J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 17

Review: Exponential Growth & Dataframe Access: Econ 115: Problem Set 7

https://github.com/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps07.ipynb

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/econ-115-f-2020-assignments/blob/master/ps07.ipynb

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/review-exponential-growth-dataframe-access-econ-115-problem-set-7.html

.#berkeley #datascience #math #teaching #tceh #2020-10-22

Disaster Capitalism: DevEng 215 2020-10-22

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/05yW08oQvx5uDpAZcxmObZsZA

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/deveng-215-2020-10-22.pptx

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/disaster-capitalism-deveng-215-2020-10-22.html

This incorporates-by-reference the readings & lectures from week 9 of Joeva Rock's Fall 2020 instantiation of GPP 115...

.#berkeley #economicdevelopment #economics #equitablegrowth #politicaleconomy #teaching #2020-10-22

Briefly Noted for Tu 2020-10-20

Daniel Davies: Book Talk���Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World https://watson.brown.edu/events/2020/book-talk-dan-davies-lying-money-how-legendary-frauds-reveal-workings-our-world...

Cities with More than 10000 Population https://www.evernote.com/l/AAHhz3j2xe1PY4XJUj0HaDcRMn0VD2bgtqcB/image.png...

Half the World Population https://www.evernote.com/l/AAETx7xhCWVPmbK_sKWWe2Nl2oc6ETuYnTEB/image.png...

Population Density https://www.evernote.com/l/AAFG80xx73hPrJ-o7SASlYf1AOAHSm_LndkB/image.png...

Sidney Kaplan (1976): The "Domestic Insurrections" of the Declaration of Independence https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-kaplan-domestic-insurrections.pdf...

Nisreen Alwan: What Exactly Is Mild Covid-19? https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-alwan-mild-covid-19.pdf...

Persi Diaconis & Frederick Mosteller: Methods for Studying Coincidences https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-diaconis-coincidences.pdf...

Stephen Pulvirent: Hodinkee Radio Episode 107: All About the Apple Watch https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/hodinkee-radio-episode-107-apple-watch-alan-dye: ���A comprehensive deep-dive into Apple's latest smartwatch���

Anna Mikusheva & Jim Stock (2007): Weak Instruments https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-384-time-series-analysis-fall-2013/lecture-notes/MIT14_384F13_lec7and8.pdf: ���Anderson-Rubin (1949) https://www.evernote.com/l/AAGO6SDBHehDP6AIs3ixnvRIAO0W38s2P10B/image.png https://www.evernote.com/l/AAH4RvtsQutIcoIV5gw7ku-orITWdgvgD-oB/image.png...

Arjun Jayadev & Mike Konczal (2010); The Boom Not The Slump: The Right Time For Austerity https://web.archive.org/web/20110802015309/http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/sites/all/files/not_the_time_for_austerity.pdf: ���Such a conclusion is unmerited. The overwhelming majority of the episodes used by A & A did not see deficit reduction in the middle of a slump. Where they did, it o#en resulted in a decline in the subsequent growth rate or an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Of the 26 episodes that they identify as ���expansionary���, in virtually none did the country a) reduce the deficit when the economy was in a slump and b) increase growth rates while reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio���

 

Plus

Mary Daly: Interview https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-wsj-interview-with-san-francisco-fed-president-mary-daly-11602788005 'The bridge��� over the coronavirus depends considerably on fiscal agents doing the part that they need to do to���. Without that fiscal stimulus, my outlook is quite a bit more muted. And whether it���s next month or the month after probably doesn���t determine the outlook for the next couple of years, but it definitely does determine how much suffering and pain many American households face.

Wendy Edelberg & Louise Sheiner: What Could Additional Fiscal Policy Do in the Next Three Years? https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-could-additional-fiscal-policy-do-for-the-economy-in-the-next-three-years/: ���We find that enacting all five of those illustrative policies and increasing federal spending by $2 trillion would raise the level of real (i.e, inflation adjusted) GDP by 0.2 percent in 2020, 4.0 percent in 2021 and 2022, and 1.6 percent in 2023 above the level it would otherwise be (authors��� calculations). If all five policies were enacted, economic activity would return to its projected path prior to the pandemic by the third quarter of 2021. Under current law, that return likely would not occur for perhaps as long as a decade���

 

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-10-20

Brad DeLong's weblog . Since 1999. Comments (mostly) welc...

