Tag: roundup

Must-Reads: December 15, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Paul Krugman: Obamacare and the Cockroaches: “Zombie ideas are claims that should have been killed by evidence…” :: Still looking, without success, for conservatives at think tanks willing to be reality-based on health care…
  • Ryan Cooper: How Climate Change Ate Conservatism’s Smartest Thinkers: “Like Clive Crook, Will Wilkinson, and Walter Russell Mead, Douthat doesn’t seriously engage with the evidence…” :: It is important to note that global warming is not unique here…
  • Kevin Hoover: The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics: “Representative-agent models [do not] provide microfundations… do not solve the problem of aggregation; rather they assume that it can be ignored…” :: The combination of representative-agent modeling and utility-based “microfoundations” was always a game of intellectual Three-Card Monte…
  • Dani Rodrik: When Economics Works and When it Doesn’t: “The efficient markets hypothesis… models… [of] sovereign debt crises…. I wish we’d put greater weight on stories of the second kind rather than the first. We’d have been better off…” :: There is an awful lot of bad right-wing economics. There is much less bad left-wing economics…
  • Zack Cooper et al.: The Price Ain’t Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured: “Health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three…. The correlation… [with] Medicare… is only 0.14…” :: Yes. Constraining hospital and doctor-group market power is very important to creating a more efficient health-care system. Why do you ask?
  • Nick Bunker: Trying to Get a Grip on the “Gig Economy”: “The sharing economy… follows rather than causes the bulk of the increase in ‘independent contracting’…” :: When put that way, what we need is not a halfway house between W-2 employees and 1099 independent contractors, but more expansionary monetary and fiscal policy

Must-Reads: December 14, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Steve Greenhouse:
    A Safety Net for On-Demand Workers?: “With Los Angeles having approved a $15-an-hour minimum wage and with many Uber drivers netting considerably less than that per hour, why exactly shouldn’t drivers be covered—and protected—by minimum wage laws?”
  • Miriam Ronzoni: Where Are the Power Relations in Piketty’s Capital?: “There seems to be a friction between the diagnosis… of the power of capital… and the suggested cure… [of] well-minded citizens… recogniz[ing] the… problem” :: The extremely-sharp Miriam Ronzoni excellently puts her finger on a substantial hole in Thomas Piketty’s _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_…
  • Ananya Roy: The Land Question: “The infrastructure problem, it turns out, is effectively a land problem…”
  • David Roberts: Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Right: “The most engaged conservative voters… won’t trust conservative elites any more than they trust liberals, scientists, or the media…”
  • Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty: “To the extent that education does nothing to provide better income support for those who do find themselves in these vulnerable situations, its effect on overall poverty levels will always be weak, or, as with the US in the last 23 years, totally nonexistent…”
  • Mark Thoma: Why It’s Tricky for Fed Officials to Talk Politically: “I think I disagree with Brad DeLong…” :: I would beg the highly-esteemed Mark Thoma to draw a distinction here between “inappropriate” and unwise…
  • Matthew Yglesias: Trumpism Is a Natural Consequence of the GOP Refusing to Moderate on Taxes or Immigration: “There has been no meaningful move to the center on economics, and–as predicted–the results are ugly…” :: “[Republicanism] is almost like you are in a religion…you are not leaving your religion…
  • Ben Thompson: Digital Dopamine: As someone who in 1993 put my copy of “Civilization” in the microwave, on the grounds that I could be either a computer-game addict or a deputy secretary of the Treasury, but probably not both, I have very mixed feelings about this…
  • Robert Johnson, Brad DeLong, Linda Bilmes, and Steve Clemons: Connecting American Foreign Policy to Economic Policy: “How might a reimagined American foreign policy… bolster the… economy…?”
  • Steve Roth (2014): The Pernicious Prison of the Price Theory Paradigm: “Steve explains it all far better, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…”

Must-Reads: December 10, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Tim Duy: And That’s a Wrap: “We are now well beyond the issue of the first rate hike…” When the next adverse macro economic shock comes, the Fed needs to be in a position to cut the federal funds rate by up to 500 basis points.
  • Frances Coppola: Eurodespair: “The German establishment seems hellbent on steering the Eurozone ship on to the rocks…”
  • FT Alphaville: Alphachatterbox: “Our podcast chat… (updated with transcript)…” :: The best extended interview-format pieces I have seen

Must-Reads Up to the Morning of December 8, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch: The Political Aftermath of financial Crises: Going to Extremes: “Far-right parties are the biggest beneficiaries…”
  • Paul Krugman: That 30s Show: “Europe’s underperformance is slowly eroding the legitimacy, not just of the European project, but of the open society itself…” :: As John Maynard Keynes wrote 80 years ago…. “It may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease while preserving efficiency and freedom…”
  • Ramez Naam: Why Energy Storage is About to Get Big–and Cheap
  • Lawrence Summers: Central Bankers do Not Have as Many Tools as They Think: “The unresolved question that will hang over the economy is how policy can delay and ultimately contain the next recession. It demands urgent attention” :: A government that does not only fail to work to generate high-pressure now, but also lacks a plan for fighting the next recession…
  • Jason Furman on residential housing supply, NIMBYism, and economic growth
  • Martin Longman: We’ve Grown Apart: “There are some ways in which MSNBC and Fox News are mirror images of each other… devoted to making the other party look bad. But Fox News is also committed to making blacks look bad…’ :: [Perhaps] this is a good sign… that racial prejudice is no longer assumed and presumed…

