Things to Read on the Evening of Thursday, November 7, 2013

Must Reads:

• Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen’s (2001) The Fabulous Decade: their reflections on why equitable growth performance was so good in the decade of the 1990s–a summary of their short Century Foundation book of the same title.

• Gavyn Davies’s take on English, Lopez-Salido, and Tetlow’s and Reifschneider, Wascher, and Wilcox’s analyses calling for much more aggressive expansionary monetary policy. You aren’t going to read the papers. You do need to read Davies’s précis.

Adrianna McIntyre’s comments on a chart by Jon Gruber on the speed of the take-up of RomneyCare in Massachusetts. One of Ezra’s Klein’s “seven cute animals that think reasons Obamacare isn’t facing a death spiral”

Should Reads:

• Ed Glaeser’s “A happy tale of two cities: New York is a magnet for people on a fast-track to be rich, and for very low-income people. What’s wrong with that?” <- Glaeser’s take on what the mayor of New York City should and should not do for equitable growth at the mouth of the Hudson River.

• Brad Plumer’s giant chart on how the world is failing at its climate goals.

• Tim Duy’s On Lowering the Unemployment Target

Should Know Exists:

William Dudley (September 2003) Reflections on the Economic Outlook and the Implications for Monetary Policy: “We have established a threshold of 6.5 percent for the unemployment rate as long as we do not expect inflation to exceed 2.5 percent… and inflation expectations remain well-anchored…. The 6.5 percent unemployment rate is a threshold, and not a trigger… we might wait a long time after we breach the threshold before we begin to raise our federal funds rate target…”