J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 116

Fifteen Worthy Reads from September 27, 2018

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

This may well be the most important paper we publish this year: Suresh Naidu, Eric A. Posner, and E. Glen Weyl: Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power: "Labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation...

Kate Bahn puts her finger on something that has long, long bothered me about the labor market literature on inequality. "Good jobs" are jobs that are well-paid. "Respected occupations" are occupations that lead to good jobs. And the "intrinsic" characteristics of the work have very little to do with whether a job is well-paid or not, and thus little to do with whether it is a "good job" or not: Kate Bahn: @lipstickecon: "This FRB report concludes that declining prime-age LFP is due to the decline in "traditional blue-collar jobs" without deconstructing what made these 'traditional' jobs good-unions...

Equitable Growth alumnus John Schmitt sends us to Lawrence Mishel: Further Evidence That the Tax Cuts Have Not Led to Widespread Bonuses, Wage or Compensation Growth: "Following the bill���s passage, a number of corporations made conveniently-timed announcements that their workers would be getting raises or bonuses.... Newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics��� Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data allow us to examine nonproduction bonuses in the first two quarters of 2018...

Arindrajit Dube and friends have a pick-up discussion on how to characterize the impact of employer monopsony power: Arindrajit Dube: @arindube: "I think growing evidence suggets "laissez faire" equilibrium is monopsonistic. So shocks like de-unionization, outsourcing and eroding wage norms can push down pay in ways hard to understand with competitive lab mkts. But the shock may not be increased concentration itself...

Lisa D. Cook is worried that the quantity of Big Data cannot compensate for its low quality. Statistics gives us lots of power with representative random samples. Nothing can give us power without the tools to do what representativeness does: Lisa D. Cook: @drlisadcook: "'Without taking data quality into account, population inferences with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox...

 

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Universal Basic Income or Universal Living Wage?: "The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they pay enough to provide a decent standard of living.... A universal basic income (UBI) would be both regressive and prohibitively expensive. Yet the idea continues to attract a motley crew...

Rob Johnson and George Soros: A Better Bailout Was Possible: "A critical opportunity was missed when the burden of post-crisis adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors.... When President Barack Obama���s administration arrived, one of us (Soros) repeatedly appealed to Summers... [for] equity injection into fragile financial institutions and... writ[ing] down mortgages to a realistic market value.... Summers objected that ... such a policy reeked of socialism and America is not a socialist country...

Paul Krugman: The Careerism and De Facto Soft Corruption of the Center_: "given Kavanaugh's record (sexual assault aside) and the Whelan stunt it's now clear that the right-wing judicial establishment is full of charlatans and cranks.... What's different is how respectfully the judicial crazies have been treated by the non-right-wing legal establishment...

I highlighted this two years ago. I am highlighting it again, as I think it has not received the attention it deserves. Ernest Liu: Industrial Policies in Production Networks: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of interventions?...

Paul Krugman: What Do We Actually Know About the Economy?: "Among macroeconomists, the self-criticism seems to me to be mainly too narrow: people berate themselves for, say, not giving financial markets a bigger role in their models, but few have done what they should, which is to question the whole direction macroeconomics has gone these past four decades or so...

Josh Marshall: @joshtpm: "Even before this came up, Brett Kavanaugh seems to lie a lot. The stuff with the Manny Miranda hacking scandal is what really stood out to me. Aside from denying the central accusations, he���s even more obviously lying about the ���Renate alumni��� stuff...

Beatrice Cherrier: @Undercoverhist: "The second part of this article is totally accurate, but omitting key information in the first part seriously weakens the overall message (any resemblance to other Duke historians���) The CHOPE received money from conservative Pope and Earhart, which funded, among others, Van Horn���s anti-Hayekian research (https://t.co/v43aoW6L3N). Then got a large grant from progressive INET (https://t.co/mhYbtnkLPO) which funded, among other, Austrian research...

David Warsh: Situations Wanted: "The mood at Duke has been gloomy since its economics department failed to make a place last year for Steven Medema, of the University of Colorado at Denver, in a quarrel over resources.�� Both sides became the loser. Medema, an expert on the law and economics movement and a stalwart of the discipline, was expected to join professors Bruce Caldwell and Kevin Hoover in the core faculty of the Center for the History of Political Economy...

