Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner

John Scalzi: 21 Years of Whatever: "Whatever exists today for the same reason it began existing 21 years ago, which is, I wanted a place to write about things. The formula hasn’t really wavered in all that time; I write about the things I want to write about, when I want to write about them, for whatever length I feel like writing about them for. Sometimes I’m ambitious and post several times a day; other times I’ll post once a day and sometimes skip a day or two (or more). When I’m writing a book, I tend to post less. When I’m not, I’ll post more. I don’t take requests, unless I do. And so on. Also, you know: I write here because I just plain like this site. This is, in more ways than one, my house and a reflection of me. I like how I’ve built it over the years and I like what it does. I like I have a place to say what I want to say. I like that I have a place where others occasionally come by to visit. I like that those people seem to like it too. So, I’ll keep at it some more. Let’s see what happens from here....

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...

Hoisted from the Archives: A Now-Extended Non-Sokratic Dialogue on Website Design: What I, at least, regard as an interesting discussion in the comments to my A Very Brief Sokratic Dialogue on Website Redesign: From that post:

Platon: Five requirements?

Sokrates: Yes.... The stream... so... who want to either read what is new or to treat the site as a weblog--that is, have a sustained engagement and conversation with the website considered as a Turing-class hivemind--can do so.... The front-end... to give each piece of content a visually-engaging and subhead-teaser informative welcome mat.... The syndication... to propagate the front-end cards out to Twitter and Facebook.... The stock... a pathway... by which people can pull things written in the past... relevant... to their concerns today.... The grammar: The visually-interesting and subhead-teaser front-end... needs to lead the people who would want to and enjoy engaging with the content to actually do so.... [But,] as William Goldman says, nobody knows anything.

Platon: Is there anybody whose degree of not-knowingness is even slightly less than the degree of not-knowingness of the rest of us?...

Sokrates: My guess... http://www.vox.com--Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell and company--are most likely to be slightly less not-knowing than the rest of us....

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

Note to Self: Are all the cool kids still writing weekly email newsletters? If not, why no longer? If so, why?

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

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner

1. Be the Podcast You Want to See in the World!: Arindrajit Dube: "God damn it Brad now Matt Y is on board and I am seriously screwed..." So it looks like we may be doing this for real—once a week, half-hour chunks, starting out as amateur hour only. First topic: thinking about what marginal tax rates on the rich should be. What say you all?...

2. Three Papers and Four Graphs and Tables: The Top Marginal Tax Rate: If Arindrajit Dube and I do start our Economic Home podcast, I think that each 30 minute segment should concentrate on two or three (or four) papers and two or three (or four) graphs and tables. Our first proposed topic is the top marginal tax rate. Are these the right papers? Are these the right graphs and tables?...

3. By Popular Deman: What Is “Modern Monetary Theory”?: Nevertheless, if one must choose between MMT on the one hand and the yahoos of either monetary stringency or fiscal austerity on the other, choose MMT. It is closer to being an accurate view. We do seek a circular flow of spending, production, and incomes both high enough to keep us from unnecessary unemployment and also from surprisingly and distressingly high prices and inflation. This is a modest goal. It is not something pushed out of reach by some malign and austere economic or budgetary accounting logic...

4. On Robert Barro's (2005) "Rare Events and the Equity Premium" and T.A. Rietz's (1988) "The Equity Risk Premium: A Solution": Our habit of using the Lucas-tree model of Lucas (1978), "Asset Prices in an Exchange Economy" as a workhorse has turned out to be a trap...

5. A Toast: "The Queen Over the water!"…: "The rightful president of the United States warned us before anybody else did...

6. Dealing with Global Warming Needs a Carbon Tax Starting Now: It would have been smart to do it 26 years ago, when Al Gore was first pushing it—and we got it through the House and fell short by two votes in the Senate: George Akerlof et al.: Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends: Bipartisan agreement on how to combat climate change: Global climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action. Guided by sound economic principles, we are united in the following policy recommendations...

7. Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels: "In Australia we'd just say Lewis CK is an arsehole...

8. Note to Self: Enjoyed Cherryh and Fancher's Alliance Rising very much, but... I wish I had read something else this past week and had saved this for five years from now, when The Hinder Stars II, III, and... IV? would be out.... If only Jen-and-Ross-Together had been given twice the screen time, 40% rather than 20% of the book, it would have been a wonderful Happy-for-Now romance...

Keep this near the top of working memory...

• 180.8 million people are represented by the 49 senators who caucus with the Democrats.
• 141.7 million people are represented by the 52 51 senators who caucus with the Republicans.
• 65.9 million people voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tim Kaine to be their president and vice president
• 63.0 million people voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be their president and vice president.

