J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 186
May 5, 2019
Economist: The Story of China���s Economy as Told Through...
Economist: The Story of China���s Economy as Told Through the World���s Biggest Building: The Global Centre: "The world���s biggest building got off to a bad start. On the eve of its opening, Deng Hong, the man who built the mall-and-office complex, disappeared... swept up in a corruption investigation just before the building���s doors opened in 2013. The media focus shifted to his hubris and his wasteful, pharaonic venture. Inside, it had a massive waterpark with an artificial beach, an ice rink, a 15-screen cinema, a 1,000-room hotel, offices galore, two supersized malls and its own fire brigade, but just a smattering of businesses and shoppers. It became a parable for the economy���s excesses and over-reliance on debt. Today, more than five years on, the story has taken a series of surprising turns. For one, the building is not a disaster. During the summer, the waterpark is crowded. The mall has come to life, a testament to the rise of the middle class. The offices are a cauldron of activity: 30,000 people work there in every industry imaginable, from app design to veterinary care. Mr Deng has been released and is back in business, declaring last summer that he had a clean slate...
...A triumphant return? Not quite. Mr Deng���s freedom is marred by the fact that he no longer owns the centre but is now an employee.... The Global Centre... is neither a spectacular success nor a catastrophic failure but a long economic struggle, a contest between China���s tremendous potential and the cracks in its foundations. America is only a secondary player in the drama. China, for better and for worse, is writing its own story.... In the 1990s that China settled on a model that has, in many respects, persisted to this day. It started evaluating local officials by how quickly the economy grew under their watch. They, in turn, competed with each other to woo firms, offering them cheap land, tax breaks and low-cost labour. Transforming the bureaucracy into something more like a large startup business, hungry to expand, yielded dramatic results. China accounted for 4% of the global economy in 1990; now that is close to 18%.
Three factors have underpinned this model. Each can be found in the origins of the Global Centre. The first is land, all of which is publicly owned. This puts a valuable asset at the disposal of local officials....A second feature of China���s economy is cronyism. Mr Deng bought the land in 2008 at a steep discount, according to state media.... The third feature in China���s model is debt (see chart). Mr Deng bought the land in 2008 just as the country embarked on a manic phase of growth. Worried about drag from the global financial crisis, Beijing unleashed a huge stimulus. Local officials ran up debts, and seized lots of land for development. A building boom ensued. The Global Centre is one of the many projects from that period that dot the country. Some are useful, such as China���s high-speed rail network. Others, less so: scores of cities built big futuristic districts but are still struggling to attract residents. ...
The challenge now is to shift to a different economic model, because all three factors are hitting their limits. Land is a finite resource, and the government���s appropriations have got ahead of market need.... Corruption has reached corrosive levels. Frailties from all the debt are showing.... But turning onto a new path is hard.... China���s problems are simple enough to diagnose. Treatment, though, is painful, and the disease more chronic than acute. So instead of taking bitter medicine, officials hope time will be a balm. But China���s ills are likely to get harder to cure....
China has done well at building first-rate ports, highways and railways. But promoting innovation is harder. Patents filed by Chinese companies, for instance, are not all they seem.... Government subsidies also have shortcomings.... This is not to say that China is failing. Judging by growth or innovation, it has excelled compared with most other countries at its income level. But it still has far to go. Despite the name of its plan to develop advanced industries������Made in China 2025������which has caused so much concern in America, the bureaucrats who drew up the plan did not think that China could rival foreign prowess until 2049. That is cold comfort for firms whose technology has been stolen. But it is an indication of where China stands: its rise will be measured in decades, not years....
Mr Deng is back. He is working for the Yunnan group, tasked with helping it make a success of his buildings, including the Global Centre. A little more than five years after it opened, he can take some pride in it. Millions of people have come through its doors. But he still has a challenge on his hands. To retain a shareholding in his projects, he has promised to deliver nearly $1bn in profits from 2018 to 2020, ten times more than over the previous three years���a nearly impossible task. Problems are also showing up. The waterpark now closes for half the year, because it is too costly to run in the winter when crowds are sparse. Doors have started to fail on some of the 200 lifts. Rainwater drips through the roof. This is one more way in which the Global Centre reflects the Chinese economy. Glittering from afar, the structure looks shabbier and less solid up close, and is sorely in need of renovation...