Dan Drezner: The world is laughing at President Trump: "That is bad news for America.... Trump claimed that he intended to inspire the laughter, but that dog won���t hunt...

Silvia Merler: Economy of Intangibles: "Over the past 20 years, there has been a steady rise in the importance of intangible investments.... Intangibles share four economic features: scalability, sunkenness, spillovers, and synergies. Haskel and Westlake argue that���taken together���these measurements and economic properties might help us understand secular stagnation...

Remember: The current Republican administration's foreign...

Remember: The current Republican administration's foreign policy is even less coherent and more deranged than his economic policy:

Josh Barro: "I don't understand the point of withdrawing from the Iran deal and sanctioning Iran, but then giving Iran financial aid to offset the effects of the sanctions in order to induce them to stay in the deal...

#noted

New and well worth reading from Lisa Cook and Jan Gerson:...

New and well worth reading from Lisa Cook and Jan Gerson: The Implications of U.S. Gender and Racial Disparities in Income and Wealth Inequality at Each Stage Of The Innovation Process: "Women and underrepresented minorities in the United States have obtained an increasing share of bachelor���s degrees and other advanced degrees in... STEM.... Yet there has been no similar increase in patenting.... Closing this gender and racial gap in the U.S. innovation process could increase U.S. Gross Domestic Product per capita by 2.7 percent.... Mentoring.... Exposing children to invention and innovation.... A recent paper in Nature finds that... patent applications with women as lead inventors are rejected more often.... Workplace climate...

#noted

James Harding: Tortoise: What We Are For: "We believe tha...

James Harding: Tortoise: What We Are For: "We believe that the coming age of artificial intelligence requires a moral intelligence���and so, as innovation permeates our lives, we stand for the human interest.... The power gap is widening. The powerful are fewer in number, more remote and less accountable.... People are locked out of the decisions that govern their lives; leadership���s gone AWOL; democracy is weakening. If we can agree on anything, it���s that our times require new thinking. We hope that if we take a little longer and open up the process of journalism, we can better understand these problems and foster new ideas. We���re trying to come to a better informed point of view on our future.... We are, let���s face it, a tiny journalism start-up. We���ve only recently moved out of my kitchen. We don���t have a manifesto. We���re not running for office; we���ve only just rented one.... We���d like to tell some stories.... We aim to tell original ones well, to report them deeply and discuss them openly...

#noted

This is key to why distributional national accounts are b...

This is key to why distributional national accounts are becoming increasingly essential for understanding what is going on: Heather Boushey: Testimony before the House Budget Committee https://equitablegrowth.org/testimony-by-heather-boushey-before-the-house-budget-committee/: "National economic statistics are becoming less representative of the experience of most Americans. The implication for how policymakers and economists alike evaluate the economy is that average economic progress is pulling away from median economic progress. We see these same divergent trends across multiple measures of economic wellbeing: wages, income, and wealth...

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Tremendously disturbing. The question in the marketplace ...

Tremendously disturbing. The question in the marketplace should aways be "is your money good?" not "I don't like your face". The second is tremendously destructive to human liberty:

Kevin Drum: A Third of Republicans Think It���s OK to Refuse Service to Muslims: "I���m never quite sure how seriously to take survey results, and today Paul Waldman points to a new PRRI survey that I really, really don���t want to take seriously.... Thanks to a baker in Colorado, we���re all accustomed to the idea that conservatives think business owners should be free to refuse service to gay people if their refusal is based on religious belief. But apparently large numbers of them also think it���s fine to refuse service to Muslims, Jews, and African Americans.... Among Democrats, there���s apparently a single, smallish contingent���around 14-19 percent of the total���that thinks it���s OK to discriminate against anyone. But among Republicans, it varies. About 18 percent think it���s OK to discriminate against blacks compared to 47 percent who think it���s OK to discriminate against gay people. Jews and Muslims and atheists are in the middle.... There���s a liberal bloc that, on principle, thinks businesses should be allowed to discriminate however they want. Conservatives, by contrast, don���t think that. They endorse discrimination more or less strongly depending on how much they dislike the group in question. So to circle back to the beginning, I wonder how seriously to take this?...