Brad DeLong's weblog . Since 1999. Comments (mostly) welcome. Or email me at delong@hey.com with "delong-weblog" as the subject. RSS feed. Also on twitter @delong.

Brief Notes on the History of Fintech

Comment on: Stephen Quinn & William Roberds: On the Evolution of Payments Systems

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0eqVET8B0fmqY2TM-T1XGpPIA

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/future-of-fintech-conference-2020-10-19.pptx

2020-10-19

The focus of good work in economic history is always this: History creates problems and opportunities for economic actors. They then have to respond. What is most interesting is how they respond, and what the unintended consequences are. The master move of economics is always that the market combines individual actions to produce something that nobody expected or necessarily wanted: that is what we expect out of our narratives, and that is what we have gotten so far in this session.

What we have heard is a chartalist-plus approach, an approach that I think that is broadly correct. The state and its payments are the foundation on which private entrepreneurs seek to gain wealth and advantage. The state with its payments and taxing flows is the anchor of their positions. The state is much more than just a very large organization that keeps itself functioning by collecting and then distributing a huge amount of wealth. Moving in the slipstream of the state's operations can gain you an awful lot of thick-market and trust benefits.

The state is also a first mover���or maybe a last mover. When it innovates (or adopts and adapts others��� innovations), it solidifies the market by setting what the expectational equilibrium will be. It is also a regulator and the adjudicator. It has people who ultimately can say what you can and cannot do. In the old days they carried spears and now it is people with guns, but ultimately they can say ���this is your wealth, and this is not���.

In that role, the state is a foreclosure of potential options that private sector entities might want to undertake. It is also often an appropriator of things that private sector entities wish to do. The state inherently has sources of advantage the private sector does not. The South Sea Company's business model was a sound one: ���We are going to take the many untradeable issues of British national debt created since the Glorious Revolution, consolidate them, and then sell them and trade them in a thick market. We will then capture all of the thick-market marketability edges as our profit, and we will divide it among the founding shareholders. And you can buy now and get in on the ground floor, for we are already trading on a when-issued basis.���

It was a wonderful business model. But ultimately it was the big player, the Bank of England, that successfully executed that business model. It was not the South Sea Company. Isaac Newton is supposed to have famously said that he could calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of crowds. But he ought to have been able to calculate the motion of a very large, better-positioned state actor, better placed to execute a now-public and potentially very profitable business plan.

We have successful state money. We then have private entrepreneurs, trying to do as they do and find things that reap the benefits of successful state money. The payments flows, assets, and liabilities created by these entrepreneurs have to be cheaper than and also have to be safe enough to be attractive for those who would otherwise use state money. And in placid times they are. They always are. Until they aren't. And then they stop being safe enough, things get very fraught.

Perhaps the key insight is that economies are always impelled to seek find ways to widen circles of trust. This is an insight I stole from economist Partha Dasgupta. You can deepen your individual division of labor, but your own ability to produce things as limited. Thus you face a world in which there are lots of commodities that you need that you cannot produce, and for which you must trade. Trade starts out with gift exchange or commodity exchange, but only with those who trust. Your division of labor is limited to your friends, your neighbors, and your family. I would not trust some of my neighbors. I definitely would not trust some of my family, when it comes to engaging in reciprocal but not contemporaneously balanced trade.

But things become easier with some kind of state institutio, like a temple, or the treasury of the Great King. Those institutions have permanence and credibility. You can deal with them. In fact, you have to deal with them: They are already collecting tithes and taxes from you, and you might as well piggyback as much as you can of your trade on those flows..

And then you have the invention of money! These little things made of precious metal that the Great King will accept in payment for taxes. He will also crucify anyone who counterfeits them, or adulterates them. And all of a sudden your circle of trust for commodity exchange has widened. Now your circle of commodity is made up of everyone who can show you the money. This is a great and wonderful thing.

But counterfeiting, adulteration, clipping, plus carrying large chests of coins around is difficult and costly. I winced when I watched the heist movie, The Italian Job, as the posse dropped a chest of gold down four stories into the getaway motorboat. I know enough about physics to know that that chest would have smashed the bottom of any boat, and promptly gone to the bottom of the Venetian lagoon.

People move from coins of gold or silver with the picture of the Great King on them to bullion,, to bullion being kept somewhere in someone's basement, to bullion that is not earmarked for you but is the fractional-reserve backing for ledger entries, to trust that the transactions of a large organization that has money coming in and going out are sufficient liquidity backing for the This is the dance that we always do over time. We see it going in payments from money to merchant credit, to bills of exchange, to deposit banks, to large state actors. Those as anchors seem to work well.

