Must- and Should-Reads: October 15, 2017

• @delong @pseudoerasmus @leahboustan: On Twitter: What high skilled jobs did the domestication of the horse eliminate?: “@leah_boustan: @pseudoerasmus @de1ong To me, robot has connotation of ‘artificial intelligence’ so CNC would be robot-like but assembly line would not be…
• Geoffrey Pulham (2013): Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?: “Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box… http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/05/09/natural-language-processing/
• Luigi Iovino and Dmitriy Sergeyev: Quantitative Easing without Rational Expectations
  : “We study the effects of risky assets purchases financed by issuance of riskless debt by the government (quantitative easing) in a model without rational expectations…
• Bruce Bartlett: I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don’t equal growth: “Even if they had released a complete plan — not just the woefully incomplete nine-page outline released Wednesday…
• Paul Krugman: Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies: “Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement…
• Simon Wren-Lewis: How Neoliberals weaponise the concept of an ideal market: “I would tend to suggest…
• Martin Wolf: A political shadow looms over the world economy: “Optimism about the global economy is tempered by fears of populism…
• Ben Bernanke: Monetary Policy in a New Era: “Outside of making a stronger case for proactive fiscal policies, there are two broad possibilities…
• Bridget Ansel: Weekend reading, “racial health disparities, wealth inequality, and labor market tightness” edition: “Equitable Growth released three new working papers…
• Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers: Rethinking macro stabilization
  Back to the future: “Lessons from past crises…
• Paul Krugman (2015): QE Truthers: “Everyone knows about the infamous open letter warning Ben Bernanke not to engage in quantitative easing…
• Tim Duy: Fed Is Ignoring Actual Inflation Data: “Policy makers may be relying on the wrong model as they push for a December rate hike…
• Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: “From the end of the 1991 recession until the second quarter of 2017, the prime employment rate explains about 80 percent of the variation in nominal wage growth…

Interesting Reads:

• Karen Weese: Behavioral economics has a plan to fight poverty—and it’s all about redesigning the “cockpit”: “‘Scarcity’… changes the way we think. We get tunnel vision, able to focus only on the present problem—the thing we lack—in a kind of fire-fighting mode, leaving us with less bandwidth for everything else…”
• David Anderson: CSR won’t be paid: “I’ve been working with Charles Gaba, Louise Norris, Andrew Sprung and a few others trying to inventory how states are allowing insurers to deal with the uncertainty of whether or not Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments would be made…. This is a living document that we will be modifying as we learn more…”
• Walter Frick: The Real Reason Superstar Firms Are Pulling Ahead: “Superstars… IT per se… combine it with other intangibles, like good management, well-known brands, or intellectual property…”
• Carola Binder: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy IV
• Sean Illing: 20 of America’s top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They’re scared: “If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast…”
• Ted Bergstrom (1986): Soldiers of Fortune: “This paper repairs what I think is a major flaw in standard general equilibrium theory, which assumes away the nonconvexity of preferences that follows from the discreteness of occupational choice…”
• Nancy LeTourneau: How Trump Is Sabotaging the Republican Tax Cut Plan: “The White House… proposed… eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes…. On whether or not this item is negotiable or if the president is re-thinking it, so far we’ve heard: yes, no, yes, no. Got that? The White House position on this is as clear as mud…”
• Mark Thoma: Economist’s View: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy: “There is a conference on Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy ‘coordinated by Olivier Blanchard… and Lawrence H. Summers…’ taking place today and tomorrow (wanted to go, but couldn’t)…”
• Frank Levy: Comments on Frey and Osborne’s “The Future of Employment”: “The authors’ understanding of computer technology appears to be average for economists (= poor for computer scientists). By my personal guess, they are overestimating what current technology can do…”
• Tim Jost: Trump Executive Order Expands Opportunities For Healthier People To Exit ACA
• Josh Barro: Republicans don’t understand why Trump tax plan hits middle class: “Abolishing personal exemptions is a revenue-raising option that hits middle-income families unusually hard…”
• Live from the Laugher Curve: Bill Easterly: ON TWITTER: @BILL_EASTERLY: “The Laffer Curve napkin is mathematically incoherent: why is the x variable on the y-axis? Why is 100% at the origin?…