Must- and Should-Reads: December 1, 2016

• Brad Setser: China’s Dual Equilibria: “Not just multiple possible exchange rate equilibria… at least two different possible macroeconomic equilibria…
• Abhijit Bannerjee: E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India
• Simon Johnson: The Politics of Job Polarization: “Highly educated people at the top of the income distribution are doing better than ever…
• Cosma Shalizi: Ernest Gellner, 1925-1995: “Most of these themes themselves revolve around the ‘great hump’ or ‘great ditch’, which divides the modern world from pre-modern civilizations…
• Nathan Lane: Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Networks in South Korea: “This paper uses a historic big push intervention and newly digitized data from South Korea to
  study the effects of industrial policy on (short- and long-run) industrial development…
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Public Investment and Fiscal Rules: “When I started writing this paper with Jonathan Portes…
• Simon Wren Lewis: Whatever Happened to the Government Debt Doom Spiral?: “A number of people… are puzzled about why government debt at 90% of GDP seemed to cause our new Chancellor and the markets so little concern when his predecessor saw it as a portent of impending doom…

Interesting Reads:

• David Allen Green: Who the UK really is negotiating with over Brexit: “Theresa May is being careful about what information is available to her opponents…. Her opponents… are not the various EU institutions… [which] know… the UK negotiating position better than the UK itself. No, her true Brexit opponents are the UK’s media and politicians and, by extension, the public…”
• Sherman Robinson
• Live from London: Duncan Black: Good Luck With That: “The weird belief that there could be no negative consequences of Brexit while still actually undertaking Brexit is cute…
• Live from Havana: Larry Summers: Castro Is Dead: “History will judge the US embargo policy a total failure…
• Why Does the Federal Reserve Take 2%/Year Inflation to Be a Ceiling Rather than a Target?
• The Kelly Risk Criterion: Hoisted from the Archives from Ten Years Ago
• Comment of the Day: J.E. D’Ulisse: Weekend Reading: Thoukydides: The Mytilenean Debate (427 B.C.): “Back in 2005, I remember sitting in bars in Rome with my Italian friends and discussing what was going on in the USA…
• Mark Gilchrist: Why Thucydides Still Matters