistant Accused of Stealing Wine from Goldman Sachs CEO Jumps to Death: "Nicolas de Meyer was due to plead guilty to 1.2m fine wine theft from David Solomon.... The personal assistant accused of stealing... from Goldman Sachs’ chief executive David Solomon has jumped to his death from a 33rd floor Manhattan hotel instead of appearing in court to plead guilty to the charges...

Barry Eichengreen: The Dollar and its Discontents: "aving unilaterally reimposed sanctions on Iran, US President Donald Trump's administration is threatening to penalize companies doing business with the Islamic Republic by denying them access to US banks. But that could hasten the dollar's demise as the main global currency...

Noah Smith baits earnest ideologues on Twitter: Ryan Hauntedhouse: @ryandhous_: "Dismantling capitalism =! becoming the USSR."

...Noah Smith: @Noahpinion: Maybe not, but what the heck DOES it mean??

Ryan Hauntedhouse: @ryandhous_: It means that an economy based on creating value for shareholders based primarily on profit as a metric will not be able to solve the oncoming catastrophe of climate change.

...Noah Smith: @Noahpinion: No, you just said what it doesn't mean. What does it mean?...

Andrew Van Dam and Heather Long: How the U.S. economy turned six good jobs into bad ones: "Six industries that provided an above-average weekly paycheck in the 1990s but now pay less than an average wage.... These downgraded jobs have one thing in common: They don’t require a college degree...

Newly-arrived at Equitable Growth, Will McGrew retweets Matthew Yglesias quoting Ryan Cooper: Will McGrew: Matthew Yglesias: "Ryan Cooper: 'There was no skills gap, nor an innovation shortage, nor an explosion of stay-at-home dads. There was a collapse in aggregate demand that was left to rot, while a lot of people who should have known better made things worse...'

Martin Sandbu: What The Nordic Mixed Economy Can Teach Today’s New Left: "Ten years ago, the global crisis laid bare the failures of financial capitalism. This gave the political left an opportunity to win support for its agenda. Yet almost every established centre-left party in the developed world bungled this shot at political dominance...

From back in 2016: still very much worth reading: Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman: Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries: "The bottom half of the income distribution in the United States has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s...

Homeowner bankruptcy and foreclosure are liquidity events, not solvency events: Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel: Liquidity vs. wealth in household debt obligations: Evidence from housing policy in the Great Recession: "We use variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments ('wealth'), and reducing short-term payments with approximately no change in long-term obligations ('liquidity')...

1. Marshall Berman: All That's Solid Melts into Air http://delong.typepad.com/files/berman_marshall_all_that_is_solid_melts_into_air_the_experience_of_modernity.pdf
2. Karen S. Freeman: How to View Web Pages on Apple Watch in Watchos 5: "Yes, you can access web pages on your Apple Watch now...
3. Wikipedia: Darien scheme
4. Caroline M. Yoachim: Carnival Nine: #sciencefiction
5. James Nicoll: The Company of Strangers: "The Ginger Star—Leigh Brackett, Skaith, book 1... #sciencefiction
6. Steven Pulvirent: A Week On The Wrist: Apple Watch Series 4: "The future of the Apple Watch is coming into focus–and I like what I'm starting to see...
7. William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0307763781 #books
8. Merrill M. Flood: Experimental Games
9. Paul Romer (1989): Endogenous Technological Change: "Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good...
10. Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...
11. William D. Nordhaus (1996): Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not: "During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago...
12. William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...
13. Nick Stern et al.: The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change

#shouldread

Just in time for midterm exams: M. Aurelius Antoninus: :M. Cornelius Fronto: "To my teacher: I received two letters from you at the same time. In one of them, you were criticizing me and you were showing that I wrote a sentence rashly; in the second, however, you were trying to approve my work with praise. Still, I swear by my mother and by my health that I got more joy from the first letter...

