Must- and Should-Reads: April 12, 2017
- Matthew C Klein: Tarullo Exits Federal Reserve https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/02/10/2184358/tarullo-exits-federal-reserve/: “Daniel K. Tarullo submitted his resignation… as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, effective on or around April 5, 2017…
- Thomas Barnebeck et al.: The Heavy Plough and the Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Europe http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Skovsgaard.pdf: “Lynn White, Jr. (1962)… the adoption of the heavy plough in Northern Europe led to increased population density and urbanization…
- Josh Barro (2012): Yes, the 1990 Budget Deal Spending Cuts Were Real https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-12-27/yes-the-1990-budget-deal-spending-cuts-were-real: “When you talk with conservatives about why they resist deficit-cutting deals…
- Dean Baker: Prime-Age Employment Rate Hits Record High for Recovery http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/prime-age-employment-rate-hits-record-high-for-recovery-in-february: “0.5 percentage points above its year-ago level…
- Paul E. Smaldino and Richard McElreath: The Natural Selection of Bad Science http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/9/160384: “Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings…
- David Leonhardt: The Original Republican Lie About Obamacare https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/the-original-lie-about-obamacare.html : “It’s often said in a tone of regret: I wish Obama had done health reform in a bipartisan way…
- Financial Times: The Fed and ECB keep a cautious eye on the exit https://www.ft.com/content/a0180496-1b7b-11e7-a266-12672483791a: “Making a promise… and then breaking that promise tends to have more severe consequences for central banks…
- Jonathan Portes: Spreadsheets are people too: statistics and reality http://notthetreasuryview.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/spreadsheets-are-people-too-statistics.html: “[David] Goodhart’s response will be… that I am…
- Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom: Why People Prefer Unequal Societies http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0082: “There is immense concern about economic inequality…
- Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Lacker’s resignation raises big question about the real Fed leaker http://www.businessinsider.com/lackers-resignation-raises-big-question-about-the-real-fed-leaker-2017-4: “Despite appearances to the contrary, we also don’t know who the actual leaker was…
- David L. Ikenberry, Richard L. Shockley, and Kent L. Womack (1998): Why Active Fund Managers Often Underperform the S&P 500: The Impact of Size and Skewness http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/kent.womack/publications/publications/skewness.pdf: “The S&P 500 index… comparison has generally cast an unfavorable impression of active fund managers…
- Noah Smith: Keynesian Economics Is Hot Again https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-10/keynesian-economics-is-hot-again: “Lawrence Christiano… after the Great Recession…
Interesting Reads:
- (2015): Refereeing Mantoux-Keynes http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/05/refereeing-mantoux-keynes.html: “Recall that Etienne Mantoux’s review of Keynes’s General Theory is quite bad…”
- Paul Krugman: Europe Has Problems, But Le Pen Is Not the Answer https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/europe-has-problems-but-le-pen-is-not-the-answer: “French contacts tell me that the Le Pen campaign is trying to portray critiques of European policies from prominent economists as implicit endorsements of the FN platform. They aren’t…”
- Hector J. Sussman and Jan C. Willems (1997): Three Centuries of Optimal Control: From the Brachystocrone to the Maximum Principle http://yima.csl.illinois.edu/psfile/ECE553/sussmann-willems.pdf: “Calculus of variations deals mainly with optimization… in the space of ‘all’ curves…. Optimal control… involve[s] a minimization over a set C of curves… determined by some dynamical constraints…”
- Marcella Alsan: Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/SPH.html?event_ID=105948&date=2017-04-10: “[Learning about] Tuskegee affected beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes among African-American men in the years following 1872. Back of the envelope calculation suggest can account for approximately one year los expectancy, on average, among older black men conditional on reaching age 50…”
- Ryan Avent: Technology and Jobs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/18/themes-of-2016-digital-revolution-technology-employment https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/09/technological-revolution-sparks-social-unrest https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/world-without-work-utopia-hell-human-labour-obsolete
- Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor: What has bank capital ever done for us? http://voxeu.org/article/what-has-bank-capital-ever-done-us: “Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis…. However, higher capital buffers have social benefits in terms of macro-stability: recoveries from financial crisis recessions are much quicker with higher bank capital…”
- JEC (2015): _Mean Squared Errors: What is it with economists and accounting identities? https://meansquarederrors.blogspot.com/2015/08/what-is-it-with-economists-and.html
- Justin Lahart: Jobs Report Obscures a Tight Labor Market – WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-report-obscures-a-tight-labor-market-1491586549: “Average hourly earnings were up 2.7% from a year earlier…. Two bright spots… were a continued decline in long-term unemployment and a solid increase in wages…”
- Anna Escher and Kate Conger: Waymo v. Uber: Everything you need to know https://techcrunch.com/timeline/waymo-v-uber-everything-you-need-to-know/: “Buckle your seatbelts. This one’s a doozy!…”
- Chris Hayes: A Colony in a Nation http://amzn.to/2oPOg7M
- #Benjamin Wallace-Wells# (2011): Economic Thinker Paul Krugman’s Lonely Crusade for Liberalism http://nymag.com/news/politics/paul-krugman-2011-5/
- There Is an Old Joke About Economists, Keys, and Lampposts That Comes to Mind Here… http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/there-is-an-old-joke-about-economists-keys-and-lampposts-that-comes-to-mind-here.html: “An interesting, if an Aesopian, article by Olivier Blanchard. He says that we need five kinds of macroeconomic models…. The examples of four of the kinds track—foundational, policy, toy, and forecasting—and we do indeed need those four kinds. Then we come to the fifth kind…”
- Live from the Banks of the Charles River: May 27, 2017 (Tentative): The Future of Higher Education and Lifelong Learning http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/live-from-the-banks-of-the-charles-river-may-27-2017-tentative-the-future-of-higher-education-and-lifelong-learning.html: “Moderator: Seth Lloyd ’82 (Ph.D., Rockefeller University), Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems and Physics, and Director, Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology…”
- Live from the Human Race Long-Term Planning Bureau: Milken Institute: Global Conference 2017: Globalization in the Crosshairs http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/live-from-the-human-race-long-term-planning-bureau-milken-institute-global-conference-2017-globalization-in-the-crossh.html: “May 2: 2:00-3:30 PM: In the 20 years leading up to the financial crisis, international trade grew at twice the rate of global output…” http://www.milkeninstitute.org/events/conferences/global-conference/2017/program-detail
- Weekend Reading: From John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/weekend-reading-from-john-maynard-keynes-1926-the-end-of-laissez-faire.html: “The economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment…”
- Weekend Reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012): Slavery Is a Love Song http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/weekend-reading-ta-nehisi-coates-2012-slavery-is-a-love-song.html: “From [David Post of the] The Volokh Conspiracy…. I made the mistake of reading it and thus stumbling on one the most immoral paragraphs I’ve read in a long long time…”
- Weekend Reading: Nate Silver (2009): Dow 36,000 Guy Kevin Hassett Accuses Obama of Sabotaging Economy http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/weekend-reading-nate-silver-2009-dow-36000-guy-kevin-hassett-accuses-obama-of-sabotaging-economy.html: “It would be hard to identify an individual who better embodied the phrase “irrational exuberance” — well, maybe the Pets.com sock puppet — or who destroyed more wealth with charlatanic financial advice. And this guy thinks it’s all some big conspiracy against him. Literally….”
- For the Weekend: Fire Ants… http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/04/for-the-weekend-fire-ants.html