Must- and Should-Reads: October 10, 2017

• INET: Reawakening: “This fall, hundreds of leading scholars, policymakers and public officials will gather at the Edinburgh International Conference center for the INET 2017 conference…
• Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, and Noam Yuchtman: Religious Competition and Reallocation: The Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant Reformation: “We document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation…
• Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2017: “Richard H. Thaler… ‘for his contributions to behavioural economics’…
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Economics: too much ideology, too little craft: “Paul Krugman argued… that… belief in the need for new economic thinking after the financial crisis was incorrect…
• Chye-Ching Huang and Brendan Duke: Vast Majority of Americans Would Likely Lose From Senate GOP’s $1.5 Trillion in Tax Cuts, Once They’re Paid For: “The Senate Budget Committee will vote on a budget resolution that would allow Congress to move forward with tax-cut legislation that adds $1.5 trillion to deficits over ten years…
• Larry Summers: America’s tax plan is not worth its name: “The US administration’s tax plan… a mélange of ideas put forth without precision or arithmetic…. The claims of Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Kevin Hassett, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, are some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest…
• Edward Hadas: Review: Dani Rodrik gives economists a better name: “Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy… this easy-to-read and sometimes loosely connected collection of columns and essays…
• Tim O’Reilly and Heather Boushey: Future of Work and What We Can Do About It: Conversation: “What’s the outlook for workers in an economy increasingly dominated by intelligent machines and the global elites who own them?…
• Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Südekum, and Nicole Woessner: The rise of robots in the German labour market: “Robots have had no aggregate effect on German employment, and robot exposure is found to actually increase the chances of workers staying with their original employer… http://voxeu.org/article/rise-robots-german-labour-market
• Vivienne Ming: Applied Neuroscience and Ramping Up Human Potential https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUHXoPS0fm8
• Mary E. Burfisher, Sherman Robinson, and Karen Thierfelder: : The Impact of NAFTA on the United States: “The mainstream forecasts during the NAFTA debate were basically correct…” http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.15.1.125
• James Kwak: The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party: “A central shortcoming of the party is that, on economic issues, it has nothing to say to people trapped on the wrong side of our country’s growing inequality divide… https://baselinescenario.com/2017/06/15/telling-a-better-story-a-new-economic-vision-for-the-democratic-party/

Interesting Reads:

• Paul Krugman (1987): Adjustment in the World Economy: “It is Keynes versus Ohlin, not Tobin versus Friedman… the old question of the relative price effects of an international transfer…”
• Paul Krugman (1987): Adjustment in the World Economy: “It is Keynes versus Ohlin, not Tobin versus Friedman… the old question of the relative price effects of an international transfer…”
• Stefan Bauernschuster, Anastasia Driva, and Erik Hornung: Bismarck’s health insurance and its impact on mortality: “Otto von Bismarck’s compulsory health insurance… [of] 1884… reduced mortality rates for blue-collar workers, probably by increasing the public’s knowledge about communicable disease transmission. This supports theories about the fundamental role of hygiene in reduced mortality at this time…”
• Howard Gleckman: Will A Corporate Rate Cut Really Increase US Jobs And Wages?: “Hassett made some bold promises to US workers, but, based on what we know so far, the Unified Framework can’t deliver them…”
• EPI: Missing Workers: The Missing Part of the Unemployment Story
• Monetary Policy Outlook: The United States (Fall 2017)
• Monday Smackdown: Paul Krugman on Kevin Hassett et al
• Comment of the Day: I would not say that Kevin Warsh is innumerate—I have never seen him claim anything like 36.5/85 = 0.20—but he does not reason coherently: Sans Souci: “‘Bernanke[‘s view]… may well be true according to economic textbooks’…”
• Comment of the Day: Phil Koop: (EARLY) MONDAY JOHN COCHRANE “ARITHMETIC IS FOR LOSERS” RESMACKDOWN: “‘And yet this was, once, an economist…’ ‘An economist who becomes a Fellow of the Hoover Institution does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life’…”