Category: Equitablog

Should-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Steve Bannon’s “economic nationalism” is total nonsense: “‘Economic nationalism’ has grave flaws as an ideology beyond Trump’s racism, lack of policy knowledge, and personal indiscipline… https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/21/16165348/steve-bannon-economic-nationalism

…The idea that the United States as a whole is locked in zero-sum economic competition with other countries or that average Americans could become wealthier at the expense of foreigners is simply wrong. At best, it’s an analytical error… At worst, it’s a con job… to distract middle- and working-class Americans from very real questions about the domestic distribution of economic resources by casting aspersions on foreigners…. The extent of expert consensus on the economic impact of both trade and immigration is important to understand…. Both sides of the argument agree that the typical American was made better-off by trade with China. By the same token, the entire bitter argument among labor economists about immigration and wages is about whether or not immigrants have depressed the incomes of native-born high school dropouts…. But… only 8 percent of the native population lacks a high school diploma. Both sides agree that most Americans are benefitting from immigration….

Globalization is, fundamentally, an enormous opportunity for almost everyone in the world…. The United States has… taken advantage of it in order to obtain cheaper manufacturing goods for domestic consumers…. But note that just as manufacturing-focused globalization hasn’t been bad for most Americans, shifting emphasis to professional services would hardly hurt foreigners. Creating broad and clear pathways for foreigners to train to US standards and then move here to work as doctors, dentists, and nurses would be great for most Americans while also creating great new economic opportunities for foreigners. All policy choices involve winners and losers, but the tradeoff is almost never the kind of strict country versus country battle that Bannonism implies….

While Americans who follow politics were obsessing over the latest ups and downs of the Trump Show this summer, real policy changes that are important to wealthy business interests continued to roll out of DC…. Nestlé is not particularly nationalistic, but they do enjoy selling bottled water. Luckily for them, last Thursday the Interior Department decided to reverse restrictions on bringing bottled water into national parks. The Trump administration was also hard at work last week on making it easier for nursing homes that provide substandard care to avoid legal liability. Like Trump’s effort to let Sinclair Broadcasting violate longstanding media concentration rules, make workplaces less safe for the people who work in them, reduce workers’ overtime pay, and make it easier for financial advisers to rip off their clients, there hasn’t been a lot of tweeting about these two regulatory actions.

Instead, Trump feeds the public a steady diet of racial conflict hoping that if he punches nonwhite America hard enough, white America will be so busy gawking they won’t notice their pockets are being picked too. This is a time-honored hustle in American politics, and Trump grasps its operation intuitively. And he also grasps in a way that Bannon may not that “economic nationalism” is useful as an extension of the hustle and no further. Adding immigrants and the Chinese to the scapegoat list alongside the traditional African-American targets makes for a more compelling narrative, and it’s let him bring the scam to parts of the urban North that have traditionally been too overwhelmingly white for the standard race hustle to seem compelling…. There’s nothing to mourn in the failure to build a more substantive vision of “economic nationalism” because the vision itself never made sense…

Should-Read: Tim Worstall: The Robots Stealing Human Jobs-Bring It On: “Spinning especially was a hugely labour intensive process which near all women did to some extent… https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/08/19/the-robots-stealing-human-jobs-bring-it-on/#524f81a421ff

…Thus that very word, homespun. By the time the Spinning Jenny got into its stride, as Henderson says, hundreds of thousands were employed in industry, outside the home. But that homespun, and thus that domestic labour, had disappeared. This is again the automation of a domestic task, the automation also bringing it out into the paid, market, economy…. Discussions of working hours, automation, robots and so on only make sense in an historical context if we include domestic labour as well as market. When we do we see that the process increases incomes, leisure and there are still jobs available…

Should-Read: John Holbo: Thinking About Groups: “I’m going to say a few (thousand) words about… Jacob Levy’s good new book, Rationalism, Pluralism, Freedom… http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/20/thinking-about-groups/

…At its core is a dilemma–an antinomy: two models of the optimal form and function of groups within a liberal order. Neither model can be quite it. It seems we need to split the difference or synthesize. But there is no coherent or necessarily stable way. (Well, that’s life.) There, I gave away the ending. Groups? Yes, you know the sort: families, political parties, ethnic groups, clans, churches, professional organizations, civic organizations, unions, corporations, neighborhood groups, bowling leagues. The lot…. In a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state. Citizens enjoy a basket of liberties and rights, over and against each other and the state…. Now, if you have these two basic units, the state and the individual, it makes it kind of tricky what the normative status is of intermediate groups, eh?