But those large anchor organizations need to be only semi-state actors. There needs to be efficient insulation of financial regulation from the fiscal needs of the state. The health of the financial system must be prioritized over the fact that the state can use this to get a little bit more seigniorage. And the state always pushes this margin.

Thus the organizations that succeed in the long run are those that are somehow sufficiently insulated from the fiscal needs of the state to prioritize the financial system: state-like enough to be concerned with the public interest rather than simply at some point taking the money and running. But they need to be non-state enough to prioritize the convenience of bankers over the goals of the high politicians.

And underneath this all there is always regulatory arbitrage by private entities. Their liabilities are, also, safe enough until they are not. And this is going to make the state nervous. If someone shows up and is large enough to actually begin taking on a state-like role, the central bank is going to get very nervous about who is the boss here and how will a crisis be handled.

Thus the state is in tension: regulator and anchor, first mover and validator. And we also need to be thinking of the state as closer of some. Maybe it forecloses some private options because they are too risky. Maybe because they are too profitable, and it wants to skim the cream itself. Maybe because these options upset the current balance of forces within the state. The state is going to seek to grab much of the thick-market benefits of being the hub.

We began with trust in commodity exchange at the start. Then we moved to trust in payments that make trust in commodity exchange not a problem. And finally we move to trust in long-term financing. This topic is, potentially, very fraught as we go forward now in this era of ��� secular stagnation. Today it seems that is not so much saving as rather risk bearing capacity and entrepreneurial vision that are the places in which the economy feels constrained, rather than in the creation of liquidity, or even in the flows of savings.

So let me stop there by saying, as Barry Eichengreen did at the start: What is our financial future? Ant Financial? VISA? FacebookPay? Or ????.

1400 words

.#economichistory #finance #highlighted #politicaleconomy #2020-10-19

DeLongToday 2020-10-16: Contemporary American Political Economy Through a Polanyian Lens

At: http://delongtoday.com

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0if3STTNspC1rWVgx8Pkp6_dw
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-2020-10-16.pptx

.#highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #polanyi #2020-10-16

Cowen: Reject the Great Barrington Declaration���Noted

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0S8zhpTx-pPo8Tln5WNl8fBWA https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/column-cowen-reject-great-barrington-noted.pptx 2020-10-16

Tyler Cowen: Why I Reject the Great Barrington Declaration https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/why-i-reject-the-great-barrington-declaration.html: ���My 2x normal length Bloomberg column on that topic... do read the whole thing...

...here is one bit....

Here are the key words of the Great Barrington Declaration on herd immunity:

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

What exactly does the word ���allow��� mean in this context? Again the passivity is evident, as if humans should just line up in the proper order of virus exposure and submit to nature���s will. How about instead we channel our inner Ayn Rand and stress the role of human agency? Something like: ���Herd immunity will come from a combination of exposure to the virus through natural infection and the widespread use of vaccines. Here are some ways to maximize the role of vaccines in that process.���...

In most parts of the Western world, normal openings for restaurants, sporting events and workplaces are likely to lead to spiraling caseloads and overloaded hospitals, as is already a risk in some of the harder-hit parts of Europe. Reopenings, to the extent they work, rely on a government that so scares people that attendance remains low even with reopening. In that sense, as things stand, there is no ���normal��� to be found. An attempt to pursue it would most likely lead to panic over the numbers of cases and hospitalizations, and would almost certainly make a second lockdown more likely. There is no ideal of liberty at the end of the tunnel here.... The Great Barrington strategy is a tempting one. Coming out of a libertarian think tank, it tries to procure maximum liberty for commerce and daily life. It is a seductive idea. Yet consistency of message is not an unalloyed good, even when the subject is liberty.... My worldview is both more hopeful and more tragic. There is no normal here.... We can do better���with vigorous actions to combat Covid-19, including government actions. The conception of human nature evident in the Great Barrington Declaration is so passive, it raises the question of whether it even qualifies as a defense of natural liberty....

