Month: August 2015

Things to Read on the Morning of August 23, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Noted for Your Nighttime Procrastination for August 22, 2015##

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Must- and Should-Reads:

Might Like to Be Aware of:

Must-Read: David Roberts: Carly Fiorina Did a 4-Minute Riff on Climate Change. Everything She Said Was Wrong

Posted on by Brad DeLong

David Roberts: Carly Fiorina Did a 4-Minute Riff on Climate Change. Everything She Said Was Wrong: “Fiorina’s comments are a farrago of falsehoods and red herrings…

The key to a ‘moderate’ Republican position on climate change is that it has to neutralize the science…. Denialism, concentrated in conservative white men, has become a liability among… demographics Republicans badly need to court. So the trick for the aspiring Republican moderate is to acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change while maintaining opposition to any policy that might penalize fossil fuels or advantage renewable energy…. Fiorina seems to have pulled it off, at least in the eyes of conservatives. There’s just one problem. After acknowledging the science at the outset, literally everything Fiorina says subsequently is false or misleading. And yes, I know what ‘literally’ means….

I have chosen a representative (but not exhaustive) sample of 10 misleading or false statements to address below. 1) ‘One nation, acting alone, can make no difference at all’…. First, it’s not true…. [Second] so what?… America is doing its small part and working to coordinate with other countries doing the same, building a framework of trust…. What’s the alternative?…. 2) California ‘destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations’ California’s climate regulations are indeed the most ambitious in the nation…. Looks like the state is surviving its environmental regulations so far. 3) ‘The answer to this problem is innovation, not regulation’… mean[ing] tax breaks for favored industries like natural gas and ‘clean coal.’ (If any Republican has a broader plan to spur clean-energy innovation, I haven’t seen it.)… In reality, of course, it’s not an either-or…. 4) ‘China could care less’ if we try to reduce carbon…. It is not so…. 5) ‘China is delighted we’re not spending any time or energy figuring out clean coal’ This makes no sense…. 6) ‘Coal provides half the energy in this nation still’ No, it doesn’t. Coal provides 20 percent…. It could be that Fiorina meant half the electricity… but she would still be wrong. In 2014, coal produced 39 percent…. 7) ‘To say we’re basically going to outlaw coal, which is what this administration has done…’ No, it hasn’t. US coal has taken a beating from natural gas, renewables, and efficiency–the market, in other words–but it still provides more than a third of US electricity. And EPA expects that under the Clean Power Plan, that share will be at 27 percent in 2030…. 8) ‘Do we tell people the truth, that [wind technology] slaughters millions of birds?’ A recent peer-reviewed survey of bird mortality studies found that wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds a year, compared with 6.8 million that die from colliding with cell and radio towers and between 1.4 and 3.7 billion killed by cats…. 9) ‘Does anybody see how unsightly those huge wind turbines are?’ The poor communities where coal power plants, oil refineries, and other fossil fuel infrastructure tends to be located probably find those polluting facilities unsightly…. People seem okay with the huge wind turbines. 10) ‘Solar is great, but solar takes huge amounts of water’ No, it doesn’t…

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Fairy Tales

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: As Keynes is rumored to have always said when anyone asked him about where any idea came from, “it’s in Marshall”…

Paul Krugman: Fairy Tales: “The origins of the phrase ‘confidence fairy’…

…I’m pretty sure–you can never be completely sure, because things can stick in your mind–that it was an original coinage on my part, a snappy way to characterize the deep implausibility of the Alesina-Ardagna stuff that was sweeping Brussels and other corridors of power in 2010…. But confidence-fairy type arguments and critiques of the same go back a long way…. And there’s a reason. As Mike Konczal, channeling Kalecki, pointed out … arguments rejecting Keynes and declaring that only business confidence can achieve full employment serve [the] very useful political purpose… [of] empower[ing] plutocrats and big business…. This is the story of Greece right now…. Syriza [has] no policy tools, nothing it can do except try to placate investors, which means… macro punishment… [and] forced… privatization…

Paul Krugman’s July 2010 use of the phrase “confidence fairy” is certainly the very first use of it in economics I have been able to find. But Alfred (and Mary) Marshall do have their 1885 “if confidence could return, touch all industries with her magic wand…” But I cannot imagine that Paul Krugman ever had enough idle time that reading all the way into the back of Economics of Industry seemed like a good idea…

