Must-Read: Dan Drezner: The Truth of Cosmopolitanism

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Dan Drezner: The Truth of Cosmopolitanism: “Douthat’s column is a perfect cocktail consisting of one part insight, one part self-loathing and one part flagrant error…

…The insight… Chris Hayes…. “The problem was so deep and so tied to the entire social order and rising inequality in the American model of enlightened meritocratic rule that even competent leadership from President Obama, or a period in which there weren’t the same sort of succession of elite failures, wasn’t going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”… I’m not necessarily convinced that this is the defining cleavage of our era (see below), I’m convinced it’s a cleavage.

And yet, never underestimate the self-loathing contained in these kinds of essays…. By definition, cosmopolitans are supposed to be open to criticism–so any of them with any sense of self-doubt will seize upon this argument as an example of what’s what’s wrong with their lives.

The final point, however, is that the rooted/cosmopolitan divide is only one of many…. I’m not even sure it’s the most salient…. Replace ‘nativist’ with ‘old’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘young.’… Does talking about a young/old divide make things any different?… Douthat is no doubt correct to point out the biases that cosmopolitans possess. But his implicit counterpoint is that nativists possess some deep reservoir of local knowledge that cosmopolitans overlook. Except that if the cleavage is split by age, it suggests… older voters… fueled by a sense of nostalgia… that… may or may not be true….. George Saunders….

The Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself…. Spoiled Americans, imbued with unreasonable boomer expectations… grievances… more theoretical than actual, more media-induced than experience-related.

Indeed, Trump’s whole campaign shtick is predicated on this kind of nostalgia, which contains far more truthiness than truth.

Must-Reads: July 4, 2016

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Must-Read: Austin Smith: Don’t Punish Journalists for Software Problems

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Austin Smith: Don’t Punish Journalists for Software Problems: “Editors are cornered by two problems…

…a hard job that gets harder by the month, and a media/social beast that feeds ravenously on every minor mistake.

No, wait, sorry, some editors are cornered by three problems, because their news organizations can’t get their damn CMS straight…. At the heart of any CMS is a text editor, which must offer writers and editors many different options for presenting an article correctly in every form factor. The text editor in the Daily News’s CMS stripped out formatting that declared blockquotes or hanging indents. Whoops! Of these three problems… one is actually possible to solve right now. It is absolutely possible to build a CMS that handles inbound formatting neatly…

Must-Read: Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt: Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt: Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach: “Inequality in mortality rates are a good indicator of economic wellbeing…

…but most of the existing literature does little to distinguish between developments in infants and adults. This column uses extensive US data to analyse mortality trends across all age groups. It finds that the health of the next generation in the poorest areas of the US has improved significantly and the race gap has declined significantly. Underlying explanations include declines in the prevalence of smoking and improved nutrition, and a major cause is social policies that target the most disadvantaged.

Must-Reads: July 3, 2016

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Must-Read: Duncan Weldon: Five Thoughts on Brexit

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Duncan Weldon: Five Thoughts on Brexit:

  1. British politics now has a big dose of Syriza thinking. ‘Respect our democratic mandate’ doesn’t work when you’re dealing with 27 other democratically elected governments.
  2. I have no idea what the final settlement looks like. No one does.
  3. We won’t get any clarity in the next few months. The Tory leadership contest will at best give a small signal, but really it’s noise. The next PM will be selected by a membership of leave supporters and the candidates will pitch to that. All will offer a fantasy that the EU is unlikely to agree to.
  4. British politics is in flux. The next Tory leader faces having to make a tough choice: disappoint the membership and traditional Tory voters or lose the City. The broad coalition of social conservatives and economic liberals that form the party may not be able to survive this choice. Labour faces similar pressures. Handled badly, this go see a UKIP surge – not into power but into a much stronger position in Parliament.
  5. Finally – I think the UK’s actions will ultimately be good for EU unity. Others will be less inclined to follow our example if it is painful (and that’s without the additional problems of leaving Schengen or the euro). It isn’t hard to imagine the Eurozone doubling down now and building the kind of institutions that the zone needs to work.

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Trade and Jobs: A Note

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ah. I’ve been waiting for Paul Krugman to write up something like this…

I think that he is, of course, correct. The estimated effects of the China shock on individual regions and labor markets is solid. Their aggregating up is fatally flawed pre-2008…

Paul Krugman: Trade and Jobs: A Note: “Trade and jobs… The big story in the academia/policy space…

…Autor et al… estimated large losses from Chinese import penetration…. But… some conceptual issues… are important for interpreting the results…. I would begin by posing a counterfactual: what would U.S. employment look like if we had pursued policies such as Trump tariffs that prevented the large trade deficits in manufacturing we actually have?… A balanced expansion of imports and imports would have, to a first approximation, no effect on manufacturing value added, and an effect on employment only to the extent that import-competing industry is more labor-intensive than exports…. [So] what matters is the manufacturing trade deficit… $600 billion in 2014. How much manufacturing did that deficit displace?… About $360 billion…. 2 million jobs.

OK, what about the effect on overall employment?… If monetary and fiscal policy are used to achieve a target level of employment–as they generally were prior to the 2008 crisis–then a first cut at the impact on overall employment is zero. That is, trade deficits meant 2 million fewer manufacturing jobs and 2 million more in the service sector. Since 2008, of course, we’ve been in a liquidity trap, with the Fed either unable or unwilling to hit its targets and fiscal policy paralyzed by ideology, so trade deficits are in practice a major drag on overall employment…. So, how big a deal is displacement of 2 million manufacturing jobs? Not trivial…. But… absent the trade deficit… we would have roughly 11.5 percent of the work force in manufacturing, rather than the actual 10. Compare this with the realities of the past: more than 20 percent in manufacturing in the late 1970s, more than 25 percent in the 1960s….

Autor and various co-authors… do… a bottom-up approach…. The impact of the China shock on employment, wages, and so on at the regional level… beautiful work. But what they do next is to apply the implied coefficient from this analysis to the aggregate effects of the China shock. And that’s much more dubious–especially when, in the second paper, they purport to estimate the effects on overall employment. In general, you can’t do that: applying estimates of partial regional effects to the overall aggregate exposes you to huge possible fallacies of composition. And in this case the crucial issue is monetary and fiscal response. Up through 2007… [their results] should be seen as jobs shifted out of manufacturing to other sectors, not total job loss…

Must-Reads: July 2, 2016

Posted on by Brad DeLong

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