Paul Krugman tells us: 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..." So I mossed on over and left three comments: one on the forum, one on secular stagnation, and one on whether there is any reason to fear low interest rates:

Is There Any Reason to Fear Low Interest Rates?: Have low interest rates led to excessive risk taking?: I suspect that the right way to make the accurate point that this line of discussion is hunting for is to focus not on the amount of risk but on, rather, who is bearing the risk...

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...

Apropos of Wigner has many friends...: Renato Renner: It’s hard to think when someone Hadamards your brain: "Hi Scott: There are currently many who are blogging about our result, so I started to use my little quantum random number generator on my desk: outcome 0 means I don’t react to it, outcome 1 means I write a reply. For your blog the outcome was 1! Now, we are already in a situation that involves superposed agents...

Diane Coyle: The Long Arc of UK Productivity: "Nick Crafts has a compact book... about the trajectory of the British economy... Forging Aahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back.... Nick’s somewhat idiosyncratic–but highly plausible–view that the seeds of the country’s post-world war 2 relative decline were sown in the institutions that enabled it to perform so well during the 19th century...

Judea Pearl: "Confounders, Colliders, and Mediators: As you surely know by now, mistaking a mediator for a confounder is one of the deadliest sins in causal inference and may lead to the most outrageous errors. The latter invites adjustment; the former forbids it..."

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?...

James Politi: Us Tariffs See Small Businesses Plead for Mercy as Trade War Bites: "One by one, they paraded before a panel of US administration officials this week to plead for mercy in the escalating trade war with Beijing, at a public hearing on the $200bn in new tariffs threatened by Donald Trump against imports from China...

It could have happened this way—a Heisenberg: the GOP's attempts to inoculate Kavanaugh against an accusation that Christine Blasey Ford had decided not to make pubic lead them to leak enough to reporters to convince CBF to come forward: Nicole Belle: Don't Kid Yourself. The GOP KNOWS Kavanaugh Tried To Rape Someone: "Blasey Ford... sends a letter to her representative... Anna Eshoo.... Eshoo passes Blasey Ford's letter on to Dianne Feinstein.... After several back-and-forths, Blasey Ford tells Feinstein's office she does not want to be put through testifying publicly...

Simon Wren-Lewis: Would a Corbyn Brexit Heal the Nation or Wound Labour?: "The answer I think is that they want to keep the minority of Labour voters who still favour Leave voting Labour.... They believe that BINO with sweeteners would convince enough Labour Leavers that Labour had got the job done, and these voters would not worry too much about the details...

Bayesian odds Brett Kavanaugh has a drinking problem at 70%: Josh Marshall: "Kavanaugh asks Sen Klobuchar multiple times if she's had alcoholic blackouts..." Jeet Heer: @HeerJeet: "For me, this exchange between Kavanaugh and Klobuchar was... I won't say triggering but it really made and impression and resonated...

How do you avoid the conclusion that Brett Kavanaugh is a CRAZYPANTS LIAR?: Brett Kavanaugh: “I may have met her, we did not travel in the same social circle, she was not a friend, not someone I knew...”

1. Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Ilhyock Shim: The Costs of Macroprudential Policy: "Macroprudential measures['] effects on the core objectives of monetary policy to stabilise output and inflation are largely unknown.... The output costs of changes in maximum loan-to-value ratios are rather small.... Such policies successfully reduce household and mortgage credit growth.... Central banks could be in a position to use macroprudential instruments to manage financial booms without interfering with the core objectives of monetary policy in a major way...

2. Mark Thoma: C.V.

3. Fandango Restaurant: "Pacific Grove...

4. Brett Kavanaugh

   • Frank Wilhoit: [The Travesty of liberalism1709279: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
   • Brad DeLong: Why Would Anybody Sane Ever, Ever Choose Brett Kavanaugh Over Amy Barrett?: "Amy Barrett has faith and principles: they do not know what the key issues will be 20 years from now, and they are scared to appoint somebody who may turn out to be like Justices Kennedy and Souter, actually have principles and faith, and so go off the reservation...
   • Stephanie Mencimer: The Many Mysteries of Brett Kavanaugh’s Finances: "Who made the down payment on his house? How did he come up with $92,000 in country club fees?...'"
   • Wikipedia: Amy Barrett
   • Wikipedia: Brett Kavanaugh
   • Neal Katyal: @neal_katyal: "Regardless of where one stands on the Kavanaugh nomination... with his former clerks, his mentoring and guidance is a model for all of us in the legal profession...
   • Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman: "The way law professors rushed to endorse Kavanaugh—who got his career start pursuing conspiracy theories...
   • Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Jessica Glenza: 'No Accident' Brett Kavanaugh's Female Law Clerks 'Looked like Models', Yale professor Told Students: "'I have no reason to believe he was saying, "Send me the pretty ones", but rather that he was reporting back and saying, "I really like so and so", and the way he described them led them to form certain conclusions"...

