Should-Read: Nicole Belle: Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread: “It is a sad statement on the state of cable news today that a smarter conversation on climate change can be had in Teen Vogue than on any one of the shows… http://crooksandliars.com/2017/09/sunday-morning-bobblehead-thread

…There can be no more shortcuts to savings and profit as we invest in the skeletons that support our civilization. As we mourn for Houston, we must go beyond thoughts, prayers, and donations—which is not to say all of these are not necessary. But we must also insist on having a mind for future prevention. The nonsense political debate will continue to rage with regard to how much man is to blame in the undeniable trend toward climate change, but science guarantees us that the sort of extreme weather unfolding in Houston is our new normal, regardless of its root cause. Working toward adaptation through preparation is not a choice, but an inevitability. Our current approach is like sitting next to a sandcastle, pretending we had no idea it was going to get swept away—only the sandcastle is civilization, and we know damn well that the waves are coming in…

Must-Read: Brink Lindsey: The End of the Working Class: “The nightmare of the industrial age was that the dependence of technological civilization on brute labor was never-ending… https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/08/30/end-working-class/

…Those old nightmares are gone—and for that we owe a prayer of thanks. Never has there been a source of human conflict more incendiary than the reliance of mass progress on mass misery…. But the old nightmare, alas, has been replaced with a new one…. Now it is feelings of uselessness that threaten to leach away people’s humanity. Anchored in their unquestioned usefulness, industrial workers could struggle personally to endure their lot for the sake of their families, and they could struggle collectively to better their lot. The working class’s struggle was the source of working-class identity and pride.

For today’s post-working-class “precariat,” though, the anchor is gone, and people drift aimlessly from one dead-end job to the next…. The scale of the challenge facing us is immense. What valuable and respected contributions to society can ordinary people not flush with abstract analytical skills make? How can we mend fraying attachments to work, family, and community?

There are volumes to write on these subjects, but there is at least one reason for hope. We can hope for something better because, for the first time in history, we are free to choose something better. The low productivity of traditional agriculture meant that mass oppression was unavoidable; the social surplus was so meager that the fruits of civilization were available only to a tiny elite, and the specter of Malthusian catastrophe was never far from view. Once the possibilities of a productivity revolution through energy-intensive mass production were glimpsed, the creation of urban proletariats in one country after another was likewise driven by historical necessity. The economic incentives for industrializing were obvious and powerful, but the political incentives were truly decisive. When military might hinged on industrial success, geopolitical competition ensured that mass mobilizations of working classes would ensue.

No equivalent dynamics operate today. There is no iron law of history impelling us to treat the majority of our fellow citizens as superfluous afterthoughts. A more humane economy, and a more inclusive prosperity, is possible…. There is a land of milk and honey beyond this wilderness, if we have the vision and resolve to reach it.

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman on Twitter: “Thinking more about why we mess up urban land use. Background: population-weighted density, from Census…” https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/904348528700530688 https://t.co/Up40gCypzw

Should-Read: Larry Summers: America needs its unions more than ever: “I suspect the most important factor… is that the bargaining power of… workers has decreased… https://www.ft.com/content/180127da-8e59-11e7-9580-c651950d3672

…Technology has given employers more scope for replacing Americans with foreign workers, or with technology, or by drawing on the gig economy. So their leverage to hold down wages has increased. On the other [side]… it is harder than it used to be to move to opportunity…. Consumers also appear more likely now to have to purchase from monopolies…. On this Labor Day we would do well to remember that unions have long played a crucial role in the American economy in evening out the bargaining power between employers and employees…. The shrinking of the union movement to the point where today only 6.4 per cent of private sector workers—a decline of nearly two-thirds since the late 1970s—are in unions is one important contributor to the decline in the relative position of labour in general and those who work with their hands in particular. The decline in the unions is also a contributor to the pervasive sense that too often our political system is for sale to the highest bidder….

