Should-Read: Neil Cummins: Longevity and the Rise of the West: Lifespans of the European Elite, 800-1800: “From the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800…

…Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual behavior. The areas of North-West Europe which later witnessed the Industrial Revolution achieved greater longevity than the rest of Europe even by 1000 AD. The data suggest that the ‘Rise of the West’ originates before the Black Death.

Berkeley Economic History Seminar 211 :: Monday, January 30, 2017 2:00pm – 3:30pm :: 639 Evans Hall

Must-Read: Simon Schama: Joyless Fantasies Abound in Trump’s Inauguration Speech: “The 45th president is not only a cantankerous man but… a mentally lazy one…

…who cannot be bothered to read daily intelligence briefings and whose speech was a barely defrosted abridgment of the acceptance tirade at Cleveland… a red rag of an address stitched together from other people’s rhetorical cast-offs…. Bannon… may think he’s restarting the New Deal’s investment in infrastructure but, if historical memory serves, Roosevelt did not actually start with a massive tax break for the top 1 per cent. In all likelihood the president will not be sweating the small stuff, emerging from the sand trap every so often to snarl and bludgeon frightened executives with taking away their toys unless they repair immediately to Duluth and open a widget factory. The actual heavy lifting will be delegated to his cabinet which largely conforms to what the Greeks called a “kakistocracy”: ​government of the least-qualified….

When it’s a matter of Rick Perry, nominated as energy secretary not knowing that his department is responsible for America’s nuclear stockpile, incredulous derision turns to red alert…. A minority vote has, through the anachronisms of the electoral college, imposed the priorities of rural and small town America on the great, populous, cosmopolitan cities…. ​The rest of the world might feel inclined to greet this swerve into isolationism, the arrival of a smaller, narrower, not a greater America, with a shrug were it not for the fact that however much President Trump wants to decree it away, global interconnectedness is an unavoidable fact of life in the 21st century…. Mr Trump’s repeated declaration of Nato’s obsolescence, and the doubt he has cast over the treaty’s obligation to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all, is tantamount to an invitation to Russian adventurism… greeted by ultranationalists and fascists from in Europe with the kind of manic glee displayed by beach bullies kicking in the sandcastle….

“The time for empty talk is over. The time for action is here,” the president proclaimed. The American majority, multitudes of whom look on his proposals with dismay and revulsion, should now take those words to heart.

Should-Read: Alex Field: Review of Marc Levinson: An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy: “1948 to 1973 has long been considered the golden age of the U.S. economy…

…And then it fell apart.  TFP growth in the United States, except for a modest revival between 1995 and 2005, experienced retardation.  Labor productivity and the material standard of living grew more slowly, with almost all of the gains going to the top.  Consumption was sustained by rising women’s labor force participation and increasing household debt levels.  Financial crises, including in developed countries, became more frequent.  And governments and all their economic advisors seemed largely powerless to change this reality. Marc Levinson provides a well written narrative of the descent from the golden age into what has become the new ordinary….

The book has many strengths. First, the narrative is based in part on original archival research…. Second, it can be thought of as a G-7 book…. The juxtaposition of narratives from different states reveals differences but also the worldwide incidence of a sea change in the developed world starting in the 1970s. Finally, Levinson’s assessments of policy regimes and policy initiatives are data driven and balanced….

There are, however, several instances in which Levinson does not quite get on top of important conceptual or accounting distinctions…. Levinson (along with many others) doesn’t understand the distinction in bank regulation between liquidity and capital requirements…. Levinson’s discussion of why labor’s share has declined is something of a mish-mash.  The main cause, he suggests (p. 142) “was most likely a speedup in the rate of technological change.”  But all the data that Levinson reviews shows that the drop in labor’s share coincided with the drop in TFP growth that marked the post-1973 period. It’s possible that if the bias of technological change altered — if it became more labor saving — it served to weaken labor’s bargaining position, and Levinson seems to be making that argument as well…. A related confusion pops up on p. 155, where he observes that politicians, in the face of the sea change, continued to offer programs devoted “to dividing up the fruits of plenty, not to reviving productivity growth and adjusting to a world of rapid technological change.”  It is difficult to imagine an economy simultaneously experiencing both declining productivity growth and an accelerating rate of technological change….

My noting of these issues should not discourage academic economists from reading this book…. The book provides a welcome introduction to very important chapters in twentieth century economic history.

Marc Levinson, An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy.  New York: Basic Books, 2016. vii + 326 pp.  $28 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-465-06198-3.

Should-Read: Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, and Jens Südekum: [Globalisation and sectoral employment trends in Germany]: “The decline of manufacturing jobs in the US has been the focus of much attention recently…

…with rising trade with China cited as one explanation. This column describes how the German economy has experienced a similar secular decline in manufacturing and rising service employment, but that growing trade with China and Eastern Europe did not speed up this trend. In fact, rising exports to the new markets have stabilised industry jobs…

Should-Read: Alan Smith and Federica Cocco: The huge disparities in US life expectancy in five charts: “Inequality means that individuals in the US have very different experiences…

…in terms of both longevity and spending on health…. Some groups in the US—the poor and middle-class women—have actually seen a decrease in life expectancy during the past three decades…

Should-Read: I believe that Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan need to start the process of invoking the 25th Amendment in order to properly assess the situation:

Benjamin Wittes: Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas: The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly…

…and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction. NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.) This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all…