J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 113

I do not understand this alternative. Tapping into global...

I do not understand this alternative. Tapping into global markets is great���if you have something to sell. But if low-wage labor is no longer a powerful source of potential comparative advantage, what then do poor countries have to sell that could jump-start development? There is labor, there is capital, there is expertise, there is your natural resource base. Poor counties are poor because they lack capital and expertise. And as for natural resources���well, "resource curse" is a phrase often heard for good reasons:

Michael Spence: The ���Digital Revolution��� of Wellbeing: "In the early stages of development... labor-intensive process-oriented manufacturing and assembly has played an indispensable role.... Advances in robotics and automation are now eroding the developing world���s traditional source of comparative advantage.... E-commerce platforms... the real prize is the global marketplace. Only if digital platforms could be extended to tap into global demand would they suggest an alternative growth model (provided that tariffs and regulatory barriers do not get in the way)...

#noted

I do not see this as a "silver lining" at all. To say tha...

I do not see this as a "silver lining" at all. To say that there are now trends for factories to locate close to demand is not an alternative source of regional comparative advantage and disadvantage but rather an amplifier of other sources. Ultimately, customers are located in regions that have regional exports. A region that does not have large regional exports���and the prospect of growing more���will not be attractive to firms making long-run decisions and attempting to locate where there customers will be. It is likely to be a very uphill climb:

Rana Foroohar: The Silver Lining for Labour Markets | Financial Times: "The McKinsey Global Institute found that globalisation was actually bottom of the list of the top five reasons that labour���s share of national income has declined since the turn of the 21st century.... The biggest reason... supercycles in areas such as commodities and real estate have made those sectors, which favour capital over labour, a larger part of the overall economy.... Reason number two���a rise in the importance of intangible assets... Automation and the speeding up of capital substitution because of technological shifts have hurt traditional industrial areas disproportionately.... But in the future it will also radically favour a few regions... a mere 25 cities and regions could account for 60 per cent of US job growth by 2030.... Tech hubs will benefit, of course, as will commodity-rich areas and tourism centres catering to the wealthy. But so will... regions... capitalis[ing] on a silver lining.... When labour makes up less of the overall cost of producing goods and services, then offshoring jobs starts to make less sense. What does make sense is being closer to customer demand.... Companies such as Nike and Adidas have built highly automated 'speed-factories' in the US, Mexico and Germany to roll out the latest styles faster and more cheaply.... The solution: shift policy to support human capital investment.... If we continue to subsidise software without supporting people, the future looks grim.

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Ben Thompson: What Is a Tech Company?: "Note the centrali...

Ben Thompson: What Is a Tech Company?: "Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics: (1) Software creates ecosystems. (2) Software has zero marginal costs. (3) Software improves over time. (4) Software offers infinite leverage. (5) Software enables zero transaction costs. The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software���s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors. Consider Netflix, a company that both competes with traditional television and movie companies yet is also considered a tech company: (1) There is no real software-created ecosystem. (2) Netflix shows are delivered at zero marginal costs without the need to pay distributors (although bandwidth bills are significant). (3) Netflix���s product improves over time. (4) Netflix is able to serve the entire world because of software, giving them far more leverage than much of their competition. (5) Netflix can transact with anyone with a self-serve model. Netflix checks four of the five boxes. Airbnb, which has yet to go public, is also often thought of as a tech company, even though they deal with lodging.... Uber, meanwhile, has long been mentioned in the same breath as Airbnb, and for good reason: it checks most of the same boxes.... WeWork... is hard to see how... is a tech company in any way.... Peloton is also iffy as far these five factors go, but then again, so is Apple: software-differentiated hardware is in many respects its own category...

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Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-02:Cal Peternell: A Recipe ...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-02:

Cal Peternell: A Recipe for Cooking https://www.amazon.com/Recipe-Cooking-Cal-Peternell-ebook/dp/B01BBPZI6I/...

Harry Brighouse: Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You���re Lucky https://www.amacad.org/publication/becoming-better-college-teacher-if-youre-lucky: "The narrator noticed the need for improvement through teaching a new class badly, and learning that he had no reason to trust that he, or many others, were teaching other classes better...

Browserling: HTML to Markdown Converter https://www.browserling.com/tools/html-to-markdown...

10 1/2 Big Ideas for 20th Century Economic History https://delong.typepad.com/2017-01-13-10-12-big-ideas-for-20th-century-economic-history-tceh.pdf

The Multimillennial Perspective https://www.icloud.com/pages/0WhM60Lk2bLhiITPcy30b2OMg...

Joan Robinson: Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/07/joan-robinson-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-tuesday-sixty-years-ago-on-the-non-internet-weblogging.html...

Notebook: Discussion of "Communism" and Related Subjects https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/communismresources-a-reading-list.html...

Communism and Really Existing Socialism: A Reading List for Post-Millennials https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/communism-and-really-existing-socialism-a-reading-list-for-post-millennials-1.html

Andrew Lazarus https://independent.academia.edu/Lazarus/CurriculumVitae...

Roger Zelazny: A Night in the Lonesome October https://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Lonesome-October-Roger-Zelazny-ebook/dp/B075R95SZS/...

Skulls in the Stars: October Reading: "A Night in the Lonesome October" https://skullsinthestars.com/2019/09/29/october-reading-a-night-in-the-lonesome-october/...

#noted #verybrieflynoted

Comment of the Day: Kaleberg https://www.bradford-delong....