What is all that in-between stuff good for or bad for? What sorts of ‘mediating groups’ need to exist–because they’re great! possibly vital for the health of citizens and/or the state itself! What sorts of stuff should not be permitted, because it’s toxic–either to the state or to some individuals. And what sorts of stuff should be merely tolerated, even though its a bit dicey, but pragmatically what are you going to do?…

At this point some people might say: I care about the health/power/status of my group way more than I care about either the stability of the state or respecting the rights and liberties of my fellow citizens…. But if you say that, you really are not… committed to liberal democracy…. I’m only considering what attitude you should have towards groups… if you have some normative commitment to making sure individuals can exercise their rights and enjoy their liberty, equally, in a stable liberal-democratic state. This is a timely issue: identity politics and groupthink and partisanship and tribalism…

Must-Watch: Jacob T. Levy: Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom:

Jacob T. Levy: Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom: “Intermediate groups—voluntary associations, churches, ethnocultural groups, universities, and more—can both protect threaten individual liberty… http://amzn.to/2igcO7Q

…The same is true for centralized state action against such groups. This wide-ranging book argues that, both normatively and historically, liberal political thought rests on a deep tension between a rationalist suspicion of intermediate and local group power, and a pluralism favorable toward intermediate group life, and preserving the bulk of its suspicion for the centralizing state.

The book studies this tension using tools from the history of political thought, normative political philosophy, law, and social theory. In the process, it retells the history of liberal thought and practice in a way that moves from the birth of intermediacy in the High Middle Ages to the British Pluralists of the twentieth century. In particular it restores centrality to the tradition of ancient constitutionalism and to Montesquieu, arguing that social contract theory’s contributions to the development of liberal thought have been mistaken for the whole tradition.

It discusses the real threats to freedom posed both by local group life and by state centralization, the ways in which those threats aggravate each other. Though the state and intermediate groups can check and balance each other in ways that protect freedom, they may also aggravate each other’s worst tendencies. Likewise, the elements of liberal thought concerned with the threats from each cannot necessarily be combined into a single satisfactory theory of freedom. While the book frequently reconstructs and defends pluralism, it ultimately argues that the tension is irreconcilable and not susceptible of harmonization or synthesis; it must be lived with, not overcome.

Should-Read: Claudia Sahm: On Twitter: “And yes, Marginal Revolution commenters have got EJMR’ers back… I used to comment on @MargRev and it would really piss me off… https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/898620250287030272

…if my attempts to talk about research ended up me being called a female body part. In a discussion of economics it’s not that hard to set gender (or race or sexual orientation) aside and debate merits of an argument. I certainly never called the guys there such gendered names… stuck to why their logic stunk :-). And of course, my tweets got some pushback at MR… an example:

But I’ve got a nice story about why I don’t reply (or “fight” as this says). After one awful blowup, I decided to get some advice, thankfully @mathbabedotorg had an advice column Aunt Pythia then. So I wrote in: on left is snippet of my question and right a bit of her advice,

Full exchange here: https://mathbabe.org/2013/12/28/aunt-pythias-advice-32/

Must-Read: It should not be necessary to say that the “community” of EJMR is not Berkeley—or indeed, is not anywhere IRL. Also: cf.: Griefer.

Do not ignore or dismiss this.

But do note that the only economics professor of any ideology or university I can recall ever praising EJMR is George Borjas of Harvard, who called it “refreshing”:

Justin Wolfers: Evidence of a Toxic Environment for Women in Economics: “Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman… https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/upshot/evidence-of-a-toxic-environment-for-women-in-economics.html

But, again, do not ignore of dismiss this:

…The simplest version involves looking for references to “she,” “her,” “herself” or “he,” “him,” “his” or “himself.” She then adapted machine-learning techniques to ferret out the terms most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.

The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women… in order… [are]: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute….

Words about men[: juicy, keys, adviser, bully, prepare, fought, wharton, austrian, checkers, homo, genes, e7ee, mathematician, advisor, burning, pricing, philly, band, kfc, nobel, cmt, amusing, greatest, textbook, goals, irate]….

It includes words that are relevant to economics, such as adviser, Austrian (a school of thought in economics) mathematician, pricing, textbook and Wharton (the University of Pennsylvania business school that is President Trump’s alma mater). More of the words associated with discussions about men have a positive tone, including terms like goals, greatest and Nobel. And to the extent that there is a clearly gendered theme, it is a schoolyard battle for status: The list includes words like bully, burning and fought…

Should-Read: Drew Conway: The Data Science Venn Diagram http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/: “The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise…

…each… very valuable, but when combined with only one other are at best simply not data science, or at worst downright dangerous…. Being able to manipulate text files at the command-line, understanding vectorized operations, thinking algorithmically… the hacking skills… apply[ing] appropriate math and statistics methods… [but] data plus math and statistics only gets you machine learning, which is great if that is what you are interested in, but not if you are doing data science… [which] is about discovery and building knowledge….

The hacking skills plus substantive expertise danger zone… people who “know enough to be dangerous”… capable of extracting and structuring data… related to a field they know quite a bit about and… run a linear regression… lack[ing] any understanding of what those coefficients mean. It is from this part of the diagram that the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” emanates, because either through ignorance or malice this overlap of skills gives people the ability to create what appears to be a legitimate analysis without any understanding of how they got there or what they have created.

Fortunately, it requires near willful ignorance to acquire hacking skills and substantive expertise without also learning some math and statistics along the way. As such, the danger zone is sparsely populated, however, it does not take many to produce a lot of damage…