Things to Read on the Afternoon of December 31, 2014
Must- and Shall-Reads:
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Stock Picking Will Never Die - :
The Real Wolves of Wall Street - :
“In the GOP debate about… [King] one side would prefer to wait for the judicial rapture to arrive…. [But] the 17% of U.S. GDP that is health care has spent five years reorganizing to accommodate ObamaCare’s dictates, and the watch-it-burn caucus is underestimating the economic, political and media blowback…
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Rational expectations: A Panel Discussion: “Kevin Hoover: ‘Kevin Hoover: Bob, did you want to comment on that? You’re looking unhappy, I thought.’ Robert Lucas: ‘No. I mean, you can’t read Muth’s paper as some recipe for cranking out true theories about everything under the sun…. My paper on expectations and the neutrality of money was an attempt to get a positive theory about what observations we call a Phillips curve. Basically it didn’t work…. I thought my model was going to explain price stickiness, and it didn’t. So we’re still working on it…. I don’t think we have a satisfactory solution… but I don’t think that’s a cloud over Muth’s work. If Jack [Muth] thinks it is, I don’t agree with him. Mike [Lovell] cites some data that Jack [Muth] couldn’t make sense out of using rational expectations…. There’re a lot of bad models out there. I authored my share, and I don’t see how that affects a lot of things we’ve been talking about earlier on about the value of Muth’s contribution…. You know, people had no trouble having financial meltdowns in their economies before all this stuff we’ve been talking about came on board. We didn’t help, though; there’s no question about that. We may have focused attention on the wrong things; I don’t know…'”
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Does Anybody Remember MOOCs?:
“They were all anybody who wrote about education would talk about for awhile. Where did that all go? Apparently administrators finally figured out that a ‘course in a box’ actually costs a lot of money, that it doesn’t scale nearly as well as they hoped, that they are a substitute for ‘learning from a book’ not ‘learning from a person,’ and you can’t charge $50,000 per year tuition simply because your prestigious name will be on the online course degree. I knew all of this because I saw people experimenting with online courses… 15 years ago. The technology, except maybe easy use of video (you could use video, it was just a bit more of a pain), was all there then…”
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Keynesians and the Volcker Disinflation:
“Right-wing economists like Stephen Moore and John Cochrane–it’s becoming ever harder to tell the difference–have some curious beliefs…. One… is that the experience of disinflation in the 1980s was a huge shock to Keynesians, refuting everything they believed. What makes this belief curious is that it’s the exact opposite of the truth. Keynesians came into the Volcker disinflation… with a standard… model…. And events matched…. Cutting inflation would require a temporary surge in unemployment. Eventually, however, unemployment could come back down to more or less its original level; this temporary surge in unemployment would deliver a permanent reduction in the inflation rate, because it would change expectations…. [That’s] what the Volcker disinflation actually looked like…. It was the other side of the macro divide that was left scrambling for answers. The models Chicago was promoting in the 1970s, based on the work of Robert Lucas and company, said that unemployment should have come down quickly…. Those models were unsustainable in the face of the data. But… most of those guys went into real business cycle theory–basically, denying that the Fed had anything to do with recessions. And from there they just kept digging ever deeper into the rabbit hole…
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Obamacare and Effective Government:
“When historians look back on the United States’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act… they will not devote much attention to its regulations, its troubled insurance exchanges, or its website’s flawed launch… [but] on how ‘Obamacare’ encouraged a wave of innovation that gradually tamed the spiraling costs of a dysfunctional system, even as millions of previously excluded Americans gained access to health insurance…”
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Eschaton: Um Because Even Proponents Never Had Any Explanation For How It Would Work?):
“1) Destroy demand in the middle of a depression. 2) ??. 3) Cure depression!!! Nowhere have austerity policies been more aggressively tried — and generally failed to live up to results promised by advocates — than in Greece. After more than four years of belt tightening, patience is wearing thin, and tentative signs of improvement have not yet trickled down into the lives of average Greeks. At least US ‘trickle down’ isn’t completely implausible. Give money to rich people and maybe they’ll buy some stuff from the rest of us! I’m not sure how belt tightening is supposed to trickle down. Perhaps we should ask the Wookies on Endor.”
Should Be Aware of:
- Nashville police chief shares message, responds to questions
- Rakesh Bhandari
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We spent Christmas at the Alamo Drafthouse’s screening of The Interview: Flags, freedom, and a heroic emergency rescue by the fire department - (2004):
Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy - :
Gun Culture and the Manly Virtues
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Liveblogging World War II: December 27, 1944: FDR Seizes Montgomery Ward:
“I live in a former lumber town and the locals are angry that the timber business isn’t what it used to be. At one time, everyone worked cutting down trees and making wood products and was paid enough to buy a house and raise a family. Being a lumber man wasn’t always like that. In the late 19th century lumberjacks were poorly paid and the town was full of bars and whore houses. During WWI, the government seized the lumber business and imposed a labor contract to provide wood and wood products for the war effort. Employers rarely raise wages just because productivity is rising or business is good. It requires united labor action or government intervention, and usually both. P.S. The business is still here, but it is ever more automated. A logging truck with a loader turns two men into a whole crew. It’s also still dangerous. We lose one or two men, usually tree fellers, every year according to the local paper. The pay is still good, but you can’t run a whole town on it anymore.”
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(1979):
Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent:
“The data do point unequivocally, we believe, to this: the grounds for debate about juvenile corrections must be shifted. The rhetoric that has guided national legislation and the policies of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is based on the premise that corrections “only makes kids worse.” That premise mayor may not be true on some dimensions. No one really knows. But in terms of delinquent behavior, corrections does not make kids worse. It makes them better. Much better, from the point of view of the community that must live with them.”