#noted

Diverse scholars at conferences ask different questions, ...

Diverse scholars at conferences ask different questions, and questions as if not more important than the mainstream. Will McGrew reports Will McGrew: The National Economic Association and the American Society of Hispanic Economists Work to Diversify and Strengthen Economics Research: "Last month, the National Economic Association and the American Society of Hispanic Economists hosted the sixth annual NEA-ASHE Freedom and Justice Conference at University of New Mexico���s Department of Economics. As in previous years, this conference provided an invaluable contribution to the field by elevating new communities, topics, and methodologies within economics research. Indeed, the papers presented at the conference painted a fuller picture of the current state of the U.S. economy and provided empirically grounded recommendations for a stronger and fairer economic future...

#noted

Quantum Supremacy

Quantum supremacy! We were all but certain that it would come. I mean, after all, leaves. A leaf is a solar panel attached to quantum computers attached to energy-storage mechanisms that does things no "classical" solar-panel-plus battery could do. But that it is coming so soon is interesting:

John Timmer: Paper Leaks Showing a Quantum Computer Doing Something a Supercomputer Can���t https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/paper-leaks-showing-a-quantum-computer-doing-something-a-supercomputer-cant/: "This hardware is not the makings of a general-purpose quantum computer... you can trust. We needed error-corrected qubits before these results; we still need them after. And it's possible to argue that this was less 'performing a computation' than simply 'repeatedly measuring a quantum system to get a probability distribution'. But that seriously understates what's going on here.... There is simply no way to get that probability distribution using a classical computer. With this system, we can get it in under 10 minutes.... There's no obvious barrier to scaling up quantum computations. The hard part is the work needed to set a certain number of qubits in a specific state and then entangle them.... Recognizing the error rate, however, the researchers suggest that we're not seeing the dawn of quantum computing, but rather what they call 'Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum technologies'.... This particular system's only obvious use is to produce a validated random number generator...

#noted

Hoisted from the Archives: From 2007: Your One-Stop Shop for All Your 70th Anniversary Leftist Sectarian Polemic Blogging Needs

Hoisted from the Archives: From 2007: Your One-Stop Shop for All Your 70th Anniversary Leftist Sectarian Polemic Blogging Needs https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/your_onestop_sh.html: In anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the bloody Stalinist suppression of the Partido Obrero de Unificaci��n Marxista in the Barcelona May Days, we are--thanks to Jacob Levy--proud to bring you the latest in sectarian Marxist polemics blogging. First, we have Eric Hobsbawm declaring that George Orwell was a Traitor to Humanity by telling the truth about what he saw in Spain:

Eric Hobsbawm: Writers supported [the Republican cause in] Spain... Hemingway, Malraux, Bernanos and virtually all the notable contemporary young British poets-Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice did. Spain was the experience that was central to their lives between 1936 and 1939.... Polemics about the civil war [within the Left]... have never ceased since 1939. This was not so while the war was still continuing, although such incidents as the banning of the dissident Marxist Poum party and the murder of its leader Andr��s Nin caused some international protest. Plainly a number of foreign volunteers... were shocked by... the behaviour of the Russians and much else...

And yet, during the war, the doubters remained silent... They did not want to give aid to the enemies of the great cause.... The exception proves the rule: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.... Orwell himself admitted after his return from Spain that "a number of people have said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what is happening in Spain and the part played by the Communist Party because to do so would prejudice public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco."... Only in the cold-war era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure....

Polemics... are legitimate... only if we separate out debate on real issues from the parti pris of political sectarianism, cold-war propaganda and pure ignorance.... A serious war conducted by a government requires structure, discipline and a degree of centralisation. What characterises social revolutions like that of [Spain in] 1936 is local initiative, spontaneity, independence of, or even resistance to, higher authority.... In short, what was and remains at issue in these debates is what divided Marx and Bakunin. Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant.... The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organisation... remains real.... Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines....

Moral revulsion against Stalinism and the behaviour of its agents in Spain is justified.... yet... not central to the problem of the civil war. Marx would have had to confront Bakunin even if all on the republican side had been angels.... Among those who fought for the republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin...

