Must- and Should-Reads: August 8, 2017

• Weekend Reading: James M. Buchanan (1970): The “Social” Efficiency of Education https://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-james-m-buchanan-1970-the-social-efficiency-of-education/
• Nick Bunker: Measuring potential GDP in the United States, and the case for emphasizing demand in monetary policy: “Olivier Coibion… Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Mauricio Ulate… https://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/measuring-potential-gdp-in-the-united-states-and-the-case-for-emphasizing-demand-in-monetary-policy/
• Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: June 2017 Report Edition: “The quits rate continues to hover in the same range as it has for months… https://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/jolts-day-graphs-june-2017-report-edition/
• Paul Romer (2016): The Trouble With Macroeconomics: “For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards… https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
• Jared Bernstein: ‘Why Did Nobody Notice It?’: “Paul Romer… gave a lecture… ‘The Trouble with Macroeconomics’… tore contemporary macro a new one… http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/45/why-did-nobody-notice-it/
• Narayana Kocherlakota: The Neglected Lessons of a Lost Decade: “In some ways… 2007 to 2009 did more economic damage than the Great Depression of the 1930s… https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/the-neglected-lessons-of-a-lost-decade
• Ann Marie Marciarille: Maternal Mortality http://www.marciarille.com/2017/06/maternal-mortality.html
• Kevin Drum: The Mystery of the Tight Labor Market: “Nearly all the data points to a tight labor market with the exception of the single most important bit of data: wages… http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-mystery-of-the-tight-labor-market/
• Duncan Black: Little Lessons: “I like to think I am wiser than I once was (about some things, at least)… http://www.eschatonblog.com/2017/08/little-lessons.html
• C. Fred Bergsten and Monica de Bolle, eds.: A Path Forward for NAFTA: “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ranks at the top of anyone’s list of the most controversial trade deals of all time… https://piie.com/system/files/documents/piieb17-2.pdf
• Paul Krugman: Structural Unemployment: Yes, It Was Humbug: “Ancient history… but five years ago there was a remarkable Beltway consensus that high unemployment was structural… https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/structural-unemployment-yes-it-was-humbug/?_r=0

Interesting Reads:

• David Zilberman: Witness to the history of agricultural and resource economics at Berkeley: “The famous coffee room in 325 Giannini, where faculty and students played bridge and discussed economics, was deemed by the administration as an inefficient use of space and was converted. The communication and camaraderie between faculty and students suffered…” http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/03/08/witness-to-the-history-of-agricultural-and-resource-economics-at-berkeley/
• Ezra Klein: The biggest stories of the Trump era may not be about Trump: “Gene editing, lab-based meat, single-payer, and climate may define our age…” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/3/16087802/trump-crispr-climate-change-meat
• Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman: Distributional national accounts: Methods and estimates for the United States https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/distributional-national-accounts/
• Jared Bernstein: The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. And some are helpful: “75 percent of such workers must interact with groups and other individuals to perform their job… for retail sales workers it’s 96 percent…. The robot thing is not a zero-one situation…” http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-robots-arent-coming-theyre-here-and-some-are-helpful/
• Karl Smith: The Federal Reserve’s Timid Monetary Policy is Contributing to Weak Productivity Growth https://niskanencenter.org/blog/federal-reserves-timid-monetary-policy-contributing-weak-productivity-growth/?utm_source=Digest&utm_campaign=e93a843f13-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b57b3ffb8c-e93a843f13-520781557
• Roger E. A. Farmer: The Marriage of Psychology with Multiple Equilibria in Economics http://www.rogerfarmer.com/rogerfarmerblog/2017/8/1/4vmwgcf0zsv2jn9twzn56bmpbl11kz | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-_DsSYKl8
• Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas: The Safe Assets Shortage Conundrum: “In this analysis, the effective lower bound is a tipping point for the global economy. Any further intensification in the shortage of safe assets has destabilizing macroeconomic consequences: with safe real rates finding increasing resistance to further downward adjustment, the global economy is pushed below its potential…” http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.3.29
• Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor: International Monetary Relations: Taking Finance Seriously: “There remain three fundamental challenges…. How should exchange rates between national currencies be determined? How can countries with balance of payments deficits reduce these without sharply contracting their economies and with minimal risk of possible negative spillovers abroad? How can the international system ensure that countries have access to an adequate supply of international liquidity—financial resources generally acceptable to foreigners in all circumstances?…” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.3.3
• Ole Peters and Alexander Adamou (2011): Leverage efficiency https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4548
• Jonathan Chait: Republicans Preparing for Third Financial Crash in 3 Tries: “The previous two times… the 1920s… and the George W. Bush administration…. [Both] ended when a wave of loosely regulated stock speculation produced a crash in the financial system…. It’s not clear what lessons [Paul] Ryan has absorbed from these prior episodes… http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/republicans-preparing-for-third-financial-crash-in-3-tries.html
• Paola De Agostini, John Hills and Holly Sutherland (2014): Were we really all in it together?: The distributional effects of the UK Coalition government’s tax-benefit policy changes http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/spcc/wp10.pdf
• Miles Kimball: Returns to Scale and Imperfect Competition in Market Equilibrium — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/6/7/returns-to-scale-and-imperfect-competition-in-market-equilibrium
• Dylan Matthews: Trump wants to protect American jobs. His immigration bill would make us poorer: “Kick out the immigrants and you don’t get higher wages. You just get fewer strawberries…” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/3/16089260/trump-raise-act-economic-effect-immigration
• Atif R. Mian, Amir Sufi, and Emil Verner: Household Debt and Business Cycles Worldwide: “An increase in the household debt to GDP ratio in the medium run predicts lower subsequent GDP growth, higher unemployment, and negative growth forecasting errors in a panel of 30 countries from 1960 to 2012…” http://www.nber.org/papers/w21581
• Nick Rowe: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Equalising the twin markups in a monopolistically competitive macroeconomy http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2017/06/equalising-the-twin-markups-in-a-monopolistically-competitive-macroeconomy.html
• What Do Econ 1 Students Need to Remember Most from the Course?: Hoisted from 2010 http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/what-do-econ-1-students-need-to-remember-most-from-the-course-hoisted-from-2010.html
• The New Socialism of Fools: Fresh at Project Syndicate http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/the-new-socialism-of-fools-fresh-at-project-syndicate.html
• Slavery and Capitalism Reading List… http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/slavery-and-capitalism.html