Hal R. Varian: Causal Inference in Economics and Marketing: "This is an elementary introduction to causal inference in economics written for readers familiar with machine learning methods. The critical step in any causal analysis is estimating the counterfactual—a prediction of what would have happened in the absence of the treatment...

James Davis Nicoll: Sorry to Crush Your Dreams, But We’re Not Colonizing Space Anytime Soon: "Robotic spaceflight has, as we all know, more than delivered on its promise. In fact, one might blame the success of robots for the slowdown in attempts at human space flight...

Note to Self: Prisoners' Dilemma Tweets...

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048597577229373440
https://twitter.com/XLProfessor/status/1048599003821047809
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048609562217996288
https://twitter.com/JonWalkerDC/status/1048610059926700032
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610236418772993
https://twitter.com/akcayerol/status/1048609883036299264
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610846014763008
https://twitter.com/laseptiemewilay/status/1048610348583010305
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610963497209856
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048611584552009728
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048612380895105024
https://twitter.com/thorgamma/status/1048614023552552966
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614093270081536
https://twitter.com/oliverbeige/status/1048613269487980545
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614520242020352
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614537962770432
https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048614352067149825
https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048614353640022017
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048615646743785472
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048616583784873984
https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048624515289436162
https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048615957189611520
https://twitter.com/dannyschwab/status/1048629320393084929
https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048630608476426241
https://twitter.com/dannyschwab/status/1048632117171838976

The first write-up of the Prisoner's (or is it Prisoners'?) Dilemma: Merrill Flood (1958): Some Experimental Games: "Summary: Two players non-cooperatively choose rows and columns of their payoff matrices in a series of 100 plays of a non-constant sum game. The purpose of this experimental game is to determine which of several theories best describes their behavior. The players, being familiar with zero-sum game theory, happen to choose a poor solution for their non-constant-sum game...

1. Wolfenoot: "Eat roast meat (because wolves eat meat) and cake decorated like a full moon. A holiday to the spirit of wolves that celebrates people who are kind to dogs? I can 100% get behind this. So we will be celebrating Wolfenoot. It’s on the 23rd November.... If you’re posting publicly about it, use #wolfenoot...
2. Emma Christensen: Recipe: Chili-Rubbed Ribeye Steak with Maple-Bourbon Butter | Kitchn: "For the steaks: 1 tablespoon cacao nibs 1 tablespoon chili powder 2 teaspoons brown sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika (optional) Black pepper 2 (1-pound) boneless ribeye steaks. For the maple-bourbon butter: 1 tablespoon bourbon 1 teaspoon maple syrup 1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) butter, very soft...
3. John Bell: +Against Measurement_
4. Daniel Swain: Substantial early-season rainfall in California to dampen explosive wildfire conditions: "Significant rainfall now appears likely from about the SF Bay Area south to Los Angeles County, with at least some precipitation pretty much statewide...
5. John Williams: 'Normal' Monetary Policy in Words and Deeds: "We could return to a system... in which the supply of reserves... was kept relatively scarce, and the interest rate was set by... open market operations.  Alternatively, we could continue with the system that we’ve been using since the crisis, in which bank reserves are abundant and the federal funds rate target is achieved through adjustments to administered rates...
6. Doug Jones: Logarithmic History: "The history of the universe—from the Big Bang to the end of the year—day by day...
7. Great China Restaurant
8. Zach Weinersmith: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: "The Program...
9. Wikipedia: Hexapodia Is the Key Insight!
10. Noah Smith: Why Millennials Are Sour on the Economy: "Lack of mobility, stagnant incomes and thwarted expectations is a painful mix...
11. Noah Smith: How to Fill the Gaps in the U.S. Economy: "Many of these advances have come through a single agency—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (also known as ARPA at some points in its history)...
12. Jason Snell: Why Are Apple Watch Faces Such a Mess?: "a lot of Apple Watch users have been surprised that they can’t add older complications to those faces. Apps need to be updated to explicitly support the new complication style, which was only introduced to developers on the day the Apple Watch Series 4 was announced...
13. Moses Abramovitz (1986): Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind

The search for "robust determinants" has always seemed to me to be wrong-headed. We should be searching for effective policies. And which determinants are "robust" will depend on what other determinants are in the mix. And an effective policy is likely to shift the values of more than one "determinant": Dani Rodrik: "Is 'export sophistication' (as in Hausmann, Hwang, and Rodrik 2007) the only robust determinant of economic growth? Robust, that is, to correcting for endogenity and OVB as best as possible? This new paper from the IMF says yes https://t.co/C3DkRzqr8d...

