J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 128

I missed this too when it came out three years ago: Chris...

I missed this too when it came out three years ago: Chris Blattman: Black Lives Matter, Economic History Edition: "Trevon Logan���s Presidential address to the National Economics Association. Partly he calculates the productivity of his sharecropping ancestors relative to slave holding estates a century before (a persistent question in American economic history). But mainly he makes an argument for doing more qualitative interviews, which seems like an obvious point, except that systematic qualitative work is the exception in economic history (as it is in development economics): 'That richer, fuller picture reveals that the work behind the estimates came to define the way that the Logan children viewed racial relations, human capital, savings, investment, and nearly every aspect of their lives..... We also learn that it is impossible to divorce the work from its social environment, an era in which Jim Crow, segregation, and other elements of overt racial oppression were a fact of life...

#noted

Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Death of Penda

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J.A. Giles and J. Ingram trans.): Death of Penda: "A.D. 655. This year Penda was slain at Wingfield, and thirty royal personages with him, some of whom were kings. One of them was Ethelhere, brother of Anna, king of the East-Angles. The Mercians after this became Christians...

...From the beginning of the world had now elapsed five thousand eight hundred and fifty winters, when Peada, the son of Penda, assumed the government of the Mercians. In his time came together himself and Oswy, brother of King Oswald, and said, that they would rear a minster to the glory of Christ, and the honour of St. Peter. And they did so, and gave it the name of Medhamsted; because there is a well there, called Meadswell. And they began the groundwall, and wrought thereon; after which they committed the work to a monk, whose name was Saxulf. He was very much the friend of God, and him also loved all people. He was nobly born in the world, and rich: he is now much richer with Christ.

But King Peada reigned no while; for he was betrayed by his own queen, in Easter-tide. This year Ithamar, Bishop of Rochester, consecrated Deus-dedit to Canterbury, on the twenty-sixth day of March...

#liveblogging #history #anglosaxonchronicle

Tim Duy: Paving The Way To Rate Cuts: "The Fed will cut i...

Tim Duy: Paving The Way To Rate Cuts: "The Fed will cut interest rates at least 25bp in September.... The manufacturing sector is weak.... Still... the slowdown in the sector has yet to match that of 2015-16 nor does it even approach something consistent with a recession. I have said this before, but it should be said again: As manufacturing becomes a smaller portion of the economy, we should expect more instances of manufacturing downturns or even manufacturing recessions being separate from the overall business cycle. In contrast, the much larger consumer sector of the economy continues to power forward. Retail sales sustained the rebound from turn-of-the-year weakness and core sales are again growing at a roughly 5% year-over-year rate.... The general continued strength in spending reflects the solid labor market. In my opinion, job losses need to mount before consumer spending will crumble. Low and steady initial unemployment claims indicate that those job losses are not yet on the horizon...

#noted

Ancient Economies: A Malthusian Model: Markdown Notebook

DRAFT: Ancient Economies: A Malthusian Model : The math for complicating the standard Solow Growth Model with (a) a rate of population growth that depends positively on the excess of spending on necessities above "subsistence" and (b) a level of the efficiency-of-labor that depends inversely on population, as a higher population induces resource scarcity that makes labor less productive. For understanding both the long-term apparent stagnation of living standards between the Neolithic and the Industrial Revolutions, and for understanding the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Question: How should we add on to the Python class for the Solow Growth Model to turn this into a tool for doing problem sets for Econ 101b (and perhaps 135):

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/LS2019/blob/master/2019-08-17-Ancient_Economies.ipynb

#berkeley #economicgrowth #economichistory #highlighted #jupyter #notebook #python #teaching #teachinghistory

A Competitive Market: Python Class/Notebook

DRAFT: A Competitive Market: A Python class for a competitive market equilibrium with linear supply and demand curves���equilibrium price, equilibrium quantity, producer surplus, consumer surplus, total surplus. Looks for input parameters giving the slopes of the demand and supply curves, plus the maximum willingness-to-pay of the most eager demander and the minimum opportunity cost of the most efficient supplier. Now ready to hand over to others for editing, tightening, and additions.

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/LS2019/blob/master/2019-08-10_market.ipynb

#berkeley #economics #highlighted #jupyter #notebook #python #teaching #teachingeconomics

Solow Growth Model: Python Class/Notebook

CANDIDATE: Solow Growth Model Derived and modified from Stachurski-Sargent http://quantecon.org. A Python class for simulations using the Solow Growth Model, with additional code for performing simulations with baseline- and alternative-scenario parameter values. Focuses on the capital-output ratio �� as the key state variable, as it is (a) observable, and (b) with constant growth-model parameter values converges exactly (in continuous time at least) as an exponential. Now ready to hand over to others for tightening and additions:

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/LS2019/blob/master/2019-08-08-Sargent-Stachurski.ipynb

#berkeley #highlighted #jupyter #macro #notebook #python #teaching #teachingmacro

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: Aug ...