5. CIA: Soviet Jokes for the DDCI

6. Urban Dictionary: UHB: "Comes from the film Metropolitan in a bar scene where two young republicans define themselves as cultured post-modern upper-middle class sophisticates; thus, Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHB. 'That girl won't date UHB, she's strictly prole; dating a frickin' electrician!'...

7. Sententiae Antiquae: Tell Me Aristotle, Why Do We Have Butts?

8. Wikipedia: Ken Ribet

9. Wikipedia: Lisa Goldberg

10. Beatrice Cherrier: Theory Vs Data, Computerization, Old Wine and New Bottles: Morgenstern and Econometric Society Fellows, 1953: "Morgenstern proposed that candidates be required to 'have done some econometric work in the strictest sense' and be 'in actual contact with data they have explored and exploited for which purpose they may have even developed new methods'...

11. James Davis Nicoll: Why I Don't Think Lunar Catapults Will Be Useful Weapons Against Targets on Earth: "If the catapults were able to fire stuff at velocities comparable to Earth's escape velocity... the energy content of the incoming rocks is something like 6x10^7 J/kg. For comparison, fission peace enhancement devices are good for about 9x10^12 J/kg, ims, and fusion PED for 8x10^14 J/kg. It still compares well to TNT's 4.6x10^6 J/kg but note we are not talking the five to seven orders of magnitude between atomic and chemical but one order of magnitude...

12. Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth: Old Powers Rising: Nadia Bulkin’s “Pro Patria”: "The book Fileppo puts on Joseph’s desk is leatherbound, redolent of the dungeon. The King in Yellow. Sounds like a child’s book, and Joseph immediately hates the thing. Adela, however, would like to read it. Fileppo looks over dark-skinned Adela and remarks that the book hasn’t been translated yet. Grimly she says she doesn’t need it translated. She knows their former conquerors’ tongue...

13. Center for Effective Global Action

Kate Bahn sends us to NPR's Planet Money: Kate Bahn: My Girl Joan Robinson: "My girl Joan Robinson is discussed in this episode of @planetmoney on underrated economists https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/22/641002632/the-underrated-economists...

How much of this correlation is causal? And how much is associational? I do not think we really know, in spite of studies of the build-out of broadband in France. The U.S. is a different country. Nevertheless, I for one think that it is long past time to put universal broadband in the same bucket as basic sanitation and rural electrification—as something that is part of the citizens' share of being an American: Delaney Crampton: Why accessibility to broadband matters in reducing economic inequality in the United States: "A strong correlation between household income and in-home connectivity—a pattern that persists across both rural and economically depressed urban communities...

Kieran Healy: @kjhealy: "Gazing around that Friday afternoon, they found themselves longing for those far-off days when sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...

Cosma Shalizi (2009): Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines, Causation, Prediction and Search: "Re-read as part of preparing for my lecture on casual discovery. I spent much of the winter of 2000 working my way through the first edition, and wound up completely imprinted on its way of thinking about what causal relationships are, how we should reason about them, and how we can find them from empirical evidence... http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/350/lectures/31/lecture-31.pdf...

.... On causation and prediction it now has an equal in Pearl's book (and I admit the latter looks prettier), but on search, that is, on discovering causal structure, there is still no rival. Their key observation is that even though correlation does not imply causation, correlations must have causal explanations. (This idea goes back to Herbert Simon, and Hans Reichenbach [see above] at least.)

So patterns of correlations, among more than just two variables, constrain what causal structures are possible. Sometimes they constrain the causal structure uniquely, in other cases it's only partially identified by the dependencies. And of course there is always the possibility of making a mistake with limited data. But none of this is any different for causal discovery than it is for any other form of statistical inference. The great contribution of this book is showing that causal discovery can be just another learning problem. They have transformed metaphysical misery into ordinary statistical unhappiness...

#shouldread

Thomas A. Russo (2008): Credit Crunch: Where Do We Stand?: "The recent market has been, in many respects, worse than it was in August. The lack of confidence in pricing has led most buyers away from mortgage products, and there are few buyers in the market with both the balance sheet and expertise to understand any 'bargains'...

Matthew Yglesias: @mattyglesias: "In Bush v Gore, Citizens United, Shelby County, throwing out Medicaid expansion, etc the 21st Century SCOTUS has mostly been an accelerant of democratic decline rather than a safeguard and the sooner people realize that the better...

2018Q2GDP: Paul Krugman: @PaulKrugman: "I'm still on vacation, but did see this morning's economic number. Lots of stuff to say about why it's no big deal, but this picture captures most of it...

