Must- and Should-Reads: November 25, 2017

Must-Reads:

• Paul Krugman (2009): The Obama Gaps: “The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job…
• Martin Wolf: A Republican tax plan built for plutocrats: “How does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy?…
• Martin Sandbu: Who should govern the euro?: “I have long argued against further centralisation of fiscal and structural policies, and proposed that some autonomy should instead be returned to the national level…
• Greg Leiserson: The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: “First, the Tax Foundation appears to incorrectly model the interaction between federal and state corporate income taxes…
• Paul Krugman: Leprechaun Economics, With Numbers: “8% is a reasonable number for after-tax required return…
• Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and The Trade Deficit: “TF provides very little detail on their model, which is itself a flashing red light: transparency is essential…
• Chye-Ching Huang: @dashching on Twitter: “A Tax Foundation dynamic score that no-one should pay any attention to an indication of what this bill would do for growth…
• Claudia Goldin: How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple): “Billie Jean King… the United States Open… 1972… $10,000. Ilie Năstase, her male counterpart, won $25,000…
• Julius Martov (1920): The state and the socialist revolution”: “Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions…
• Barry Eichengreen: Trade Policy and Growth: “Nothing one can say in this area is uncontroversial…
• David Kamin: Fixing the Loophole in the House Limit on Deductibility of State and Local Income Taxes: “First, under the legislation…
• Paul Krugman: Discredited ideas
• Jason Furman: @jasonfurman on Twitter: Lack of Treasury Dynamic Analysis: “The lack of a Treasury career staff analysis of the growth and dynamic effects of the bill tells you a lot about what such an analysis would show…”
• Roger Farmer: How to Fix the Curse of the Five: “I recently came across this video link to a session held at the 2017 ASSA meetings on the ‘Curse of the Top Five’…

Should-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Schroedinger’s Tax Hike: “The Senate bill… tries to be long-run deficit-neutral… by offsetting huge corporate tax cuts with higher taxes on individuals…
• Alexander William Salter and Daniel J. Smith: Political Economists or Political Economists? The Role of Political Environments in the Formation of Fed Policy Under Burns, Greenspan, and Bernanke: “We analyze the writings and speeches of… Arthur Burns, Alan Greenspan, and Benjamin Bernanke…
• Paul Krugman: The Transfer Problem and Tax Incidence: “These days, what passes for policymaking in America manages to be simultaneously farcical and sinister, and the evil-clown aspects extend into the oddest places…
• Ned Phelps: Nothing Natural About the Natural Rate of Unemployment: “A compelling hypothesis is that workers, shaken by the 2008 financial crisis and the deep recession that resulted…
• Stan Collender: GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington: “The GOP tax bill will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches’ brew of gimmicks and outright lies)…
• Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts, Growth, and Leprechauns: “The Tax Policy Center released its macroeconomic analysis of the House tax cut bill…
• Peter Lindert: The rise and future of progressive redistribution: “There has been a blossoming of research into fiscal incidence by income class…
• Jo Mitchell: Dilettantes Shouldn’t Get Excited: “The Freshwater version of the model concluded that all government policy has no effect and that any changes are driven by an unexplained residual….
• Paul Krugman: Everybody Hates the Trump Tax Plan: “Gary Cohn, Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, met with a group of top executives… asked to raise their hands if lower taxes would lead them to raise capital expenditures…
• Paul Krugman: Days of Greed and Desperation: “The House tax bill is wildly regressive; the Senate bill actually raises taxes on most families, while including a special tax break for private planes…
• Martin Wolf: A bruising Brexit could shipwreck the British economy: “The UK economy remains the most regionally divided in Europe…
• Matthew Yglesias: Watch CEOs admit they won’t actually invest more if tax reform passes: “A telling and important moment…
• Douglas L. Campbell: Ancestry and Development: the Power Pose of Economics?: “George Mason… asked me to present my work joint with Ju Hyun Pyun, taking down the “genetic distance to the US predicts development”…
• Nick Bunker: The forces behind the highly unequal U.S. wealth distribution: “Two papers… give us some guidance on the forces that have led to such an unequal wealth distribution in the United States…
• Krystal Ball and Ro Khanna: Lessons for Democrats after Virginia election and how tech can help: “Given modern communications technology, there’s no reason why good jobs in the new economy should be sequestered in a few hubs…
• Noah Smith: The “cackling cartoon villain” defense of DSGE: “The new defense of DSGE by Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Trabandt is pretty cringe-inducing…
• Jasjeet S. Sekhon: Causal Inference in the Age of Big Data: “The rise of massive datasets that provide fine-grained information about human beings and their behavior offers unprecedented opportunities…
• Lant Pritchett: The Perils of Partial Attribution: Let’s All Play for Team Development: “There was a growth acceleration in 1993 that created 1.1 trillion in additional GDP…
• Matteo Maggiori, Brent Neiman, and Jesse Schreger: International Currencies and Capital Allocation: “The external wealth of countries has increased dramatically over the last forty years…
• Charles J. Sykes: Year One: The Mad King: “Bret Stephens… sought to explain the capitulation of the conservative movement by citing the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz…
• Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Facing the Four Structural Threats to US Democracy: “As California has shown, structural barriers to good governance can be eliminated through citizen-driven reforms…
• Paul Krugman: Trump and Ryan Versus the Little People: “Consider four hypothetical taxpayers…. First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about..
• Eli Stokols: Trump Says Democrats Will Like Senate Tax Plan More Than House Version: “President Donald Trump moved to assuage centrist Democratic senators’ concerns about the House Republican tax overhaul by telling them the Senate version will be more to their liking…
• Nick Bunker: Policy rules and central bank independence: “The general public and their elected officials are not simply passengers on a ship…
• Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Republican tax plan slams workers and job creators in favor of the rich and inherited wealth: “The tax plan… is a remarkable document… most notably in that it achieves the opposite of its stated goal…
• Noah Smith: The U.S. and Japan Don’t Have a Trade Problem: “When Japan buys U.S. bonds, stocks, or car factories…
• Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles: Economic Inequality & Crony Capitalism: Conservatives Should Rethink Their Views: “Conservatives have two intellectual commitments that are increasingly incompatible…, some prominent Republicans argued that the Republican Party should court black voters…
• Paul Krugman: On Twitter: GOP tax bill is awesomely bad: “GOP tax bill is awesomely bad, raising taxes on half of middle class while mainly benefiting the idle rich. Why?…
• Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: September 2017 Report Edition: “The rate at which workers are quitting their jobs hasn’t changed much over the last year…