Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Powerpoints:

• 2016-01-20: The Shadow of Malthus http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-1
• 2016-01-27: Commercial and Other Pre-Industrial Economic Revolutions http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-2
• 2016-02-03: Modern Economic Growth http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-3
• 2016-02-10: Slavery and Serfdom http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-4
• 2016-02-17: Accounting for Growth http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-5
• 2016-02-24: Cities http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-6
• 2016-03-02: Extractive and Developmental Institutions http://tinyurl.com/dl210as16-7

Weekly Memo Questions

Syllabus and Readings

bCourses Page

Noah Smith has a nice post this morning [i.e., back in December 2013]:

Noah Smith: Risk premia or behavioral craziness?:

John Cochrane is quite critical of Robert Shiller.... He... thinks that Shiller is trying to make finance less quantitative and more literary (I somehow doubt this, given that Shiller is first and foremost an econometrician, and not that literary of a guy).

Over at Equitable Growth: So as I finish my Pre-Federal Reserve Interest-Rate Liftoff Lollapalooza, I am left with three conclusions:

1. Paul Krugman and Larry Summers are such amazing f#@$*%$ geniuses...
2. If I simply wiped my brain, and reprogrammed the left half with Paul and the right half with Larry, I would be so much smarter than I am...
3. Their influence on low-theory, analysis, and policy is immense, yet somehow... not big enough...

I confess that back when I somehow found myself taking point on the internet for the Larry-Summers-for-Fed-Chair movement, I thought that the choice between Janet and Larry had the potential to be a big deal if we wound up in the tails--that Larry might break the committee so that it could not act when it needed to, and Janet might fail to act in the absence of consensus when it need to act. But I did not think it would be a big deal anywhere near the center of the distribution.

Yet here we are in the center of the distribution, and somehow the difference the choice has made feels... substantial. Larry the Dove...

Here's the whole lollapalooza: READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth: Larry Summers: What Should the Fed Do and Have Done?: "The Federal Reserve... has strongly signaled that it will raise rates...

...Given the strength of the signals that have been sent it would be credibility-destroying not to carry through with the rate increase, so there is no interesting discussion to be had about what should be done on Wednesday...

This seems to me to be wrong: credibility that one will stubbornly pursue bad policies is not worth gaining, or preserving. READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth: Olivier Blanchard, at least, has said that the secular decline in global real interest rates and increased macro instability means that the 2%/year inflation target was greatly ill-advised and needs to be raised to 4%/year. But, among the great and good who staff the finance ministries, central banks, and international organizations these days, he is nearly alone. And the other pieces of the policy puzzle that might get us out of our zero-lower-bound-secular-stagnation pickle--aggressive redistribution via taxes and transfers, higher debt levels for reserve currency-issuing sovereigns with exorbitant privilege to boost the supply of safe assets, reducing risk premia by governments' assumption of the role of entrepreneurial risk-bearer of last resort, international organizations that emerging markets regard as friends rather than enemies--are nowheresville. READ MOAR