Arindrajit Dube and friends have a pick-up discussion on how to characterize the impact of employer monopsony power: Arindrajit Dube: @arindube: "I think growing evidence suggets "laissez faire" equilibrium is monopsonistic. So shocks like de-unionization, outsourcing and eroding wage norms can push down pay in ways hard to understand with competitive lab mkts. But the shock may not be increased concentration itself...

IMHO, this is closely akin to William Julius Wilson's "the declining significance of race"—i.e., the rising significance of class: Robert Manduca: How rising U.S. income inequality exacerbates racial economic disparities: "In 1968... median African American family income was 57 percent of the median white American family income. In 2016, the ratio was 56 percent. The utter lack of progress is striking...

Duncan Black: Remember When Bill Clinton Ended Welfare As We Know It And Took That Off The Table Forever?: "There's barely anything resembling 'welfare' (aside from rich people welfare) but that doesn't stop them: '(CNN) Republican Rep. Jason Lewis has repeatedly demeaned recipients of welfare and government assistance, calling them "parasites" and "scoundrels," and said the black community had "traded one plantation for another.' Conservative white people believe there's a secret welfare system for black people. You cannot convince them otherwise, no matter what you do..."

"[All of] his college acquaintances who weren't part of the hard-partying prep school crew though [Kavanaugh] was an incredible ass----. And he was an ass---- when he was working for Ken Starr and an ass---- when he was part of hacking and stealing Democrats' emails in the 2000s. And an ass---- as a judge, e.g. the SeaWorld case that Steve Greenhouse wrote about recently. That's the word David Rothkopf uses, and I think it's the word that all information, even dubious freshman memories, supports..."

Wigner has many friends, and they can disagree: Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner: Quantum Theory Cannot Consistently Describe the Use of Itself. Lidia del Rio: Journal club: Frauchiger-Renner No-Go theorem for Single-World Interpretations of Quantum Theory: "In this talk I will go over the recent paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, "Single-World Interpretations of Quantum Theory Cannot Be Self-Consistent" (arXiv:1604.07422)...

...The paper introduces an extended Wigner's friend thought experiment, which makes use of Hardy's paradox to show that agents will necessarily reach contradictory conclusions-unless they take into account that they themselves may be in a superposition, and that their subjective experience of observing an outcome is not the whole story. Frauchiger and Renner then put this experiment in context within a general framework to analyse physical theories. This leads to a theorem saying that a theory cannot be simultaneously (1) compliant with quantum theory, including at the macroscopic level, (2) single-world, and (3) self-consistent across different agents. In this talk I will (1) describe the experiment and its immediate consequences, (2) quickly review how different interpretations react to it, (3) explain the framework and theorem in more detail...

Scott Aaronson: It’s Hard to Think When Someone Hadamards Your Brain: "So: a bunch of people asked for my reaction to the new Nature Communications paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, provocatively titled 'Quantum Theory Cannot Consistently Describe the Use of Itself'...

Hal Varian: Bots vs. Tots: "US labor market is already beginning to tighten. Expect a tight labor market for the next 15-25 years. Retirees continue to consume. Robots don’t consume. Labor supply is growing more slowly than labor demand. Old intuitions no longer helpful...

Equitable Growth: TONIGHT! Join us for #ResearchOnTap: Economic mobility: The impact of race and place, ft. #EGgrantee(s) @InequalityHKS’s Ellora Derenoncourt, @DavidGrusky & @TrevonDLogan w/ @KA_Marketplace: 919 19th Street NW, Washington, DC 20006 6-8 PM

Josh Marshall: @joshtpm: "Even before this came up, Brett Kavanaugh seems to lie a lot. The stuff with the Manny Miranda hacking scandal is what really stood out to me. Aside from denying the central accusations, he’s even more obviously lying about the ‘Renate alumni’ stuff...

Robert E. Litan and Ian Hathaway: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?: "William Baumol... idea... that may help explain America’s productivity slump. Baumol’s writing raises the possibility that U.S. productivity is low because would-be entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong kind of work...

Will McGrew directs us to David Leonhardt's rant against the mainstream media's addiction to gauging the overall health of the economy by statistical measures that are relevant only to the rich: Will McGrew: Weekend Reading: “Earnings Inequality” Edition: "Criticizing the relevance of the economic data the government makes available, David Leonhardt echoes an argument...

I have been a "China is unlikely to keep its model going for more than another five years—a decade tops" perma-bear since 1988. All I understand is that I do not understand the Chinese economy. I wish I did understand it: Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: R.I.P. Chinese Exceptionalism?: "Over the past few decades, China’s growth has appeared to violate certain fundamental laws of economics.... China’s debt keeps on rising.... For any normal country, the build-up of extensive surplus capacity would lead to sharp declines in investment and GDP growth. And that, in turn, would produce financial distress, followed by a crisis if the warning signs were ignored. But China has had a different experience...