Must- and Should-Reads

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

• Issi Romem: Paying For Dirt: Where Have Home Values Detached From Construction Costs?: “In the expensive U.S. coastal metros, home prices have detached from construction costs…
• Melissa S. Kearney: How Should Governments Address Inequality?: “Putting Piketty Into Practice…
• Ben Thompson: Netflix’s Earnings, Netflix’s Price Raise, Additional Netflix Notes: “Netflix has a completely orthogonal strategy: content is only valuable if it is evergreen…
• CPPC: Senator Amy Klobuchar: Drug Price Bills Will Likely Advance As Amendments to Larger Bills: “Senator Klobuchar began with… 1 out of 4 Americans have either cut their prescription drugs in half….
• Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladston, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu: Do Americans want to tax capital? Evidence from online surveys: “We provide, to our knowledge, the first investigation of individuals’ preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth…
• Simon Wren-Lewis: The lesson monetary policy needs to learn: “The main problem with monetary policy…
• Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: “High achieving black Americans… still exhibit large health disparities…
• Larry Summers: Hassett’s flawed analysis of the Trump tax plan: “Kevin Hassett… accuses me of an ad-hominem attack…
• What were they thinking of, signing this? Wasn’t Kevin Hassett’s behavior since 100% predictable? Letter in Support of the Nomination of Kevin Hassett to be Chairman of the Council of Economic…: “Alan J. Auerbach… Martin N. Baily… Dean Baker…
• CPPC: Victory in California! Drug Price Transparency Bill Becomes Law: “California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 17, a drug price transparency bill, into law…
• Jay Shambaugh et al.: Thirteen Facts About Wage Growth: “Economic and policy changes are both important for the division of economic gains… http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/thirteen_facts_wage_growth.pdf
• David Anderson: State Approaches to Handling CSR Uncertainty for 2018 Premiums – Balloon Juice: “The 2018 ACA Marketplace that begins on November 1, 2017…
• Paul Krugman: Subsidies, Spite, and Supply Chains: “I’ve been fairly complacent about NAFTA’s fate…

Interesting Reads:

• Joseph E. Stiglitz, Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev: Intellectual Property for the Twenty-First-Century Economy: “Developing countries are increasingly pushing back against the intellectual property regime foisted on them by the advanced economies over the last 30 years. They are right to do so, because what matters is not only the production of knowledge, but also that it is used in ways that put the health and wellbeing of people ahead of corporate profits…”
• Jim O’Neill: What’s Really at Stake at the CCP Congress? by Jim O’Neill – Project Syndicate: “Whenever the Chinese Communist Party holds its quinquennial National Congress, pundits revel in speculating about the behind-the-scenes political dynamics driving what is invariably a carefully choreographed event. But they should really be focusing on whether China’s leaders will signal continuity or change regarding the country’s economic and trade policies…”
• David Anderson: Morning thoughts on Alexander-Murray: “I would vote for this bill if I were in the Senate…”
• Edward Luce: Donald Trump’s poisoning of global trade: “The suspicion is that the president never wanted to make deals in the first place…”
• Shawn Donnan: Bitter differences over Nafta break into the open: “Bitter differences over how to update the North American Free Trade Agreement have broken into the open, as Donald Trump’s trade tsar accused Canada and Mexico of resisting the need for major change and warned US companies they would need to make sacrifices…”
• Gene Sperling: Expand the EITC to Include Childless Workers – The Atlantic: “The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the country’s most effective anti-poverty policies, but it mostly leaves out a huge segment of workers: those without children…”
• Richard Sutch: The One Percent across Two Centuries: A Replication of Thomas Piketty’s Data on the Concentration of Wealth in the United States: “Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable. They are based on a single mid-century observation that provides no guidance about the antebellum trend and only tenuous information about the trend in inequality during the Gilded Age…”
• Should-Read: Political Institutions, Economic Liberty, and the Great Divergence: “Max Weber proposed that politically autonomous cities were ‘critical to Europe’s economic rise…
• Tim Duy: Is The Fed Setting Itself Up To Fail In The Next Recession?: “The Federal Reserve remains committed to a December rate hike, persistent low inflation not withstanding…. The main risk… is that the US economy enters the next recession with diminished inflation expectations, which could further hobble central bankers already facing the prospect of returning to the effective lower bound in the next cycle…”
• John Podesta: Trump’s tax-cuts pitch takes disdain for evidence to a new level – The Washington Post
• David Anderson: Misunderstanding the No CSR World – Balloon Juice: “At least forty states have taken steps to protect all on-Exchange buyers from CSR costs in 2018… Bronze and Gold plans are significantly cheaper for subsidized buyers…”