Dan Drezner: The world is laughing at President Trump: "That is bad news for America.... Trump claimed that he intended to inspire the laughter, but that dog won’t hunt...

Lars Svensson: Can Monetary Policy Still Deliver? A Natural Experiment: "Riksbank policy-rate hikes 2010-2011, from 0.25% to 2%. What happens to inflation and unemployment when the central bank (for no good reason) raise the policy rate by 175 bp?... Monetary policy works like clockwork in Sweden. Neo-Fisherian view rejected. What contributes to powerful monetary policy in Sweden? 1. Strong exchange-rate channel 2. Strong household cash-flow channel...

Our Kate Bahn Reminds us: Kate Bahn: "This needs to be screamed from the rooftops.... We cannot have a substantive conversation about how tight the labor market is without examining demographic disparities..." ands sends us to Equitable Growth alumnus John Schmitt quoting Janelle Jones at: Laura Maggi: Despite Drop in Black Unemployment, Significant Disparities Remain: "The African-American unemployment rate... low—compared to historic numbers. In July, it was 6.6 percent...

Adam Ozimek: Wider Labor Market Slack Implies Lower Rates: "Focusing on wider labor slack helps explain why the Fed remains somewhat accommodative. It also suggests that if labor markets can return to 2001 levels, then rates should remain highly accommodative at the moment...

Jason Snell: The Dream of Converting Podcasts into Text: "While... machine translations aren’t readable, they are getting good enough to fuel search engines. A great proof of concept is this one from David Smith...

Joseph E. Gagnon and Brian Sack: QE: A User's Guide: "Central banks should characterize QE in terms of the stock of long-term asset holdings and should announce purchases of assets in discrete increments that are designed to deliver macroeconomic stimulus equivalent to the policy rate cut that they would otherwise desire to implement...

Scarce: Sharice Davids (D) and Kevin Yoder (R) in KS-03: "It's a bit surprising that the Republicans are pulling out this early in a nominally red district (R+4), but early polling had Davids already up by 8. Yoder, who had been endorsed by Trump, committed the grievous crime earlier this summer of supporting asylum for migrants who were victims of domestic violence. Unforgivable for the cultists...

Are there transcripts for the Ezra Klein show?: Ezra Klein: The Ezra Klein Show: "Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?... Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics... Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy...

Very clever by Sedláček et al.. And this certainly looks right: 2% of GDP as the (ongoing) cost of the Boris Johnson BREXIT clown show: Benjamin Born, Gernot Müller, Moritz Schularick, and Petr Sedláček: £350 Million a Week: The Output Cost of the Brexit Vote: "The current cost of Brexit... counterfactual... a matching algorithm... combination of comparison economies best resembles the pre-referendum growth path of the UK economy.... The negative drag from the Brexit vote now appears to be roughly £350 million a week...

Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman: "The American Economic Association has a new discussion forum set up by Olivier Blanchard. First up is the question of whether low interest rates are leading to excessive risk-taking https://www.aeaweb.org/forum/311/have-low-interest-rates-led-to-excessive-risk-taking...

I think I have got it: Re: Scott Aaronson: It’s hard to think when someone Hadamards your brain: Frauchiger and Renner say: State |ψ>:

$ |\psi> = \frac{|00> + |01> + |10>}{\sqrt{3}} $

and Alice and Bob will measure the first and second qubits of this state in the basis {+,-}. There are three components to the state |ψ>, and in them:

Kevin Drum: Technology Is the Key to Success, But Probably Not the Technology You Enjoy: "I’d put it more bluntly: unless they’re forced to at the point of a metaphorical gun... service-sector managers are lazy... in a very specific way: they don’t really understand technology...