If you argue, as many herd immunity critics do, that the elderly cannot be isolated, it seems you also should not be entirely confident that the currently non-infected can be isolated.�� The brutal truth is simply that a Great Barrington strategy put into practice would lead to rapidly spiraling cases and a rather quick and oppressive second lockdown, worse than what the status quo or some improved version of it is likely to bring.�� Total deaths are likely higher, along with more social trauma, due to the more extreme whipsaw effects���

.#noted #2020-10-16

Briefly Noted for 2020-10-16

Philippe Weil (1989): The Equity Premium Puzzle & the Riskfree Rate Puzzle https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-weil-1989-riskfree.pdf...

Donald Harris: Introduction to Bukharin: ���Theory of the Leisure Class��� https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-harris-bukharin-intro.pdf���

Constance L. Hunter: Economic Outlook: Riding the COVID-Coaster https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/presentation-hunter-covid-coasterpresentation-hunter-covid-coaster.pdf���

Joan Robinson: Rereading Marx https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-robinson-rereading-marx������

Vanessa Stovall: A Tale of Two Creons: Black tragedies, White anxieties, and the Necessity of Abolition https://medium.com/corona-borealis/a-tale-of-two-creons-black-tragedies-white-anxieties-and-the-necessity-of-abolition-4d1816ce3f7a...

Athol Fugard, John Kani, & Winston Ntshona: The Island (Play) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(play)

Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman: The Rise of Income & Wealth Inequality of America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Rise%20of%20Income%20and%20Wealth%20Inequality%20in%20America-%20Zucman.pdf...���
Scott Hanselman (2014): Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler https://youtu.be/UzyoT4DziQ4?t=94���

 

I must say, the world-historical reception of Karl Marx would have been very different had he stuck to his initial word choices, and not substituted "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" for what he had originally called "Juden" and "Judentum" as labels for his concepts: Shlomo Avinieri (2019): Karl Marx: Philosophy & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-avineri-marx.pdf: ���In German parlance of the time, Judentum also stood for commerce, trade, huckstering in general, just as the English verb ���to jew��� (now excised from the Oxford English Dictionary) used to mean ���to cheat.��� So when Marx says that American society is the apotheosis of the power of ���Judaism��� or that society should be emancipated from the thrall of ���Judaism,��� there is a subtext here: contemporary readers would recognize that he was not writing just about Jews. Fear of censorship might also have convinced Marx to use the colloquial Judentum rather than ���capitalism.��� Second, and ironically, Marx���s identification of Judaism with capitalism has a paradoxical literary origin. It appears for the first time in Germany in an article by Marx���s socialist colleague Moses Hess called ���On Money��� [U��ber das Geldwesen]���

Really, really not my favorite person. Someone who knows nothing at all about how market economies work, and yet thinks his political allegiance to something he calls "Marxism" makes him an expert. The U.S. in 2008-9 was���as anyone looking at interest rates would know���very far indeed from exhausting its debt capacity: David Harvey (2009): Why the U.S. Stimulus Package Is Bound to Fail https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/department-of-huh-in-praise-of-neoclassical-economics-department.html: ���Any attempt to find an adequate Keynesian solution has been doomed at the start.... A Keynesian solution would require massive and prolonged deficit financing.... The problem for the United States in 2008-9 is that it starts from a position of chronic indebtedness to the rest of the world (it has been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten years or more) and this poses an economic limitation upon the size of the extra deficit that can now be incurred. (This was not a serious problem for Roosevelt who began with a roughly balanced budget). There is also a geo-political limitation since the funding of any extra deficit is contingent upon the willingness of other powers (principally from East Asia and the Gulf States) to lend���

 

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-10-16

Briefly Noted for 2020-10-14

Excellent to watch to see Michael Kades present his point-of-view on video: Michael Kades: Proposals to Strengthen the Antitrust Laws & Restore Competition Online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--jXAdjieTo���

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leak-the-atlantic-had-a-meeting-about-kevin-williamson-it-was-a-liberal-self-reckoning_n_5ac7a3abe4b0337ad1e7b4df: ���Black writers... would be brought in... [to] give a view of black life that I felt like very few black people actually would recognize themselves in their own private spaces.... I got incredibly used to learning from people... who... were fucking racist.... I didn���t... have the luxury of having teachers who... saw me completely as a human being.... I couldn���t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us���

Neel Kashkari: Why I Dissented https://medium.com/@neelkashkari/why-i-dissented-feb698ae4d08: ���We misread the labor market.... We heard repeatedly from businesses who complained that... we had a ���historic worker shortage.���... [My] proposed language guards against the risk of underestimating slack.... We would only lift off... [after] core inflation... had... actually hit or exceed[ed] 2 percent...

