Must-Reads: December 14, 2015

  • Steve Greenhouse:
    A Safety Net for On-Demand Workers?: “With Los Angeles having approved a $15-an-hour minimum wage and with many Uber drivers netting considerably less than that per hour, why exactly shouldn’t drivers be covered—and protected—by minimum wage laws?”
  • Miriam Ronzoni: Where Are the Power Relations in Piketty’s Capital?: “There seems to be a friction between the diagnosis… of the power of capital… and the suggested cure… [of] well-minded citizens… recogniz[ing] the… problem” :: The extremely-sharp Miriam Ronzoni excellently puts her finger on a substantial hole in Thomas Piketty’s _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_…
  • Ananya Roy: The Land Question: “The infrastructure problem, it turns out, is effectively a land problem…”
  • David Roberts: Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Right: “The most engaged conservative voters… won’t trust conservative elites any more than they trust liberals, scientists, or the media…”
  • Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty: “To the extent that education does nothing to provide better income support for those who do find themselves in these vulnerable situations, its effect on overall poverty levels will always be weak, or, as with the US in the last 23 years, totally nonexistent…”
  • Mark Thoma: Why It’s Tricky for Fed Officials to Talk Politically: “I think I disagree with Brad DeLong…” :: I would beg the highly-esteemed Mark Thoma to draw a distinction here between “inappropriate” and unwise…
  • Matthew Yglesias: Trumpism Is a Natural Consequence of the GOP Refusing to Moderate on Taxes or Immigration: “There has been no meaningful move to the center on economics, and–as predicted–the results are ugly…” :: “[Republicanism] is almost like you are in a religion…you are not leaving your religion…
  • Ben Thompson: Digital Dopamine: As someone who in 1993 put my copy of “Civilization” in the microwave, on the grounds that I could be either a computer-game addict or a deputy secretary of the Treasury, but probably not both, I have very mixed feelings about this…
  • Robert Johnson, Brad DeLong, Linda Bilmes, and Steve Clemons: Connecting American Foreign Policy to Economic Policy: “How might a reimagined American foreign policy… bolster the… economy…?”
  • Steve Roth (2014): The Pernicious Prison of the Price Theory Paradigm: “Steve explains it all far better, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…”

December 14, 2015

AUTHORS:

Brad DeLong
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