J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 131

Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Death of Oswald

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J.A. Giles and J. Ingram trans.): Death of Oswald: "A.D. 642. This year Oswald, king of the Northumbrians, was slain by Penda, king of the Southumbrians, at Mirfield, on the fifth day of August; and his body was buried at Bardney. His holiness and miracles were afterwards displayed on manifold occasions throughout this island; and his hands remain still uncorrupted at Barnburgh...

...The same year in which Oswald was slain, Oswy his brother succeeded to the government of the Northumbrians, and reigned two less than thirty years. A.D. 643. This year Kenwal succeeded to the kingdom of the West-Saxons, and held it one and thirty winters. This Kenwal ordered the old (20) church at Winchester to be built in the name of St. Peter. He was the son of Cynegils.

#liveblogging #history #anglosaxonchronicle

Jacob L. Vigdor: Is Urban Decay Bad? Is Urban Revitalizat...

Jacob L. Vigdor: Is Urban Decay Bad? Is Urban Revitalization Bad Too?: "Many observers argue that urban revitalization harms the poor, primarily by raising rents. Others argue that urban decline harms the poor by reducing job opportunities, the quality of local public services, and other neighborhood amenities. While both decay and revitalization can have negative effects if moving costs are sufficiently high, in general the impact of neighborhood change on utility depends on the strength of price responses to neighborhood quality changes. Data from the American Housing Survey are used to estimate a discrete choice model identifying households' willingness-to-pay for neighborhood quality. These willingness-to-pay estimates are then compared to the actual price changes that accompany observed changes in neighborhood quality. The results suggest that price increases associated with revitalization are smaller than most households' willingness to pay for neighborhood improvements. The results imply that, in general, neighborhood revitalization is more favorable than neighborhood decline...

#noted

Walter Scheidel: A Comparative Perspective on the Determi...

Walter Scheidel: A Comparative Perspective on the Determinants of the Scale and productivity of Maritime Trade in the Roman Mediterranean: "The scale and productivity of maritime trade is a function of environmental conditions, political processes and economic development that determine demand, and more specifically of trading costs. Trading costs are the sum of transportation costs (comprised of the cost of carriage and the cost of risk, most notably predation), transaction costs and financing costs. Comparative evidence from the medieval and early modern periods shows that the cost of predation (caused by war, privateering, piracy, and tolls) and commercial organization (which profoundly affects transaction and financing costs as well as the cost of carriage) have long been the most important determinants of overall trading costs. This suggests that conditions in the Roman period were unusually favorable for maritime trade. Technological innovation, by contrast, was primarily an endogenous function of broader political and economic developments and should not be viewed as a major factor in the expansion of commerce in this period...

#noted

Jamie Powell: A Delirious Defence of Uber: "What���s the ...

Jamie Powell: A Delirious Defence of Uber: "What���s the counterargument here? Well, we soon find out: 'In other words, this company isn't losing money. It's the opposite. It's gathering in enormous sums: Gross bookings were up 31% to nearly $16 billion. Revenue was up 14% to $3.2 billion. Riders increased 30% to 99 million. It's difficult to look at those numbers and conclude that Uber is dysfunctional.' But the Business Insider article just told us that it is losing money: 1.6bn in six months.... Revenue growth, in and of itself, is only impressive when combined with positive economics. With an ebitda margin of negative 28.6 per cent last quarter, Uber is still a long way off proving that its business model works sustainably. For completion���s sake, here are the final few paragraphs.... 'Uber did increase its various operational expenses, such as marketing, R&D, and salaries & admin costs. But those are all costs that Uber can control, and cut in the future if need be. For now, the company is investing in its own growth. In other words, this company is still behaving like an "early stage" tech start-up���albeit on a vast scale. This company has a LONG way to go before it tops out. (Think about Facebook when it reached 1 billion people and everyone thought Facebook would slow down.) Investors are idiots for selling their stock right now.' Uber is a decade old global brand whose core business���ride-sharing���is now growing at just 2 per cent. It is also betting heavily that its smaller business lines, such as food delivery and freight, will be a source of future growth. In other words, it���s acting less like a start-up, and more like a legacy tech company scrambling for new growth. Think Oracle, IBM or perhaps even the modern-day Apple. Notice the difference, however. All of these companies have 'cash cow' products which help to keep the buybacks and dividends flowing, as well as funding future bets. Uber on the other hand... Look, there���s something to be said for the hysterical way quarterly results are sometimes reported by the press. After all they often contain a lot of noise and, in isolation, are not that indicative of how a business is really doing. But let���s not pretend Uber���s financials, to date, show a company gathering in cash ���'in enormous sums'...

#noted

I still don't understand whether Scaramucci has had a gen...

I still don't understand whether Scaramucci has had a genuine Road-to-Damascus moment or whether he has decided that the wind has shifted, and there is more money to be earned via affinity fraud by being anti-Trump than pro-Trump. In either case, it is information that this is happening:

Anthony Scaramucci: The Mooch Says GOP Needs Someone To Replace Trump On The Ticket: "So you and Alisyn have often asked me that and people say, okay, where's the red line where you break from your support from somebody. Because remember, loyalty is symmetrical. It's not asymmetric. What I said to you last week was, geez, this is really polarizing. this is very divisive. As a supporter of his, I would caution we not go in this. You brought up stochastic terrorism. I brought up how this charged rhetoric coming from the bully pulpit of the presidency could lead to some unintended tragic consequences. All I said was, 'I wish the president would stop doing that.' One scintilla of criticism, you get this sort of backlash. And so for me, it's one step too far with the racial charging of his rhetoric and his twitter feet. and you could say, okay, the only reason you're breaking from him now is that he went after you specifically on Twitter. And I'll accept that. I think that to me was a big turning point because I'm looking at that saying, wait a minute. I'm out here supporting him. The guy fired me two years ago. I have been super loyal to this guy, super loyal to the president's agenda. But there's something wrong with the guy as a leader if he can't take constructive criticism or advice from people that have been super loyal to him...