#noted
How did I miss this before? Kate Bahn about how it really...
How did I miss this before? Kate Bahn about how it really is the case that holders of H-1 and H-2 visas really are close to indentured servants���and suffer for it: Kate Bahn: The Search for and Hiring of Guest Workers in the United States Displays the Complexity of Market Concentration and Monopsony Power: "Eric M. Gibbons... Allie Greenman... Peter Norlander... and Todd Sorensen... monopsonistic effects for workers who are employed under guest worker visas such as H-1 and H-2... review lawsuits against employers of guest workers and confirm widely held beliefs about wage theft and abusive employment... The four researchers exploit the application process to the U.S. Department of Labor for guest worker visas to estimate employer concentration for guest workers and how this affects wages.... Guest workers are in a more concentrated set of occupations than the overall U.S. labor market, with more than a third of them working in computer and mathematical occupations on H-1B visas and nearly half working in building, grounds cleaning, and maintenance on H-2B visas... Herfindahl-Hirschman Index...is sufficiently high to warrant U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny of mergers in these sectors of the U.S. economy...
#noted
Go watch Michael Kades testify on Capitol Hill on Thursda...
Go watch Michael Kades testify on Capitol Hill on Thursday March 7: Michael Kades: To Combat Rising U.S. Prescription Drug Prices, Let���s Try Competition: "Look at the variety of problems with anti-competitive practices engaged in by U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Take ViroPharma Inc. When faced with the possibility that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would approve generic versions of its Vancocin product (a drug to treat a potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal infection), the company filed 43 petitions to delay or prevent generic approval. Although none were successful on the merits, it took years before the FDA approved any generic competitors. The Federal Trade Commission alleged the strategy increased costs by hundreds of millions of dollars...
#noted
Yes, it is time for the center-left to pass the baton to ...
Yes, it is time for the center-left to pass the baton to those further left for the next lap in the race for equitable growth. But what does that mean, concretely, for policies. Paul Krugman gives his opinion: Paul Krugman: "A few thoughts inspired by @delong's 'I am no longer a neoliberal' piece. Brad is really saying two things: [1] there is no center-right, so centrists must deal with the left; and [2] market-oriented policies don't work as well as thought. I've been there on both fronts for a while (although I have been fairly left of center for many years). But I think it's useful to ask what it means for policy proposals in different areas...
...The big issue right now is environmental policy/Green New Deal. Here both aspects of the neoliberal rethink matter. Carbon pricing probably works less well than Econ 101 suggests-it works, for sure, but needs public investment in infrastructure and research too. Beyond that, however, there will be no help from conservatives. They may talk about Pigouvian taxes, but when push comes to shove they will find reasons why any carbon pricing plan is an evil socialist plot. So the deal must be with the left. And if that means tying climate policy to a broader agenda, much of it stuff we all want but maybe a few flaky ideas too���OK! We want this to be a Christmas tree with lots of stuff for different interests, because that's what it will take to get it done.
Health care is a different story. I don't think people like Brad or me were ever opposed in principle to single-payer; I'd go for it in a minute. Nor did I ever imagine that any Rs would sign on. The problem is how to deal with the ~160 million people with employer coverage. Telling them that they have to give that up, but don't worry, our plan will be better still looks unrealistic. It's not left v right, and it's not about being naive about the GOP. It's about loss aversion: hard to convince people to fix something they don't see as broken.
Next up: fiscal policy. Both politics and good economics say to be relaxed about the deficit. Fiscal restraint by Ds is hard to justify when you know Rs will blow it next time they are in power; low interest rates and secular stagnation say deficit spending w/in limits OK. Again, I've been there for a while; these days even Larry Summers, Jason Furman, and Olivier Blanchard are pretty much there. Only fools, knaves, and Howard Schultz think deficits should be a prime concern these days.