God! He's long-winded: Joseph Schumpeter: Fiat Money & Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf...

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ���THE TWO MEN WERE NOT ANTAGONISTS.... While Schumpeter considered all of Keynes' answers wrong, or at least misleading, he was a sympathetic critic���

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ���Keynes, in turn, considered Schumpeter one of the few contemporary economists worthy of his respect. In his lectures he again and again referred to the works Schumpeter had published during World War I, and especially to Schumpeter's essay on the Rechenpfennige (i.e., money of account) as the initial stimulus for his own thoughts on money���

Bapu Jena & al.: Acute Myocardial Infarction Mortality During Dates of National Interventional Cardiology Meetings https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29523525/���

Tim Miller: Actually, Virtue Signaling Is Good https://thebulwark.com/actually-virtue-signaling-is-good/...

Kate Bahn: 'Unemployment Benefits Initial Claims https://twitter.com/LipstickEcon/status/1311648495300947968 [are] not good... have plateaued around 800,000 [per week] for the last 8 weeks... at the level and about the length (from my eyeballing) of the peak during the Great Recession.... It's just so bad���

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 1933 Inaugural Address https://www.c-span.org/video/?5792-1/president-roosevelt-1933-inaugural-address https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp���

Tim Duy: Trump Kills Fiscal Stimulus Negotiations https://blogs.uoregon.edu/timduyfedwatch/2020/10/06/trump-kills-fiscal-stimulus-negotiations/: ���From a campaign perspective, it seems ludicrous.... Ultimately, I think McConnell just isn���t willing to get a deal done.... Interestingly, Trump���s abandonment of fiscal stimulus comes soon after the latest plea from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for additional support for what he sees as a still struggling economy...

Vladimir Lenin (1917): State & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lenin-1917-state-%26-revolution.pdf

Leon Smolinski: Lenin & Economic Planning https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-smolinski-lenin.pdf���

Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian (1998): Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy https://books.google.com/books?id=aE_J4Iv_PVEC

Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, & Sherry Fei Ju: The Transformation of Ant Financial https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/articler-mcmorrow-ant.pdf

Josef Schumpeter (1917): Fiat Money & the Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf

Mall History: Ku Klux Klan Rally http://mallhistory.org/items/show/175: ���In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The organized event brought 25,000 members in full regalia to the city���

EPI: The Productivity���Pay Gap https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/���

Eric Lemieux: This Day in Labor History: July 28, 1932 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/liveblogging-history-july-28-1932-the-bonus-army.html: ���On July 28, 1932, the U.S. Army 12th Infantry regiment commanded by Douglas MacArthur and the 3rd Calvary Regiment, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Major George Patton violently evicted the Bonus Army from their Washington, D.C. encampment. This violent action and horrible treatment of impoverished veterans shocked the American public and demonstrated the utter indifference of Herbert Hoover to the desperate poverty the nation faced���

 

 

Plus:

John Bellamy Foster: On the Laws of Capitalism https://monthlyreview.org/2011/05/01/on-the-laws-of-capitalism/#en19: ���The Socialist Party of Boston wrote to the Harvard economics department, proposing a debate on capitalism and socialism.... The debate was held... with Sweezy and Schumpeter as the two protagonists, before a packed audience in Harvard���s Littauer Auditorium���. Leontief, as chair, summarized.... "The patient is capitalism. What is to be his fate? Our speakers are in fact agreed that the patient is inevitably dying. But the bases of their diagnoses could not be more different. On the one hand there is Sweezy, who utilizes the analysis of Marx and of Lenin to deduce that the patient is dying of a malignant cancer. Absolutely no operation can help. The end is foreordained. On the other hand, there is Schumpeter. He, too, and rather cheerfully, admits that the patient is dying. (His sweetheart already died in 1914 and his bank of tears has long since run dry.) But to Schumpeter, the patient is dying of a psychosomatic ailment. Not cancer but neurosis is his complaint. Filled with self-hate, he has lost the will to live. In this view capitalism is an unlovable system, and what is unlovable will not be loved. Paul Sweezy himself is a talisman and omen of that alienation which will seal the system���s doom...