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: Aug 16, 2019: : "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.8% for 2019:Q3. News from this week's data releases increased the nowcast for 2019:Q3 by 0.2 percentage point. Positive surprises from building permits and retail sales were only partially offset by negative surprises from industrial production and capacity utilization...

#noted

August 16, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update

There was little news about real GDP last week: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York nowcast continues to stand at 1.8% for 2019:Q3. The real news was:

A change from one week ago: The market continues to lower interest rates at the long end of the yield curve.
A change from 1 month ago: The Trump trade war picture becomes increasingly confused and irrational.
* **A change from 3 months ago: A no-deal Brexit is now not just a possibility, but more likely than not.
A change from 6 months ago: The Federal Reserve has���behind the curve���become convinced that it raised interest rates too much in 2018, and is now likely to cut them.
A change from 6 months ago: Trump trade-war tensions are higher.

We saw another twenty-five basis points of market easing at the long end of the yield curve: the 10-Year TIPS yield is now negative. The market has now delivered 170 basis points of easing in the 10-year Treasury window since the end of last October, and 140 basis points to the 30-year bond. On the 30-year bond, you would have made a 30% profit if you bought it last October and sold it today, compared to a 3.5% profit on the S&P Composite over the same period. That is a major, major sentiment shift. That means that a number of people short debt with riskier operations than the S&P Composite are about to face margin calls and rollover difficulties. We will shortly see how solvent the market judges them.

No, it is not yet August 2007. But it is much closer to August 2007 than I expected to see for another generation.
��
 

Talking Points:

The Federal Reserve has, largely through jawboning, eased policy substantially over the past six months.
The trade wars that Trump is waging is a major source of uncertainty, and a possible recession risk.
U.S. potential economic growth continues to be a hair above 2%/year.
There are still no signs the U.S. has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating or of needed interest-rate normalization: secular stagnation continues to reign.
The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut has been a complete failure at boosting the American economy through increased investment in America. But it has been a success in making the rich richer and thus America more unequal. Those who beat the drum for it owe us an explanation for why they got it wrong. They have not provided one: shame on them.




#macro #forecasting #highlighted


pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2flhnnlox3mokb8/2019-08-16-Forecasting-Update.pdf?dl=0

Pages: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0Dy9UoT9MrXHCl7tiKebMUokw https://www.icloud.com/pages/0Dy9UoT9MrXHCl7tiKebMUokw

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Edit This File: https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f0800388340240a4c1e2ea200b/edit

Forecasting: https://www.bradford-delong.com/forecasting.html

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth and Elsewhere... August 16, 2018

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth...

An excellent piece from Marinescu, Dinan, and Hovenkamp: one of our working papers laying out how the analysis of how antitrust policy should be done given that compensated firms face their counter parties not just in the product but in labor markets. I think this is the most important thing I have seen out of our shop here at Equitable Growth this week*Ioana Marinescu, James G. Dinan, and Herbert Hovenkamp*: Anticompetitive mergers in labor markets: "Increased market concentration in labor markets threatens to facilitate coordinated interaction among employers that could lead to lower output and wage suppression in employment markets...

As Michael Kades writes, ���the stakes are much higher than an ideological battle or technical adjustments to a legal regime��� here. We need to understand how anti-trust practice affects the degree of monopoly in the United States and Hal monopoly effects equitable growth and societal well being. We do not. I think that attempting to understand these two issues is the most important analytic issue for policy relevant economic research in the United States today: Michael Kades: Why market competition matters to equitable growth: "At first glance, competition in the U.S. economy may seem far afield of the topic of equitable growth.... What could antitrust enforcement have to do with maintaining a healthy economy?...

The analysis of rising inequality and its effects in the United States and elsewhere over the past generation has suffered from a relative downplaying of the role of the family and how income gets earned and then transformed Into well-being. Central to this is the rapidly changing economic role of women in the workforce, but that is not all of it. We need more and better analyses of her public policy needs to shift in the context of changing family structure and rising inequality. Elizabeth Jacobs presents some of our thinking about how Equitable Growth is and will be trying to support this effort: Elizabeth Jacobs: Rethinking 20th century policies to support 21st century families: "...As a raft of research illustrates, economic growth is increasingly concentrating at the top...

