Things to Read on the Evening of February 1, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : “Scientists from Stanford Medical Center have devised a technique for extending the length of human telomeres…”
- : Demographics and GDP: 2% Is the New 4%
- : A Greek Burial for German Austerity
- : The Natural Rate Hypothesis: Past Its Sell-by Date
- : How negative can interest rates go?
- : Dropouts, Taxes and Risk: The Economic Return to College under Realistic Assumptions
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: Baker’s Dozen Sample of Weblogs: “There’s: * Daring Fireball, * Slate Star Codex, * Ta-Nehisi Coates, * Freddie DeBoer, * Noahpinion, * Marginal Revolution, * Elizabeth Stoker Breunig, * Paul Krugman, Digby’s Hullabaloo, * Jared Bernstein, * Brad DeLong, * The Incidental Economist, * Kevin Drum, to name a few. There are plenty of great voices out there.” -
: On Secular Stagnation: “Who would have thought that six years after… advanced economies would still be swimming in an alphabet soup… of unconventional monetary policies?… Just in the last year and a half, the European Central Bank adopted its own version of FG, then moved to ZIRP, and then embraced CE, before deciding to try NDR…. One result of this global monetary-policy activism has been a rebellion among pseudo-economists and market hacks… ‘Austrian’ economists, radical monetarists, gold bugs, and Bitcoin fanatics… repeatedly warned that such a massive increase in global liquidity would lead to hyperinflation, the US dollar’s collapse, sky-high gold prices, and the eventual demise of fiat currencies at the hands of digital krypto-currency counterparts. None of these dire predictions has been borne out…. Most of the doomsayers have barely any knowledge of basic economics. But that has not stopped their views from informing the public debate…. Unemployed workers… chasing too few available jobs… trade and globalization… labor-saving technological innovations… squeezing workers’ jobs and incomes…. Slack in real-estate markets where booms went bust…. North America’s shale-energy revolution has weakened oil and gas prices…. China’s slowdown has undermined demand for a broad range of commodities… a global glut of manufactured and industrial goods…. Rising income inequality, by redistributing income from those who spend more to those who save more, has exacerbated the demand shortfall. So has the asymmetric adjustment between over-saving creditor[s]… and over-spending debtor[s]…. Perhaps more important has been a profound mismatch with fiscal policy. To be effective, monetary stimulus needs to be accompanied by temporary fiscal stimulus, which is now lacking in all major economies…. With long-term interest rates close to zero in most advanced economies (and in some cases even negative), the case for infrastructure spending is indeed compelling…. All of this adds up to a recipe for continued slow growth, secular stagnation, disinflation, and even deflation…. In the absence of appropriate fiscal policies… unconventional monetary policies will remain a central feature of the macroeconomic landscape.” -
: What Andrew Sullivan’s Exit Says: “The incentives of the social web make it a threat to the conversational web. The need to create content that ‘travels’ is at war with the fact that great work often needs to be rooted in a particular place and context… that the reader and the author already share…. We’re getting better at serving a huge audience even as we’re getting worse at serving a loyal one. At Vox, we have some cool ideas that we’re going to roll out in the coming months to try to chip away at this problem, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near a solution…” -
: John Stuart Mill on the Rich and the Elite: “I hate bashing of the honest rich. Of course, the dishonest or unworthy rich are a very different matter…. Whatever arguments one may have for taxing the rich, it is not OK to verbally attack the honest rich. If we fail to give honor to those who became rich by helping to provide goods and services that we value, then we will have to let them keep more money in order to provide appropriate incentives. On the other hand, the more we honor and tend to the souls of the rich, the more we can tax them and still have adequate incentives…. Envy raises complex philosophical issues for utilitarian social welfare maximization, related to issues about respect for the boundaries between people…. Interfering with conspicuous consumption out of one’s envy… has the potential to interfere with the efficient provision of incentives… [and] also often leads to attempts to limit conspicuous excellence…” -
: A Question for Those Skeptical about Fiscal Stimulus: “There are many opponents of fiscal stimulus… e.g. Robert Lucas and Eugene Fama. Some argue that nominal aggregate demand affects only the price level… others argue that fiscal stimulus doesn’t affect aggregate demand. My question is: What about Argentina?… Do fiscal policy skeptics… think that a temporary reduction in Argentine public spending would cause reduced aggregate demand?… If someone who considers himself a fiscal stimulus skeptic realizes that he thinks that austerity is a good anti-inflation tool, then he has a puzzle to solve. I also ask those who believe in expansionary austerity if they think that Argentina should cut aggregate demand and inflationary pressure by raising public spending. If the problem is the over-exuberant confidence fairy, then policy should be designed to damage confidence…”
Should Be Aware of:
- : Inside the Training Revolution
- : Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture
- : Academic Freedom and Anti-Semitism
- : Mark Halperin Is Incapable of Shame
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: Leaving Academia for Finance and then Leaving Finance…: “People who are successful for a while think they know everything. People who are rich think they are always right. People who are both successful and rich are absolutely incredible douchebags. It seems like a law of nature. (i.e. I can only assume that if I ever become rich and successful I will also become a douchebag….) when I think about that last project I was working on, I still get kind of sick to my stomach. It was essentially, and I need to be vague here, a way of collecting dumb money from pension funds. There’s no real way to make that moral, or even morally neutral. There’s no way to see that as scavenging on the marketplace. Nope, that’s just plain chasing after dumb money, and I needed to quit…” -
: Unfogged: “I enjoyed Belle ‘The Blender’ Waring’s follow-up on Chait, and it reminded me of a thought I had after his anti-PC piece: this is going to be interesting just as a psychological study of one guy. He might end up backgrounding his redistributive, government-loving self and becoming by degrees indistinguishable from a lefty-attacking righty so that in twenty years one of today’s kindergartners will say to her friend: ‘Dude, did you know that Jonathan Chait used to be a liberal?’ Or he might do the harder thing, and keep plugging away as one liberal writer among others, with the occasional defensive joke about those disagreements. It’s of no consequence, but I’ll be watching anyway.” -
: Comment on Following Up: “Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens: Actually, reading [TNR] in the 90s when I lived in DC, the vibe was very specific. It was ‘I am a smarmy recent Ivy Leavue grad, likely Jewish, who is completely terrified of being mugged on my way home after work. Also Clinton is surrounded by too many goobers.’ I swear that basically is sufficient to define the magazine’s politics in the early-mid 90s. peep: What’s a goober? Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens: Dumb Arkansas redneck, but in the mind of my ideal-type TNR reporter it basically included anyone who wasn’t exactly like them. Thorn: I hear you, fa, and I’d love to read a more expansive history, but this wasn’t it, I thought. And to dalriata’s second point, the 1991 rap article struck me as almost entirely of a piece with what I was reading in my parents’ National Reviews in ’91. The hard part of all of this is the people who had an emotional attachment to TNR trying to make sense of what they loved and how to justify and/or recreate it, right?…”