 

Om Malik: Apple Watch���s Sensory Overload https://om.co/2020/09/15/apple-watchs-sensory-overload/: ���Longtime readers are familiar with my theory around hyper-personalization, and Apple has brought that to a mass-produced product.��Oh, and it also tells time!" || This Mirror with Sensors Points to a New Connected Future. Here Is Why https://om.co/gigaom/this-mirror-with-sensors-points-to-a-new-connected-future-here-is-why/: ���By offering a uniquely/hyper personal experience, simplehuman can go from being an invisible brand to one that is center stage in our minds. Think of it this way���connectivity and sensors allow us ��to turn any large-scale platform into a personal one. Call me crazy, by when we��add a dash of connectivity to those omnipresent sensors then interesting and/or magical things can happen...

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-10-14

Briefly Noted for 2020-10-12

Wikipedia: Martha Gellhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn���

Martha Gellhorn: The Face of War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-gellhorn-face.pdf...

Yun Sheng: Little Emperors: Memoir of an Only Child https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors���

Evan Cheng & Sandi Khine: Over 100 Faculty Sign Open Letter Calling for Faculty Senate to Reconsider Hoover Institution���s Relationship with Stanford https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/09/23/over-100-faculty-sign-open-letter-calling-for-faculty-senate-to-reconsider-hoover-institutions-relationship-with-stanford/

Matthew Yglesias: One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827���

PAA DEI Committee: Demographics of Racial Violence https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pbVXnchhQtac5enVKSPzxw���

Ursula K. LeGuin (1973): The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/story-leguin-omelas.pdf...

Wikipedia: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas...

Gabrielle Bellot (2017): Ursula Le Guin���s ���The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas��� Defies Genre https://www.tor.com/2017/08/07/ursula-le-guins-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-defies-genre/...

Our World in Data: Coronavirus Pandemic https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus���

Wikipedia: Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie,_Duchess_of_Hohenberg���

Wikipedia: Vaso ��ubrilovi�� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaso_%C4%8Cubrilovi%C4#World_War_II_and_later_life���

KJV: Revelation 6 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%206&version=KJV: ���And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying: "Come and see!"���

Manton Reece: Micro.blog 2.0 Makes It Easier to Customize Your Blog https://news.micro.blog/2020/09/29/press-release-microblog.html���

Nic Newman: The Resurgence & Importance of Email Newsletters http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/the-resurgence-and-importance-of-email-newsletters/: ���Email newsletters... are proving increasingly valuable to publishers looking to build strong direct relationships with audiences���

Noah Smith: The Late '10s Were Better for Incomes than the '90s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-23/median-household-income-grew-more-in-the-10s-than-the-90s...

Claudia Foroni, Massimiliano Marcellino, & Dalibor Stevanovic: Forecasting the COVID-19 Recession & Recovery https://voxeu.org/article/forecasting-covid-19-recession-and-recovery: ���Adjusting for forecasting errors made during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 better aligns the COVID forecasts with observed data. The results suggest a slow recovery to pre-COVID-19 levels, lasting several years���

 

Plus:

George-Marios Angeletos & Chen Lian: Confidence & the Propagation of Demand Shocks https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-angeletos-%26-lian-confidence.pdf: 'Intertemporal substitution in production... rational confusion (or bounded rationality) in consumption. The first element allows aggregate supply to respond to shifts in aggregate demand.... The second introduces a ���confidence multiplier,��� namely a positive feedback loop between real economic activity, consumer expectations of permanent income, and investor expectations... [that] amplifies the business-cycle fluctuations triggered by demand shocks (but not those triggered by supply shocks); it helps investment to comove with consumption; and it allows front-loaded fiscal stimuli to crowd in private spending...

 

Duncan Dowson & Bernard Hamrock (1980): History of Ball Bearings https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810009866: ���The familiar precision rolling-element bearings of the twentieth century are products of exacting technology and sophisticated science. Their very effectiveness and basic simplicity of form may discourage further interest in their history and development. Yet the full story covers a large portion of recorded history and surprising evidence of an early recognition of the advantages of rolling motion over sliding action and progress toward the development of rolling-element bearings. The development of rolling-element bearings is followed from the earliest civilizations to the end of the eighteenth century. The influence of general technological developments, particularly those concerned with the movement of large building blocks, road transportation, instruments, water-raising equipment, and windmills are discussed, together with the emergence of studies of the nature of rolling friction and the impact of economic factors. By 1800 the essential features of ball and rolling-element bearings had emerged and it only remained for precision manufacture and mass production to confirm the value of these fascinating machine elements...

 

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-10-12