Second, we have a reply by Stephen Schwartz, whose affection for Eric Hobsbawm is far smaller than mine:

Eric Hobsbawm's Stalinist Homage to Catalonia: Eric Hobsbawm... political and pseudo-intellectual legacy of Stalinism... banal but repellent rehash... long-discredited clich��s... fundamental lie of Stalinist propaganda, which holds that the Republicans would have won the war if they had submitted to dictation from Moscow....

Hobsbawm... contemptible exercise in pseudo-history... CNT militants in the uprising at Casas Viejas, a rural hamlet in Andalusia, in 1933.... Jerome Mintz... exposed Hobsbawm as a mendacious tourist.... ���[H]is account is based primarily on a preconceived evolutionary model of political development rather than on data gathered in field research.��� Mintz correctly states, ���The model scales labor movements in accord with their progress toward mass parties and central authority... [Hobsbawm] explains how anarchosyndicalists were presumed to act rather than what actually took place... his evolutionary model misled him on virtually every point.���... In Spain today Mintz���s work, based on extensive and serious research and interviews, enjoys high esteem....

Hobsbawm... the Guardian in 2007... attack[s] [George] Orwell, the [Catalonian Anarchist Movement] POUM, and the general legacy of the Spanish revolution....

Three distinct trends appeared on the Republican side [of the Spanish Cvil War]:

the Catalan Left, Basque nationalists, and other liberal bourgeois trends who wanted to carry out a Jacobin-style modernization;
the proletarian upsurge of the CNT, Socialists, and POUM;
the Stalinist conspiracy to create a one-party dictatorship.

Moscow tried to unite 1) with 3) to overcome 2), but 1) and 2) had more in common with each other, and the attempt failed. Stalin, however, succeeded in effectively sabotaging the Republican defense; his discreet 1938 message to Hitler indicating Soviet willingness to withdraw support for the Republic was a crucial step....

The Stalinist view of [George] Orwell put forward by... [Hobsbawm] dismisses Homage to Catalonia because it was turned down by a Soviet-lining publisher.... For Hobsbawm, Orwell is not only illegitimate because his book did not sell well, but because he was ���an awkward, marginal figure.���... As to the POUM... Hobsbawm.. refers with something approaching disdain to ���the murder of its leader Andr��s Nin [having] caused some international protest.... Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant here and, given that party���s small size and marginal role in the civil war, barely significant.���...

Andreu Nin (1892-1937) was not simply... leader of an anti-Stalinist party. He was also a respected Catalan-language journalist and the translator into Catalan of several major Russian works, including Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina. His versions of these classics are still widely known in Catalonia, and it is mainly because of them that his murder by the Stalinists has never been forgotten.... Nin's assassination was the subject of a prime-time documentary, Operaci�� Nikolai, shown on the Catalan channel TV3 in 1992.... To kill Nin was not the same as it would have been to murder, say, the American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, but would have been more like liquidating John Dos Passos....

The role of the POUM in Catalan history was never marginal... it filled the Marxist political space in the region���s labor movement... its members included most of the original founders of the Spanish Communist party, and it embraced ���minority��� nationalism, i.e. Catalanism, at a time when such a position was novel in Spain and... almost unknown elsewhere in the Western European left....

Hobsbawm informs us ���Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines.��� Once again, the Stalin-nostalgia betrays his ignorance of Spanish reality.... [T]he militia units generally fought better than the militarized units.... [T]he Stalinist-controlled International Brigades and the militarized Republican soldiery with whom they were coordinated were known for incompetence in battle, desertion, and, in the case of many of the foreigners, their reassignment to special groups ordered by the Russians to kill leftist dissidents, since the Spanish would not carry out such duties....

The Spanish knew so many things that Hobsbawm will never know ��� and above all, they know that while Orwell���s methods might not have guaranteed the victory of the Spanish Republic, those of Stalin and his admirers assured its defeat...

#history #hoistedfromthearchives #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere

Joseph Stalin (1935): "The Pope! https://en.wikiquote.org...

Joseph Stalin (1935): "The Pope! https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin How many divisions has he got?... (Said sarcastically to Pierre Laval in 1935, in response to being asked whether he could do anything with Russian Catholics to help Laval win favour with the Pope, to counter the increasing threat of Nazism; as quoted in The Second World War (1948) by Winston Churchill vol. 1, ch. 8, p. 105.)

#noted