And, of course, I am still trying to wrap my head around this: "Scaramucci... is a stock clown character of the 16th-century commedia dell'arte.... The role combined characteristics of the Zanni (servant) and the Capitano (masked henchman), with some assortment of villainous traits. Usually attired in black Spanish dress and burlesquing a Don, he was often beaten by Harlequin for his boasting and cowardice..."

#noted

Comment of the Day: Doctor Jay: "I'm very much not gettin...

Comment of the Day: Doctor Jay: "I'm very much not getting what I want out of social media. I very much AM getting what I want out of internet search. The distinction is stark, and few writers bother to make it. In your Facebook stream are ads you didn't ask for and can't get rid of. They enjoy the tacit endorsement of your closest friends and family because of this placement. They aren't based on what you have "liked" and are interested in, they are based on who has paid to put them there. And all this is, as far as I can tell, completely legal. In comparison, the information Google has gleaned about you mostly shows up in banner ads that are placed in such a way that they enjoy no such endorsement, and are easily blocked or otherwise ignored. Often you get ads in response to searches, and usually the ads feature some aspect of what you were looking for. That doesn't seem intrusive to me. YouTube ads for me these days are mostly for things I'm interested in, or it's plausible that I would be interested in, except for a couple of political things that obviously think that a guy with my interests really ought to be interested in right-wing propaganda masquerading as The Truth. I wish more writers would understand and engage with this distinction. There may well be anti-trust issues with Google, but it doesn't have nearly the same corrosive effect on our social trust and credit that Facebook does...

#commentoftheday

Kara Swisher: Can anyone tame the next internet?: "which ...

Kara Swisher: Can anyone tame the next internet?: "which jobs will be impacted? It���s not just factory workers, burger flippers, and long-haul truckers. Highly paid lawyers, skilled doctors (don���t let your daughter be a radiologist), and, yes, even lowly journalists will need to find new lines of work. And those tectonic workplace realignments will only become more profound as the AI becomes inevitably���and exponentially���better. To thrive in this environment will require being in a profession that is creative, where analog interactions are critical���one that cannot be easily made digital. Think art, think the caring professions, think anything in which being human trumps cyborg. And since AI becomes ever smarter, it will make sense to allow it to do more and more as we become ever less so.... We���ll also soon see the effects of radical advances in robotics and automation.... The way we wage war is changing dramatically, but it���s not the killer robots we think of...

#noted

Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: How to design a stim...

Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: How to design a stimulus package | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal: "the size of the stimulus does not follow the bang-for-the-buck logic.... Stimulus spending should be similarly small when multipliers are small and large. The stimulus should only be large for medium multipliers. Relatedly, the threshold value of one for the multiplier plays no role at all.... A well-designed stimulus package should also depend on the usefulness of public expenditure.... When the elasticity of substitution is higher, extra public goods are more valuable, so stimulus spending is more desirable.... We find that the output multiplier is not a robust statistic to use in stimulus discussion. Instead, we should use the ���unemployment multiplier���...

#noted

Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence H. Summers: Evolution or R...

Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence H. Summers: Evolution or Revolution: An Afterword: "Since... we wrote... neutral... have likely declined even as the crisis has receded. The notion that low rates largely reflected the after-effects of the financial crisis and would slowly fade away has simply proven wrong.... Fiscal policy has continued to be expansionary in Japan and has turned strongly expansionary in the US and mildly expansionary in Europe.... Inflation has barely reached the Fed���s inflation target.... In the euro area and in Japan, inflation remains below target.... Output is still below potential, at least in the euro area and in Japan.... These facts lead to the inevitable conclusion that fiscal policy will have to play a much bigger role in the future than it has in the past.... For a long time, economists looking at Japan pointed to mistakes in policy and excessive reliance on deficits; it is now clear that the Japanese macroeconomic response was, on net, the right one.... We noted... that both the Depression and the Great Inflation of the 1970s led to dramatic changes in macroeconomic thinking���much more dramatic than have yet occurred in response to the events of the last decade. We think it is increasingly likely that this gap will close in the next few years...

#noted

I agree with Larry Glickman here: Talking your book is ne...

I agree with Larry Glickman here: Talking your book is never good. And monopsony is not freedom���not even if the monopsonist works for you: Lawrence Glickman: "I have questions about this piece by @tylercowen: https://t.co/UllO6J28my: Why must very wealthy universities 'choose between boosting their academic quality through better training, or paying them higher stipends and teaching wages to ease their immediate financial concerns'? Why is it an inherently zero sum situation? Why can't they do both? You write, 'I would merely note that many of my graduate students come from relatively well-to-do backgrounds and face favorable prospects after they graduate'. First, anecdotes about your grad students is not the best basis for policy making. Second, presumably you do not want to live in a world in which grad school is only feasible for the 'well-to-do'. Third, your students may face 'favorable' job prospects, but there is a huge jobs crisis in the humanities that you may have read about. Grad students may not be 'employees in the traditional sense', but the category of "employees in in the traditional sense" is shrinking. There are many more Whole Foods employees than coal miners. Unions work just as well for the former as the latter...

Balu Puppy: The tell is in the pompously worded & patronizing footnote: "I have been overseeing graduate students,using them as research assistants & raising money to support them in varying roles, for about 30 yrs at George Mason, where there is no such union"...

SMW: This is ���job creator��� ideology dressed up in paternalistic condescension. Note it only applies to private schools... also note the emphasis on wages���an important part, to be sure, but unions protect grads in so many other ways...

#noted