Our Kate Bahn Reminds us: Kate Bahn: "This needs to be screamed from the rooftops.... We cannot have a substantive conversation about how tight the labor market is without examining demographic disparities..." ands sends us to Equitable Growth alumnus John Schmitt quoting Janelle Jones at: Laura Maggi: Despite Drop in Black Unemployment, Significant Disparities Remain: "The African-American unemployment rate... low���compared to historic numbers. In July, it was 6.6 percent...

Not to put the pressure on or anything, but I expect very good things from our Equitable Growth grant to: Matthew Staiger: Parental Resources And The Career Choices of Young Workers: "With a specific focus on the impact of parental resources on entrepreneurship and job mobility...

Worthy Reads Elsewhere...

Dan Drezner: The invisible heroism of Paul Ryan: "Back in March,��I wrote.... 'Why, exactly, is Paul D. Ryan being so quiet? What does he hope to accomplish at this point? I don���t know. I would love to hear from someone who does'...

The utility of history for rational self-government: David Walsh: "That Twitter is the major forum for this says a lot about the pitiful state of our institutional capacity...

Erica Groshen and Robert Groves: Better Data for a Better Economy: "Mov[ing] the Bureau of Labor Statistics���the source of statistics on jobs, wages, working conditions, productivity and prices���from the Labor Department to the Commerce Department...

Nancy L. Yu, Preston Atteberry, Peter B. Bach: Spending On Prescription Drugs In The US: Where Does All The Money Go?: "The US pharmaceutical industry is characterized by a complex and often opaque system of distribution and reimbursement...

No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial costs and no benefits at all: Thomas DeLeire: The Effect of Disenrollment from Medicaid on Employment, Insurance Coverage, Health and Health Care Utilization: "From July through September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules...

A very good point here: there is good reason not to take a markup-free model as our benchmark from which we begin our analysis of Trump: Ben Golub: Krugman Thinks Efficiency Loss of a Trade War Is Small: "Krugman thinks efficiency loss of a trade war is small (Harberger triangle size) even though trade is now in intermediates along supply chains...

Smart proposal to unify U.S. statistical agencies in the Department of Commerce: Erica L. Groshen and���Robert M. Groves: Op-Ed: "We depend largely on three professional government agencies: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau...

Cathy O'Neal: Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth: "I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They���re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created...

Kate Aronoff: What the ���New York Times��� Climate Blockbuster Missed: "Nathaniel Rich���s article illustrates American failures, not global ones...

Alexandra Erin: Fear, and Fear of Witches: "There's fear, and then there's fear of witches...

Michael Tomasky: Hail to the Chief: "It���s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists...

Paul Krugman: Supply Chains and Trade War: "There are three possible stories about how supply chains might increase the costs of trade war, and while two of them are right, I suspect that many economists are buying into the third, which isn���t...

Mattheew Fay: The U.S. Military is a Tool, but the President Thinks it���s a Trophy: "The president routinely complains that the United States can���t afford to maintain its alliance commitments... suggests military exercises on the Korean Peninsula are so costly that they can be traded for vague promises of North Korean denuclearization.... The president will preside over a military parade in Washington, D.C., later this year that will cost nearly as much as the exercises. What explains this apparent contradiction?...

Michael Tomasky: What Are Capitalists Thinking?: "Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face.... The kind of capitalism that has been practiced in this country over the last few decades has made socialism look far more appealing.... If you���re 28 like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... what have you seen during your sentient life?...

Why are Fox News's victims so easily-grifted with respect to making them scared of liberal universities?: Jacob T. Levy: "I���ve made a lot of arguments in my life to people who didn���t want to hear them. I argued about sodomy laws and Bowers vs Hardwick with my grandmother when I was 15...

Doug Irwin: Trump���s trade policy is an exercise in futility: "Yet for all the Sturm und Drang of his trade policy, the president is likely to end up being terribly disappointed by the results of his efforts...

#hoistedfromthearchives #noted

Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Conversion of the Middle-Angles

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J.A. Giles and J. Ingram trans.): Conversion of the Middle-Angles: "A.D. 652. This year Kenwal fought at Bradford by the Avon. A.D. 653...

...This year, the Middle-Angles under alderman Peada received the right belief.

A.D. 654. This year King Anna was slain, and Botolph began to build that minster at Icanhoe. This year also died Archbishop Honorius, on the thirtieth of September...

#liveblogging #history #anglosaxonchronicle