Hamilton Project: Place-Based Policies for Shared Economic Growth: "Depending on where they live, people across the United States experience drastically different economic outcomes...

Back in the 1990s we in the Clinton administration put Breyer on the Supreme Court in the belief that the Court needed somebody who genuinely understood antitrust. But the Republican justices have given him zero deference, even though he knows the issues and they do not. And this is an increasing problem: Fiona Scott Morton: [There is a lot to fix in U.S. antitrust enforcement today(https://equitablegrowth.org/there-is-a-lot-to-fix-in-u-s-antitrust-enforcement-today/): "Last month’s court decision allowing AT&T Inc. to acquire Time Warner Inc. is an example of the inability of our current system of courts and enforcement.... Judge Richard Leon demonstrated a lack of understanding of the markets, the concept of vertical integration, corporate incentives, and the intellectual exercise of forecasting what the unified firm would do... a poor decision...

Jan Bakker, Stephan Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke, and Ferdinand Rauch: Trade and growth in the Iron Age: "The first millennium BC... the growth effects of one of the first major trade expansions... the systematic crossing of the open sea in the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. A strong positive relationship between connectedness and archaeological sites suggests a large role for geography and trade in development even at such an early juncture in history...

Kate Bahn: @lipstickecon: "This FRB report concludes that declining prime-age LFP is due to the decline in "traditional blue-collar jobs" without deconstructing what made these 'traditional' jobs good-unions...

Henry Farrell: "There's a history: "behind Tucker Carlson's warning to Fox viewers that 'If you're looking to understand what's actually happening in this country, always assume the opposite of whatever they're telling you on the big news stations.' And it's the history of US conservative media...

SEC: Elon Musk Charged with Securities Fraud for Misleading Tweets: "On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted to his 22 million Twitter followers that he could take Tesla private at $420 per share (a substantial premium to its trading price at the time), that funding for the transaction had been secured, and that the only remaining uncertainty was a shareholder vote...

Patrick Wallis, Justin Colson, and David Chilosi: Structural Change and Economic Growth in the British Economy before the Industrial Revolution, 1500–1800: "Male labor sectoral shares for England and Wales before 1800...

Xeni Jardin: UPDATE: "I faced it with carbs, coffee, hugs, spiritual practice, dogs, and weed." "I don’t know how to face the fact that a serial rapist who showed us his rape face is going to become a Supreme Court Justice today. And then he’s going to become a tool for impunity and harming women, people of color, but really—all of us. He’s going to hurt us...

Right-wing neoconservative nutboy Eliot Cohen gets this one right, I think. The reasons to get Kavanaugh on SCOTUS were (1) to demonstrate that the Republican Party rewarded being a Tea Party-Unfederalist apparatchik, and so (2) strengthen the Tea Party-Unfederalist social network. Those are not in the interest of anyone not already high up in that social network. Opposed are that (a) Kavanaugh is not near the top of those likely to be most effective as a conservative justice because he is not a first-rank persuasive intellect, (b) Kavanaugh is not near the top of those likely to be most effective as a conservative justice because he is mean and uncollegial, (c) Kavanaugh is not near the top of those likely to be most effective as a conservative justice because he does not have a judicial temperament, (d) Kavanaugh is not near the top of those likely to be most effective as a conservative justice because he too obviously lacks judicial principles, and (e) you take electoral damage from pushing him through. It is a mystery why he has not been withdrawn yet—especially with the July 1 entry on his calendar. Eliot Cohen focuses on (c): Eliot Cohen: The Republican Party Abandons Conservatism: "But if we expect steely resolve from a police officer confronting a knife-wielding assailant... we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out.... The conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane...