J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 134

Note to Self: On the one hand, we are worried because w...

Note to Self: On the one hand, we are worried because we know we are not terribly rational animals, and we know that big data can find correlations. We thus fear people will then use those correlations to hack our brains for their profit or advantage���and for our loss. we fear they will learn how to hack our brains to get us to think, say, do, or buy things that are not in accord with our best selves or our long-term goals���things that we will later on profoundly regret.

On the other hand, this morning, while I was waiting for my first appointment, I was served up nine bra ads���and not because I have desires to cross-dress that I have not yet admitted to myself. It was because Big Ad Data is not smart enough to figure out: "although this internet identity is associated with this credit card number, the person surfing the web right now is not the person who buys the bras"...

#hackingourbrains #internet #notetoself #riseoftherobots #2019-08-07

Moral fault attaches to all those who in any way support ...

Moral fault attaches to all those who in any way support or excuse the New York Times: Scott Lemieux: Today is the Day Donald Trump Most Assuredly Became President: "Nate Silver: 'Not sure "TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM" is how I would have framed the story.' In fairness, you can���t deny that Trump has his finger on the pulse of the Rust Belt in a way no coastal liberal could ever understand: Reuters: '"May God bless the memories of those who perished in Toledo", Trump said, mistakenly saying "Toledo" not Dayton, Ohio, where 10 people, including the gunman, died over the weekend'...

#noted

Clair Jones: Former Fed chairs gang up on Trump : "Every ...

Clair Jones: Former Fed chairs gang up on Trump : "Every living former US Federal Reserve chair has ganged up on US President Donald Trump in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal.... 'When the current chair's four-year term ends, the president will have the opportunity to reappoint him or choose someone new. That nomination will have to be ratified by the Senate. We hope that when that decision is made, the choice will be based on the prospective nominee's competence and integrity, not on political allegiance or activism. It is critical to preserve the Federal Reserve's ability to make decisions based on the best interests of the nation, not the interests of a small group of politicians....' The Journal article is diplomatic, eloquent and reflective. Everything that Trump isn���t, then. The trouble is, in an era of short attention spans and pick-A-side politics where the Fed chair finds himself regularly called out on Twitter, relying on things like evidence, or a coherent argument, might not cut it.... Earlier this year, when addressing Trump���s threat to replace Powell, former Fed vice-chair Stan Fischer put it bluntly. If the US President used his re-election in 2020 to choose a Fed chair with views close to his own, there was a chance of the US becoming 'a Third World country'. Stark and not exactly politically correct. If they are to retain their independence, though, the world���s central bankers might need a bit more of Fischer���s zing...

#federalreserve #monetarypolicy #neofascism #noted #orangehairedbaboons

DeLong Smackdown: Why I Was Wrong Over 2006-2010...

Smackdown/Hoisted: Why I Was Wrong...: Calculated Risk issued an invitation:

Calculated Risk: Hoocoodanode?: Earlier today, I saw Greg "Bush economist" Mankiw was a little touchy about a Krugman blog comment. My reaction was that Mankiw has some explaining to do. A key embarrassment for the economics profession in general, and Bush economists Greg Mankiw and Eddie Lazear in particular, is how they missed the biggest economic story of our times.... This was a typical response from the right (this is from a post by Professor Arnold Kling) in August 2006:

Apparently, the echo chamber of left-wing macro pundits has pronounced a recession to be imminent. For example, Nouriel Roubini writes, "Given the recent flow of dismal economic indicators, I now believe that the odds of a U.S. recession by year end have increased from 50% to 70%." For these pundits, the most dismal indicator is that we have a Republican Administration. They have been gloomy for six years now...

Sure Roubini was early (I thought so at the time), but show me someone who has been more right! And this brings me to Krugman's column:

... Why did so many observers dismiss the obvious signs of a housing bubble, even though the 1990s dot-com bubble was fresh in our memories? Why did so many people insist that our financial system was ���resilient,��� as Alan Greenspan put it, when in 1998 the collapse of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, temporarily paralyzed credit markets around the world? Why did almost everyone believe in the omnipotence of the Federal Reserve when its counterpart, the Bank of Japan, spent a decade trying and failing to jump-start a stalled economy?

One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper.... There���s also another reason the economic policy establishment failed to see the current crisis coming. The crises of the 1990s and the early years of this decade should have been seen as dire omens, as intimations of still worse troubles to come. But everyone was too busy celebrating our success in getting through those crises to notice...

In addition to looking forward, I think certain economists need to do some serious soul searching. Instead of leaving it to us to guess why their analysis was so flawed, I believe the time has come for Mankiw, Kling and many other economists to write a post titled "Why I was wrong".

Let me say what things I was "expecting," in the sense of anticipating that it was they were both likely enough and serious enough that public policymakers should be paying significant attention to guarding the risks that it would create:

(1) A collapse of the dollar produced by a panic flight by investors who recognized the long-term consequences of the U.S. trade deficit.

or:

(2) A fall back of housing prices halfway from their peak to pre-2000 normal price-rental ratios.

I was not expecting (2) plus:

(3) the discovery that banks and mortgage companies had made no provision for how the loans they made would be renegotiated or serviced in the event of a housing-price downturn.

(4) the discovery that the rating agencies had failed in their assessment of lower-tail risk to make the standard analytical judgment: that when things get really bad all correlations go to one.

(5) the fact that highly-leveraged banks working on the originate-and-distribute model of mortgage securitization had originated but had not distributed: that they had held on to much too much of the risks that they were supposed to find other people to handle.

(6) the panic flight from all risky assets--not just mortgages--upon the discovery of the problems in the mortgage market.

(7) the engagement in regulatory arbitrage which had left major banks even more highly leveraged than I had thought possible.

(8) the failure of highly-leveraged financial institutions to have backup plans for recapitalization in place in the case of a major financial crisis.

(9) the Bush administration's sticking to a private-sector solution for the crisis for months after it had become clear that such a solution was no longer viable.

We could have interrupted this chain that has gotten us here at any of a number of places. And I still am trying to figure out why we did not...

And, now, in 2019, let me add:

(10) Broad, total cluelessness that that this financial crisis-triggered recession would not generate anything like a rapid bounce-back

#economicsgonewrong #greatrecession #highlighted #hoistedfrothearchives #macro #mondaysmackdown


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Ben Thompson: A Framework for Moderation: "Section 230 do...

Ben Thompson: A Framework for Moderation: "Section 230 doesn���t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality ��� that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal ��� was undesirable by Congress. Keep in mind that Congress is extremely limited in what it can make illegal because of the First Amendment.... This is how we have arrived at the uneasy space that Cloudflare and others occupy: it is the will of the democratically elected Congress that companies moderate content above-and-beyond what is illegal, but Congress can not tell them exactly what content should be moderated...

#noted

David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road": "Hello everyon...

David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road": "Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff���s essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you���re OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response. Myself, I���m just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing.... Ignatieff���s 2005 NY Times Magazine essay justifying the Iraq war... said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread 'The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson���s Dream'. (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson��� and they didn���t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!... I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: 'Please, for the love of God, don���t ever listen to me again'. HOWEVER... The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff���s essay... is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy.... Below, a smorgasbord of Ignatieff���s musings, with commentary: 'An intellectual���s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician���s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm...' Right off the bat, he���s saying: 'It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I���ll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality'. So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You���ve been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis...

#noted

Looking Backwards from This Week at 24, 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2, and 1/4 Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2019)

MUST OF THE MUSTS: James M. Buchanan: The "Social" Efficiency of Education: You have to be able to hold in your mind two things at once in order to understand economist James M. Buchanan: (1) He was a total loon: a strong believer in the de Maistrean trinity of Patriarchy, Orthodoxy, Autocracy as necessary for society���essential Noble Lies; a man who in 1970 wanted to shut down America's universities as teachers of evil, and regretted the failure of nerve that made that impossible; a man who saw Martin Luther King Jr. as a teacher of evil���whose response to the Civil Rights movement and its peaceful civil disobedience campaign was not Edmund Burke's "to make us love our country, our country must be lovely", but rather: how dare MLK claim that an African American should be "openly encouraged to use his own conscience"���rather than shutting up and accepting his subservient Jim Crow position in society! (2) A man who saw things that other economists did not and would not have without him...

 

Three Months Ago (May 1-6, 2019):

Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics

An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016": The Great Depression

In the absence of global warming such a 95%-ile cyclone would have a maximum windspeed at landfall of 220 km/hr rather than 240...

It's not a disconnect between utility and happiness, its a disconnect between revealed preference and happiness. And a disconnect between revealed preference and happiness is properly solved via educating people to become their best selves���I do not think it poses grave philosophical conundrums...

Note to Self: Thomas Jefferson born in 1743; Sally Hemings born in 1773; she is pregnant by 1788...

 

Six Months Ago (February 1-6, 2019):

The first truly good conceptual framework I have seen on where the future of employment growth may lie: David Autor: The Future Of Work: ":'Frontier work'... 'Wealth work'... 'Last mile'... what's left after machines have eaten the tasks...

"Gunpowder Empire": Should We Generalize Mark Elvin's High-Level Equilibrium Trap?

?????? it certainly seems to me as though Donald Trump wants there to be a Sino-American trade war���after all they are, as he says, easy to win. If the U.S. wants a tussle with China over intellectual property, the right strategy is for the U.S to back off now, go to the TPP members, apologize for its actions in rejecting the TPP in early 2017, join the TPP, and then negotiate as part of a United front with other TPP members. The U.S. by itself has no leverage ���the IP China can grab is worth more than the cost of losing access to the U.S. market. So I have no idea what Marty thinks he is saying here: Martin Feldstein: There Is No Sino-American Trade War...

There is no merit-based case for David Malpass to run the World Bank. Ivanka would be a massively superior candidate: Dylan Matthews: David Malpass���s World Bank Nomination, Explained: "Malpass is... an infamously bad... forecaster...

 

One Year Ago (July 31-August 6, 2018):

Monday Smackdown: Who Wants Charles Murray to Speak on Their Campus, and Why?: I have a question for Stanford's Michael @McFaul: We know that "If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation in mating, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ballpark estimates), and if the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation of lifetime incomes would be 0.01..." (see Bowles and Giants (2002)). That is only two percent the observed intergenerational correlation���49/50 of the intergenerational transmission of status in America comes from other causes. Why, then, is it important to invite to your campus to speak someone whose big thing is the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, and racial differences thereof? And if one were going to invite to your campus to speak someone, etc., why would you pick somebody who likes to burn crosses? Wouldn't a healthier approach be to regard such a person���who focuses on the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, harps on genetic roots of differences between "races", and likes to burn crosses���as we regard those who know a little too much about the muzzle velocities of the main cannon of the various models of the Nazi Armored Battlewagon Version 4?...

A Question I Did Not Ask Condoleeza Rice: "Secretary Rice: Dual containment of Iran and Iraq���that always seemed to me like a good policy.... We broke dual containment.... Why we decided to launch such a war of choice in 2003 has always been opaque to me. Can you please make your thinking at the time less opaque to me?...

Mr. Justice McReynolds: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel: "Mr. Justice McReynolds: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel: "The Court... departs from well-established principles followed in Schechter... and Carter v. Carter Coal...

The Argument for Lots of Remaining Labor-Market Slack, Graphically...: Anybody have any good reason why the U.S. prime-age employment-to-population ratio could not rise another 2%-points with a high-pressure economy?...

Herbert Hoover: As Bad to Ally with Stalin and Churchill Against Hitler as to Ally with Hitler Against Stalin and Churchill...

 

Two Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2017):

James M. Buchanan: The "Social" Efficiency of Education: You have to be able to hold in your mind two things at once in order to understand economist James M. Buchanan: (1) He was a total loon: a strong believer in the de Maistrean trinity of Patriarchy, Orthodoxy, Autocracy as necessary for society���essential Noble Lies���a man who in 1970 wanted to shut down America's universities as teachers of evil, and regretted the failure of nerve that made that impossible; a man who saw Martin Luther King Jr. as a teacher of evil���whose response to the Civil Rights movement and its peaceful civil disobedience campaign was not Edmund Burke's "to make us love our country, our country must be lovely", but rather: how dare MLK claim that an African American should be "openly encouraged to use his own conscience"���rather than shutting up and accepting his subservient Jim Crow position in society! (2) A man who saw things that other economists did not and would not have without him...

Paul Krugman: STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT: YES, IT WAS HUMBUG: "Ancient history... but five years ago there was a remarkable Beltway consensus that high unemployment was structural...

Hoisted from the Archives from 2007: Who Gets a Seat at the Table?: More Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging: : "Mark Graber has gotten himself to the right of John C. Calhoun... a position painful and ludicrous... that... should induce any twenty-first-century American academic to undertake an agonizing reappraisal���particularly over Martin Luther King holiday weekend. But Mark Graber doesn't...

A Historical Document from 1993: Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal Predicts the Failure of Clintonomics: One evasion in Ken Auletta's piece on the Wall Street Journal stands out: his quoting without comment of Norman Pearlstine's claim that Paul Gigot ���was a first-rate reporter"...

Open Letter from 1470 Economists (Including Me) on Immigration

Yes: The CBO's Growth Forecasts Are Not Unreasonable...: The Trump administration (I won't say "Donald Trump", because I am not convinced that Donald Trump knows what the Congressional Budget Office is) wants people to take on the CBO's projections that real GDP growth is likely to average a hair less than 2 percent per year. And professional Republicans John Cogan of Stanford, Glenn Hubbard of Columbia, John Taylor of Stanford, and Kevin Warsh of Stanford deliver...

 

Four Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2015):

Hoisted from the Archives: I See the Stars at Bloody Warrs in the Wounded Welkin Weeping (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...): For me, the frustrating narrative hole was always Flandry's insufficient motivation: Why is this decadent sybarite also Horatius at the Gate? (Let's not ask why Macaulay is impelled to write the poems that Romans would have written had the Romans been illiterate Scots.)... A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows did not lift any burden, but seemed more like a bizarre hall of mirrors. Dominic Flandry falling in True Love? The lifetime appreciator of High Culture and defender of the possibility of civilization turning into the Greatest Cultural Vandal of All Time? Flandry in this book is a different man from the Flandry in earlier books. It's not good to write a story in which a new character inhabits the skin and bears the name of an old one...

Hoisted from the Archives: Feeling Bad About Chet Compensation Levels: A bigger part of this answer is that there are four relevant human capabilities here: (1) the ability to master details, (2) the ability to quickly grasp what the salient issues are and follow them through to their conclusion, (3) the ability to work like a dog, and (4) the ability to size up people���figure out quickly who will actually produce something useful and who will not, who will hang tough and who will easily bid more, who will soften if wooed and who will stay hard-nosed.... For someone who has one of the other three���mastery of detail or skill at analysis or the ability to work like a dog for ungodly periods of time���mastery of Chet-hood is a very valuable and lucrative skill...

Oddities in the Rhetoric of Economics: Paul Romer Confronts the "Adversarial Method" in the Presentation of Economic Theory: At the time I thought that Prescott might simply not be good at communicating. It never crossed my mind that this game of hide-the-ball might be a deliberate strategy, let alone that some economists thought that all economists played--or should play--this game of trying to draw a large wedge between the narrow conclusions readers should actually draw from the model presented and the sweeping conclusions authors hoped to fool readers into drawing from the model. But Romer is not the only one who is now very annoyed at this mode of "argument". Cf.: Pfleiderer on "chameleons"...

Trekonomics Teaser Videos: Brad DeLong, Adam Gomolin, Manu Saadia:"Manu Saadia, the author of the forthcoming book, Trekonomics, discusses the economic theories behind the creation of the Star Trek with J. Bradford DeLong, professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Treasury. Inkshares' Adam Gomolin is the moderator...

 

Eight Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2011):

And the Invisible Bond Market Vigilantes Are Still Missing as Well ...

 

Twelve Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2007):

Places You Must See: Mesa Verde

Yet Another Note: Hoover in China: : "Hoover in China: From Hugh Deane (1990), Good Deeds and Gunboats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters (San Francisco/Beijing: China Books and Periodicals/New World Press: 0835123782), pp. 75-6: 'In 1920, having gained an international reputation through relief work, and thinking of public office, Hoover began an extraordinary and costly effort to blur and falsify the record of the trial... instructed his London solicitor to "spare no expense or effort" to purchase all existing copies of the trial transcript. Burner's biography indicates that Hoover thought he had succeeded, but in fact his agents were unable to obtain the copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In the early 1930s [John Hamill]... observed... that, trying to check on certain accusation, "At many sources we came only to find that somebody had been there before us, going over the hard-beaten track of Mr. Hoover's past, and taking up, buying up, and otherwise obliterating important records".... The reality was expressed at the time of the swindle by Britain's charge d'affaires in Beijing, Arthur Townley. With the help of a Yankee [Hoover], he said, an Anglo-Belgian gang had "fleeced" the Chinese, and Moreing and associates had "made pretty pile at their expense"'...

A Historical Document: The Kaiping Mines: The Times of London, March 2, 1905, p. 9

Matthew Yglesias on Michael Ignatieff as Not-too-Bright Student: "I found Michael Ignatieff's reflective essay on getting things wrong about Iraq to be somehow pleasantly soothing. But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics. This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise���notably people who weren't really on the left politically���were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really 'independent' of political machinations...

Fear of Finance: "We are at that turn of the intellectual cycle where the world's great and good become fearful of finance: distrustful of the rich and high-paid people who live very well indeed and work behind computer screens in the cores of the world's major cities doing... well, doing something that doesn't look like work, or productive, or useful.... Truth to be told, there is a lot to fear.... Consider the 4 trillion dollars of mergers and acquisitions this year.... Once we look outside transfers within the financial sector, the total global effects of this chunk of finance is a gain of perhaps 340B in increased real shareholder value from higher expected future profits counterbalanced by a loss of 170B in future real wages, for households will find themselves paying higher margins to companies with more market power.... The gross gains���fees, trading profits, and capital gains to the winners of perhaps 800B from this year's M&A���are greatly in excess of the perhaps 170B of net gains. Governments have a very important educational, admonitory, and regulatory role to play in this business: people should know the risks and probabilities, for they may wind up among the 630B worth of losers. So far there is little sign that they do https://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/08/fear-of-finan-1.html...

Three Miles East of East Inlet Trailhead, Rocky Mountain National Park: Two hundred feet of vertical will get you to where there is almost nobody in any American national park. So what is this chipmunk doing chittering at us from the creekbed?...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post Edition): Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias, who examines Ruth Marcus's special pleading for Alberto Gonzales: 'Ruth Marcus, driving hard for the wanker of the day prize, decides that though Al Gonzalez "dissembled and misled" and he didn't commit perjury and so rather than "trying to incite criminal a prosecution that won't happen of an attorney general who should have been gone long ago," Democrats "need to concentrate on determining what the administration did..." The possibility that if the administration continues to dissemble and mislead... and is told in advance that it can get off the hook for doing so, it might be difficult to get to the bottom of this matter doesn't seem to have occurred to her. Oh, well.' She can't really be that stupid, can she? Anybody think that Ruth Marcus and company "should[n't] have been gone long ago"? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?...

James Fallows: Two-Class Voting and the Great Newspaper: James Fallows writes about public trusts and public corporations: "The fundamental problem with today's American press is a mismatch between its economic basis and its public function...." One would think that the Wall Street Journal editorial page since a time before the memory of man, or the Washington Post editorial board since 2000, or the New York Times's Whitewater and Iraq coverage would give Jim a little pause. Freedom from market discipline is not enough; freedom from wingnuttery is needed as well...

 

Sixteen Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 2003):

Mercy, Mercy, Lord Jeebus! Mercy!: As is nearly always the case with Moore, it is hard to tell what of his ignorance is genuine and what is feigned...

20-20 Hindsight:: Paul Blustein of the Washington Post has a nice article (washingtonpost.com: Argentina Didn't Fall on Its Own) on Argentina, the inflow of foreign capital, and its recent collapse. I do, however, think that he overplays the "poor investors" and the "poor Argentinian government" line.... Argentina's politicians were told at extraordinary length by their own economic advisers, by the U.S. Treasury, and by the IMF of the risks they were running by combining a hard fixed exchange rate with large unbalanced budget deficits...

Would Somebody Please Explain to Me...: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Would somebody please explain to me how it can be that Fox polls routinely have George W. Bush's approval-minus-disapproval rating twenty percentage points higher than Zogby? I mean, this isn't rocket science: this is polling. If I wanted to generate such huge differences--differences that dwarf sampling standard deviations at least five-fold--I wouldn't know how to go about it. How do they do it?...

Mutual Amazement: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Arnold Kling is amazed that anyone can understand the decentralized libertarian internet and still be a non-libertarian "statist".... Conversely, it amazes me that people who understand the incredibly complicated social division of labor that is the government-supported, standards-based, cooperative, information-sharing internet and not understand that agoric systems can only be built on top of a powerful and appopriate foundation of... ahem... "regulation"...

Edward Said Pledges Allegiance: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: To poverty, dictatorship, and keeping women illiterate and barefoot: "There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on contemporary Arab and Muslim societies for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room..." Of course, still bigger howlers come earlier in the article. One is the passage where Said mourns the tragedies of the Middle East: "...Lebanese civil war... violence... ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process..." without deigning to mention that Said worked as hard as he could for a decade to try to ensure the failure of the Oslo peace process...

Eric Alterman Bangs His Head Against the Wall: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Eric Alterman bangs his head against the wall. Not only does Condi Rice not read her own briefing materials, she doesn't listen to (or read) here boss's speeches.... "He's trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody ever said that it was going to be the next year." - Condoleeza Rice in PBS interview, 7/30/03. "[Iraq] could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." - George Bush, 10/8/02...

Why Is Our Press Corps So Bad? Part CCCXIV: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall in despair at the quantitative illiteracy--the innumeracy--of those who feel appointed to try to contribute to the debate on economic policy. What is it this time? This time it is that Andrew Sullivan thinks that federal spending jumped by 25 percent between the first and the second quarters of 2003: "HEY, BIG SPENDER: In one quarter, federal spending jumped 25 percent. As often, wars are good for economies..." Of course it did not. U.S. federal spending is currently running at $500 billion a quarter. It did not suddenly jump to $625 billion a quarter. What happened instead was that federal government purchases of goods and services (a much smaller total, running at $180 billion a quarter or so) grew at a 25 percent per year annual rate--which means that in a quarter it grows at a hair over 6 percent...

Yes! Good GDP News!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Yes! The second quarter (April-June) showed significantly faster real GDP growth than I (and everybody else) had been expecting: GDP grew at a 2.4% per year annual rate (meaning that second-quarter real GDP was 2.4%/4 = 0.6% higher than first-quarter real GDP. Now IIRC, average hours worked were down 0.2% in the second quarter vis-a-vis the first quarter, and employment was down in the second quarter by 0.2%, meaning that Americans worked 0.4% fewer hours in the second quarter than the first quarter--that labor input shrank at a 1.6% per year annual rate. Combine a 2.4% per year rate of growth of real GDP with a -1.6% per year rate of growth of labor hours, and you have a 4.0% per year rate of growth of labor productivity. That's a very impressive number for the long run. But in the short run it drives a big wedge between the (relatively good) production news and the (relatively bad) employment news...

 

Twenty Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 1999):

Readings:

Paul David (1985): Clio and the Economics of QWERTY http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teaching_folder/Econ_210a_f99/Readings/David_QWERTY.pdf
Moses Abamovitz and Paul David (1973): Reinterpreting Economic Growth: Parables and Realities http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teaching_Folder/Econ_210a_f99/Readings/Abramovitz_David.pdf
Gavin Wright (1990): The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879-1940 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Teaching_Folder/Econ_210a_f99/Readings/Wright.pdf
Willem Buiter and Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou (199): Liquidity Traps: How to Avoid Them, and How to Escapte Them http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/refs/Safari_Scrapbook2/55382-w7245.pdf

 

Twenty-Four Years Ago (July 31-August 6, 1995):

The Shock of the Virtual : How the Website of the U.C. Museum of Paleontology Feels More "Real" than the Museum Itself: I am not at all sure that this is the right place to put this. I can already hear Chuq Von Rospach saying "Now, if this were apple-philosophy-internet-virtuality..." Nevertheless, the experience was profoundly disturbing, and made we want to consult a philosophical professional (in the same way that a health problem makes me want to consult a medical professional...)

 

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Nir Kaissar: Don���t Count Out Value Investing Despite Gr...

Nir Kaissar: Don���t Count Out Value Investing Despite Growth���s Spurt: "A decade or more of lagging doesn���t mean the landscape has changed permanently.... A third theory���and the most generous to value���is that the measure of value is broken... While it���s true that P/B ratio has been the worst-performing measure of value over the last 12 years, it���s premature to call it obsolete. No one measure has performed consistently better than others in decades past, so it���s just as likely that P/B ratio���s recent struggles are purely coincidental.... Also, P/B ratio has a long history of strong performance relative to growth stocks following bouts of weak performance, and vice versa, which strongly suggests that its recent underperformance will prove to be cyclical rather than permanent.... Of course, investors can sidestep the value versus growth debate by simply buying the market...

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Normally, when there is a small chance that a form of beh...

Normally, when there is a small chance that a form of behavior assisted by particular commodities will produce very destructive results, we impose strict liability, and let those who promote that behavior and sell those commodities sort out the tradeoffs���or we heavily regulate for safety. Firearms is the only car in which we do neither:

Paul Campos: Where Do Lone Wolf Mentally Ill Mass Murders Get Their Ideas About a "Hispanic Invasion"?: "From their Republican President Donald Trump: 'When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.'... From their Republican U.S senator John Cornyn: 'Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year.'... From Fox News's Laura Ingraham: 'As the so-called US-bound ���caravan��� traveling through Mexico continues to swell, some questions arise that the media will not ask. Who is funding these efforts? How has it grown so quickly and what did the Democrats have to offer besides a bunch of cliches and bromides, and of course grandstanding? If you have been watching other networks, you have been treated to sympathetic, overwrought coverage of this invading horde'...

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Future generations are going to have a very difficult tim...

Future generations are going to have a very difficult time understanding the early twenty-first century Republican Party in America and its relationship to gun and ammunition manufacturers: Frank Wilkinson: El Paso Shooter's Bullets and Gun Culture: "What the El Paso shooter���s hyper-deadly ammunition tells us about gun culture. The hyper-lethality of the bullets��is the point.... The 'manifesto' purportedly posted by the shooter accused of last weekend���s mass murder in El Paso, Texas... included a section called 'Gear'.... Along with his AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle, he cites an 8m3 bullet, which appears to have something of a cult following owing to its capacity to expand and fragment inside bodies, causing 'catastrophic wounds'.... It���s a sick soliloquy. But you can find others much like it. An anonymous review��at SGammo.com states that the customer���s��Russian-made 8m3 'works in all of my ak���s and is devastating in soft tissue'. Bullet talk is as revealing a window on American gun culture as gun talk���maybe more so. Consider this 2011 ammo review at Shooting Illustrated, the 'official journal' of the National Rifle Association.... Americans buy guns designed and marketed as hyper-lethal. They fill their magazines with bullets specifically manufactured to rip human bodies to shreds and make human lives unsavable. In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York proposed a huge tax increase on the most vicious brands of ammunition, pointing out that, unlike guns, ammunition doesn���t last forever. 'Guns don���t kill people', Moynihan said, 'bullets do'...

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