Comment of the Day: Kaleberg https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/hoisted-from-teh-archives-from-2006-tightwad-hill.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4b47837200d#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4b47837200d: "There's a reason David Lodge, in his Changing Places, set up Euphoric State University to contrast against the University of Rummidge, a thinly disguised University of Birmingham. Physically quite different, they were both complex mazes of bureaucracy, idiocy and academic power plays. I mainly knew UCB computer science types, mainly graduate students. They were used to pain in the ass computers, so the institution bothered them less. Besides, they all had obvious fall backs and side gigs across the bay. The humanities types I knew there called it 'Beserkely'. Becoming a small fish in a big pond is a common problem at MIT. For just about any given task that you find at the edge of your abilities, there are going to be a good number of people who find it 'intuitively obvious'. When I went to MIT there were three physics tracks for those who hadn't placed out of the course (via AP test or prior credits). Drop date was almost two months into the term, and one could easily transfer before then. MIT admits students based on grades and enthusiasm. There is almost always a number of tasks that one finds intuitively obvious but seems nearly impossible to the rest of the class...

#commentoftheday

Twitter Week of October 1

#noted #twitter

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-01:Alain Naef: CV https://w...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-01:

Alain Naef: CV https://www.dropbox.com/s/w6ck5ly5vmpve4r/CV%20Alain%20Naef.pdf?dl=0

Alain Naef: Blowing against the Wind? A Narrative Approach to Central Bank Foreign Exchange Intervention https://delong.typepad.com/naef-wiind.pdf

Wikipedia: Deioces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deioces

Wikipedia: Effective Population Size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size

Dave Guarino: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveguarino/: Apply for California Food Stamps Online | GetCalFresh.org https://www.getcalfresh.org/

Marshall Berman: _All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity https://books.google.com/books?id=mox1ywiyhtgC

ASPE: 2019 Poverty Guidelines https://aspe.hhs.gov/2019-poverty-guidelines

David Singh Grewal https://www.law.berkeley.edu/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/david-singh-grewal/

Possibly the worst thing written in April, 2019: Benjamin Wittes: Attorney General Bill Barr Deserves a Fair Chance https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/give-william-barr-benefit-doubt/586207/: "Judge the attorney general by what he ultimately sends to Congress...

Amazon: Yves Cohen https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B004N7QBZE

UC Berkeley: Interdisciplinary Studies Field https://isf.ugis.berkeley.edu/

Does the expansion in the money stock reflect an outward shift in the demand-for-money or in the supply-of-money schedule? That is the question that is ignored in the fruitless debate between the banking and currency schools: Wikipedia: British Currency School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Currency_School Wikipedia: British Banking School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Banking_School...

Charles P. Kindleberger: Manias, Panics, and Crashes https://delong.typepad.com/manias.pdf

Muscat Water Temperature https://www.seatemperature.org/middle-east/oman/muscat.htm

Paul Krugman: Target Zones and Exchange Rate Dynamics https://delong.typepad.com/krugman-target-zones.pdf: "Target zone... the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even... inside the zone... a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty...

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Hoisted from the Archives from 2006: Tightwad Hill

Tightwad Hill: Stanford Week: "Many of the great rivalries are fundamentally class rivalries - the "big-city" university v the land grant agriculture college. This is what fuels Alabama/Auburn, or Oregon/OSU. Some are even about religion (BYU/Utah) or fashion (USC/UCLA). Cal/Stanford is the only great rivalry that's fundamentally about ideology.... The ideology at play here is authoritarianism. Cal teaches its own to question authority by imposing a faceless, soul-crushing bureaucracy upon its students.... Four years at Berkeley feels like a Kafka novel-you come out with a perhaps too-healthy skepticism of professors, administrators, Presidents and the like. Stanford is a school next to a mall and some golf courses that is populated by cheerful authority figures who want to like you. They serve as your counselor, and help you choose your classes. They arrange comfy dorm rooms, and social events with your fellow fascinating students drawn from all parts of the country. They want you to succeed, because you're one of them-the few, the proud, the elites. Isn't it grand? You exit Stanford feeling really, really good about yourself. You exit Berkeley happy to have survived the experience. Berkeley is exhilirating; Stanford is pleasant. Both sets of alumni run the world, but only one group of alumni feels entitled to...

#berkeley hoistedfromthearchives #stanford

Duncan Black: Just Like Any Other President https://www.e...

Duncan Black: Just Like Any Other President https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/09/just-like-any-other-president.html: "I can imagine the conversations in newsrooms when Trump became president. They aren't all that stupid. "How are we supposed to cover this freak show of a man?" And the answer they came to is "we cover it like we cover any other presidency." But that's not what they've done, even if they think it is. They aren't covering Trump as they would've covered Obama or even George W. Bush. Pretending everything is normal is not normal coverage. Normally "tan suits" are enough to cause a freakout....

Dan Froomkin: _ "The AP_ https://twitter.com/froomkin/status/1178643473387462657?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1178643473387462657&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eschatonblog.com%2F2019%2F09%2Fjust-like-any-other-president.html simply ignores Trump���s civil war threat and his call for Schiff to be tried for treason...

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Duncan Black: This Is Excellent News For John McCain http...

Duncan Black: This Is Excellent News For John McCain https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/09/this-is-excellent-news-for-john-mccain.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/bRuz+(Eschaton): "It always is: "Executive Director of the McCain Institute Kurt Volker resigned from his position as the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Friday, following reports he collaborated with Ukraine and President Donald Trump. An ASU official confirmed Volker's resignation Friday, and said the University could not speak about his future at ASU because the University does not comment on personnel matters...

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