Must-reads: December 5, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Reads Up to the Wee Hours of December 3, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Stephen S. Roach: China’s Macro Disconnect: “Speedy implementation of the shift from production to consumption will be vital if the country is to remain on course and avoid the middle-income trap…” :: I really wish that I thought I understood China. Strike that: I really wish that I actually understood China.
  • Gauti Eggertson and Michael Woodford (2003): The Zero Bound on Interest Rates and Optimal Monetary Policy: “any failure of… credib[ility] will not be due to skepticism about whether the central bank is able to follow through on its commitment…” :: [Are] those who think (1) that Bernanke shot himself in the foot… correct[?]
  • Jan Mohlmann and Wim Suyker: Blanchard and Leigh’s Fiscal Multipliers Revisited: “[We] do not find convincing evidence for stronger-than-expected fiscal multipliers… during the sovereign debt crisis (2012-2013) or during the tepid recovery thereafter…” :: Seizing the high ground of the null hypothesis for oneself, and then running tests with no power, is undignified…

Must-Reads Up to the Wee Hours of December 2, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Greg Ip: The False Promise of a Rules-Based Fed: “The Fed will repeatedly change the rule… [or] stick to the rule longer than it should…” :: It does boggle my mind that John Taylor and Paul Ryan would take the 2004-today experience as suggesting that the Federal Reserve should be even loosely bound by any sort of policy “rule”
  • Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson: Pre-Industrial Inequality: “Compare… inequality to the maximum feasible inequality that… might have been ‘extracted’ by those in power…’ :: And the ‘winner’ for all time–in terms of success at extracting as much wealth from the workers as possible given resources, population, and technology–is Mughal India in 1750!

Must-Reads Up to Midnight on November 30, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas: Global Imbalances and Currency Wars at the ZLB
  • Willem Buiter: Transferring Robot Incomes to the People: “the scope for automation is actually greater, probably, in cerebral work than in physical work…” :: The distribution of wealth; the distribution of income; the distribution of utility–and, possibly, the distribution of eudaimonia…
  • Ricardo Hausmann: The Import of Exports: “To survive and thrive, societies need to pay special attention to those activities that produce goods and services they can sell to non-residents…” :: There is a very interesting argument made here about the export sector as the key link…
  • Ben Thompson: Selling Feelings: “Now… time and money… must… be invested in getting even closer to customers and more finely attuned to exactly why they are spending their money on you…” :: So how do we build an information-age economy in which producers have incentives to learn as much as they can about consumers to successfully anticipate them without also giving them an even bigger incentive and capability to deceive them?
  • Jonathan Moreno: Explaining the “History of Technology” Series, and Equitable Growth
  • Paul Krugman: Demand, Supply, and Macroeconomic Models: “If you came into the crisis with a broadly Hicksian view of aggregate demand you did quite well…. What hasn’t worked…is our understanding of aggregate supply…” :: A key factor Krugman omits in which standard Hicksian-inclined economists’ predictions have fallen down: the length of the short run…
  • Noah Smith: Unlearning conomics: “Right now we’re in the middle of an empirical revolution in econ, and… common theories are just not matching reality very well…” :: Noah Smith is pushing me towards thinking that Econ 1 needs to teach *a lot more than supply-and-demand plus macroeconomic externalities that can be dealt with by stabilizing monetary and maybe fiscal policy…*
  • Eric Chyn: Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effect of Public Housing Demolition on Labor Market Outcomes of Children: “Displaced children are 9 percent more likely to be employed and earn 16 percent more as adults…” :: Huh. It now looks like the huge benefits that got us excited back in the “moving to opportunity” policy days may have been an underestimate…

Must-Reads Up to Mid-Morning on November 27, 2015

Posted on by Brad DeLong
  • Must-Read: Adam Posen: Some Big Changes in Macroeconomic Thinking from Lawrence Summers
  • Refet S. Gürkaynak and Troy Davig: Central Bankers as Policymakers of Last Resort: “Central banks… have been shouldering ever-increasing policy burdens beyond their core mandate…. The end result is that tools available to the central bank may be used excessively but ineffectively…” :: I would say central bankers should be (a) more modest, but also (b) commit not to price stability but to making Say’s Law true in practice…
  • Charles Arthur: Artificial Intelligence: “‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’…” :: Just what is it that makes some personal service jobs–personal-care attendant, housekeeper–low-status and Low-pay, while keeping others–investment manager who fails to beat the indexes–high status and high pay?
  • Jeffry Frieden: ‘The Money Makers,’ by Eric Rauchway: “For the next 10 years, even as war clouds gathered and then as war raged, American and British policy makers, led by John Maynard Keynes and the United States Treasury official Harry Dexter White, planned a new international monetary order…” :: Few people today realize the extent to which the New Deal was not ideological or theoretical but rather their opposites: pragmatic. And where the New Deal was ideological or theoretical, it tended to be the least successful–witness Thurman Arnold and utilities, or Roosevelt’s austerian turn in 1937-1938.
  • William Poole: Don’t Blame the Fed for Low Rates: “Long-term rates reflect weak job creation and credit demand, both a result of President Obama’s poor economic stewardship…” :: The factors he points to… would… produce both (a) a fall in interest rates and (b) a fall in the equity values of established companies. We have the first. We do not have the second…