And I want to push back against the Kalecki line: I don’t doubt that rich people think high unemployment and recession disciplines both the working class and the unworthy speculators, and so leaves them able to hire at a low wage and to pick up stranded assets cheaply. But it is not really true: America’s rich would have been better off in absolute terms (albeit not in relative) with growth at the pre-2007 trend since than they are now, and would definitely have been better off both in absolute and in relative terms without the Great Depression…

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: A Better Way to Read on the Internet

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: A Better Way to Read on the Internet: “I have figured out how to read online, and it is glorious…

…Diana Kimball… developed this system for ‘a decent digital commonplace book system.’… Clippings.io will export your Kindle notes and highlights in usable, searchable form–and then plug them directly into Evernote, so they’re available whenever you need them, and sortable in every way you might imagine. The difference here is profound…. My relationship with highlighted passages and notes has gone from one in which I have to find them to one in which they can unexpectedly, wonderfully find me. A search for, say, ‘filibuster’ will call up highlights and notes I wasn’t specifically looking for, and that I had actually forgotten, but that help….

A lot of what I read, however, isn’t books. It’s news articles, blog posts, magazine features. I’ve long wanted a cleaner way to save the best ideas, facts, and quotes I come across. Now I have one. Instapaper… recently added a highlight function…. Kimball created an If That Then This recipe that automatically exports Instapaper highlights into Evernote. So now anything I highlight in an article… on Instapaper is saved into the same searchable, sortable space that my book highlights inhabit…. It’s wonderful.

But there’s one exception…. DFs are the worst…. And yet a lot of what I read is in PDF…. If anyone out there has a good solution, I’d love to hear about it.

Things to Read on the Morning of August 21, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must- and Should-Reads:

Might Like to Be Aware of:

Over at Grasping Reality: Trekonomics Teaser Clip: The Prime Directive…

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Over at Grasping Reality: Manu Saadia, the author of the forthcoming book, Trekonomics, discusses the economic theories behind the creation of the Star Trek with J. Bradford DeLong, professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Treasury. Inkshares’ Adam Gomolin is the moderator:

The prime directive…:

Must-Read: Robert Solow: Conversations with Economists

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Me? I’m happy talking about cavalry tactics with Austerlitz–even to people who have it wrong. But I’m overwhelmingly annoyed with people who use their fake and false knowledge about cavalry tactics at Austerlitz to criticize those who are actually applying stuff they know to make better economic policy and to make the world a better place. If all you know about is cavalry tactics at Austerlitz, sit down and be quiet. And if cavalry tactics at Austerlitz is all you know but you don’t know that is all you know, get a clue…

Robert Solow (1984): Conversations with Economists: “Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now…

…and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I’m getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous–that is, by laughing at it–so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique.

Must-Read: Genius: Annotate the World

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Genius: Annotate the World: “Genius lets you add line-by-line annotations…

…to any page on the Internet. Put Genius.it/ in front of any URL (or install our Chrome extension or our bookmarklet) to activate Genius annotations. Try it on an article, blog post, or a Wikipedia page. Highlight any text. Explain why it’s important, cool, or wack. Add an image or a YouTube link. Read and reply to other people’s annotations. Share the Genius URL to show the world what you think. (The more people that upvote your annotations, the more Genius IQ you’ll rack up!)

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Debt Is Good

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Debt Is Good: “Rand Paul said something funny… of course it wasn’t intentional…

…He decried… fiscal policy, declaring, “The last time the United States was debt free was 1835.” Wags quickly noted that the U.S. economy has… done pretty well these past 180 years, suggesting that having the government owe the private sector money might not be all that bad a thing…. But is the point simply that public debt isn’t as bad as legend has it?… Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well…. The power of the deficit scolds was always a triumph of ideology over evidence…. Debt is a way to pay for useful things, and we should do more of that when the price is right…. This is a very good time to be borrowing and investing in the future, and a very bad time for what has actually happened: an unprecedented decline in public construction spending adjusted for population growth and inflation. Beyond that, those very low interest rates are telling us something about what markets want…. The debt of stable, reliable governments provides “safe assets” that help investors manage risks, make transactions easier and avoid a destructive scramble for cash.

Now, in principle the private sector can also create safe assets…. But [in 2008] all of that supposedly brilliant financial engineering turned out to be a con job…. So investors scurried back into the haven provided by the debt of the United States and a few other major economies… [and] drove interest rates on that debt way down…. When interest rates on government debt are very low… there’s not much room to cut them when the economy is weak, making it much harder to fight recessions…. Simply raising interest rates, as some financial types keep demanding (with an eye on their own bottom lines), would undermine our still-fragile recovery. What we need are policies that would permit higher rates in good times without causing a slump. And one such policy… would be… a higher level of debt.