In an era when the most valuable companies are the Apples and the Amazons rather than the General Motors and the General Electrics, the role of unions cannot go back to being what it was. But on this Labor Day any leader concerned with the American middle class needs to consider that the basic function of unions—balancing the power of employers and employees—is as important to our economy as it has ever been.

Must-Read: Because economic theory can be nothing but crystalized or distilled economic theory:

Robert M. Solow (1985): Economic History and Economics: “Economics is a social science… subject to Damon Runyon’s Law that nothing between human beings is more than three to one… http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

…Much of what we observe cannot be treated as the realization of a stationary stochastic process without straining credulity. Moreover, all narrowly economic activity is embedded in a web of social institutions, customs, beliefs, and attitudes. Concrete outcomes are indubitably affected by these background factors…. As soon as time-series get long enough to offer hope of discriminating among complex hypotheses, the likelihood that they remain stationary dwindles away, and the noise level gets correspondingly high. Under these circumstances, a little cleverness and persistence can get you almost any result you want. I think that is why so few econometricians have ever been forced by the facts to abandon a firmly held belief. Indeed, some of Fortune’s favorites have been known to write scores of empirical articles without once feeling obliged to report a result that contradicts their prior prejudices.

If I am anywhere near right about this, the interests of scientific economics would be better served by a more modest approach. There is enough for us to do without pretending to a degree of completeness and precision which we cannot deliver…. The true functions of analytical economics are… to organize our necessarily incomplete perceptions about the economy, to see connections that the untutored eye would miss, to tell plausible-sometimes even convincing-causal stories with the help of a few central principles, and to make rough quantitative judgments about the consequences of economic policy and other exogenous events.

In this scheme of things, the end product of economic analysis is likely to be a collection of models contingent on society’s circumstances-on the historical context, you might say-and not a single monolithic model for all seasons….

What economic history offers… is more interesting. If the proper choice of a model depends on the institutional context-and it should-then economic history performs the nice function of widening the range of observation available to the theorist. Economic theory can only gain from being taught something about the range of possibilities in human societies. Few things should be more interesting to a civilized economic theorist than the opportunity to observe the interplay between social institutions and economic behavior over time and place….

If the project of turning economics into a hard science could succeed, it would surely be worth doing. No doubt some of us should keep trying….

There are, however… reasons for pessimism…. Hard sciences dealing with complex systems… less complex than the U.S. economy… succeed because they can isolate, they can experiment, and they can make repeated observations under controlled conditions[;]… or because they can make long series of observations under natural but essentially stationary conditions…. Neither of these… is open to economists….

A clear and productive division of labor between the economist and the economic historian… economist… concerned with making and testing models of the economic world as… we think it is[;]… economic historian… whether this or that story rings true when applied in earlier times or other places, and, if not, why not…. Economic history can offer the economist a sense of the variety and flexibility of social arrangements and thus, in particular, a shot at understanding a little better the interaction of economic behavior and other social institutions…

Should-Read: Noah Smith: Harvey Won’t Hold Back Housto: “If economic geography dictates that a city be located in a certain spot, there will be a city there—period… https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-31/harvey-won-t-hold-back-houston

…The clearest—and most grisly—demonstration of this principle comes from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Within 10 years after that horrific destruction, Nagasaki, a key port city and manufacturing center, had returned to its previous population growth trend line. It took Hiroshima about 30 years, but it’s now the eighth largest city in Japan, a thriving industrial and commercial center. In the long run, even nuclear bombs couldn’t overcome the power of economics….

Houston… has… been growing strongly…. According to Krugman’s theory, growth like that is a sign that a city hasn’t yet achieved its full economic potential—the node it occupies in the system of cities still needs more people. That means there will be no exodus of people or investment dollars from Houston. This is in contrast to New Orleans, whose population had been declining for decades before Katrina hit…. A second theory of why cities exist has to do with knowledge industries. Smart people living in close proximity form a deep pool of workers for companies to choose from, and employees moving from company to company cause ideas to spread…. Houston is a tech cluster… energy… has gone increasingly high-tech…. The same pool of skilled employees that sustains Houston’s energy industry makes it appealing to other knowledge-based sectors as well—machinery manufacturing, chemicals, business and financial services, even information technology…. The city will emerge from Harvey’s devastation stronger than before.

But because Houston is destined to rebound, it’s even more important… to invest in measures to prevent future floods from wreaking havoc…

Should-Read: I don’t understand this:

If it is a personnel issue and not a program issue, you fire the person.

If it is a program issue and not a personnel issue, you spin out the group, wish them best wishes in their future endeavors, and direct funders their way.

But this seems to me to fit neither case. Sending young rising stars “many of whom… [you] have mentored” out into the wilderness with a boss who you believe “repeatedly violated the standards of honesty and good faith” is not doing them a favor:

Anne-Marie Slaughter: When The Truth is Messy and Hard: “I have racked my brain… as to what I… could or should have done differently about the departure of Barry Lynn and Open Markets from New America…. https://medium.com/@slaughteram/when-the-truth-is-messy-and-hard-1655a36e313f

…This was a personnel issue that I knew others would see as a program issue…. I… could keep an employee who had repeatedly violated the standards of honesty and good faith…. I could fire him outright and try to find a leader for his program, which would force both his funders and his program staff, many of whom were young rising stars who both Barry and I have mentored, to choose between us and him. Or I could try to work with Barry to negotiate a cooperative spinning out of the Open Markets…. I chose the third option, one that was much better for Barry than an outright firing would have been….

This was no “expulsion” of his team; quite the contrary, our biggest concern was precisely that these were New America employees to whom we had real obligations and regretted losing. Moreover, we had prepared a statement announcing the spin-out that emphasized our respect for Open Markets’ work…. Work that has included plenty of attacks on corporations that have funded other parts of New America. We were having productive conversations with Barry as recently as Monday…. James Fallows… was our first board chair… had become friends with Eric Schmidt when Eric was still at Novell and recruited him onto our board…. He has been very generous to New America and we are proud of our association with him…. At the same time, we have bragged from the beginning, using various adjectives, that we are an independent, heterodox, iconoclastic place. Barry Lynn and Michael Lind have long argued about economic concentration; a year ago we held a debate between Barry and Michael for our staff on Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian views of the economy. In the coming months, one of our programs is hosting several events about the dangers of monopolies. I am no stranger to situations in which a fellow or a program staff member writes something that directly contradicts the views of another program in ways that has upset a funder….

In the academy… donors know that academic independence is sacrosanct…. As a nonpartisan think tank, one that prides itself on not being politically predictable, we uphold the same standards of intellectual independence. But we do not pay our researchers’ salaries. Grants do…. We tell all of our donors that they cannot control the results of what they fund…. But we also develop and maintain relationships with our donors…. So there’s the tension. In practice, with an employee who had already surprised his colleagues unpleasantly—and many would say dishonestly—in the past, it meant that I wanted to see a press release before it went out. That is the reason that the Open Markets statement went up and then was taken down. It was posted before I had a chance to give it a final review….

I wanted to give the funder a heads up that it was coming and send it over ourselves. That seems like a defensible minimum courtesy that an institution can offer its funders: we’re about to do something you are really not going to like, but at least we are telling you about it…. I had to make a tough call. I still believe I made the right one consistent with our history and institutional values…. [But] we were not in fact negotiating a cooperative spin-out with Barry Lynn but were in fact on the other end of a carefully prepared campaign, one that was already generating thousands of tweets and emails. In an effort to express New America’s position quickly in 140 characters, I said that Ken Vogel’s New York Times story was false…. Many of the story’s facts and selective quotations were presented in a way that gave the strong impression that we told Open Markets it had to leave because of pressure from Google. Again, this is simply not true. Still, the blanket claim that the entire story was “false” contributes to the kind of degradation of our national discourse that I often publicly lament…. I regret my tweet….

Barry’s new organization and campaign against Google is the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election, at a time when I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country…. For us, organizations like us, and the media who cover us, let’s start by speaking truth, even when it’s complicated and messy and hard.