Last point: wages. Here's where research has convinced me and others that wages are much less determined by supply and demand, much more determined by market power, than we used to believe. This implies a much bigger role for "predistribution" policies like minimum wage hikes, pro-union policies, and more than we used to think. "Let the market do its thing, but spend more on education/training and a bigger EITC" no longer sounds like wisdom.
The point is that the DeLong concession, if that's what we want to call it, doesn't mean that policies preferred by AOC or whatever are always right, economically or politically; it means that they need to be taken seriously, and never mind what the center-right thinks...
#noted
From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Sil...
From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Silicon Valley to account���to get the social media companies to thin of themselves as information utilities rather than misinformation utilities: Carole Cadwalladr: My TED Talk: HJow I Took on the Tech Titans in Their Lair: "The world needs all kinds of brains. But in the situation we are in... not these.... If they���re not sick to their stomach about what has happened in Myanmar or overwhelmed by guilt about how their platforms were used by Russian intelligence to subvert their own country���s democracy, or sickened by their own role in what happened in New Zealand, they���re not fit to hold these jobs.... I don���t think they set out to enable massacres to be live-streamed. Or massive electoral fraud in a once-in-a-lifetime, knife-edge vote. But they did. If they don���t feel guilt, shame and remorse, if they don���t have a burning desire to make amends, their boards, shareholders, investors, employees and family members need to get them out. We can see the iceberg. We know it���s coming. That���s the lesson of TED 2019. We all know it. There are only five people in the room who apparently don���t...
#noted
Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: May 3, 2019: Weekly ...
Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: May 3, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change: "I can't insert a figure here, so the very few points of raw data are here ,https://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2019/... or do click here or other bears will be angry https://angrybearblog.com/2019/05/fiscal-policy-and-gdp-2019-update.html I don't see anything funny happening in the past 8 quarters which isn't fit almost perfectly using the assumption that the government spending multiplier is 1.5 and nothing else matters...
#commentoftheday
May 3, 2019
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 3, 2019)
May 3, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change: Note that all of the decline in the unemployment rate is a shift of workers from "unemployed" to "out of the labor force", which now stands 800,000 lower than it did in December...
For the Weekend: Watch a Single Cell Become a Complex Organism in Just Six Minutes
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes: from The End of Laissez-Faire (1926)
Weekend Reading: Vachel Lindsay: from Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan
Note to Self: Thomas Jefferson born in 1743; Sally Hemings born in 1773; she is pregnant by 1788...
John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Je��re��mie Cohen-Setton, Egor Gornostay, and Colombe Ladreit:: The Aggregate Effects of Budget Stimulus: Evidence From the Large Fiscal Expansions Database: "Large, persistent, and positive effects of fiscal stimulus on GDP with a decrease in net exports that only partly offsets the increase in private domestic demand.... suggestive evidence that fiscal policy is more effective in a slump than in a boom...
Noah Smith: Why Macroeconomist Emi Nakamura Deserves John Bates Clark Medal - Bloomberg: "The John Clark Bates Medal��almost never goes to a macroeconomist.��Emi Nakamura is a worthy exception...
Greg Ip: For Lower-Paid Workers, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived: "Software and algorithms are used to screen, hire, assign and now terminate workers...
Jessica M. Goldstein: : "Rachel Lears' documentary 'Knock Down the House' captures a political phenom on the rise���and three other women running for office for the first time...
Jason Kottke: Grace Hopper Explains a Nanosecond: "In this short clip from 1983, legendary computer scientist Grace Hopper uses a short length of wire to explain what a nanosecond is...
Steve M.: The Rot In The Republican Party Started Long Before Fox 'News' And Trump: "Sorry James Comey, but William Barr didn't need to spend time with Donald Trump to become who he is now...
byu/cil3x: MacBook Pro Keyboard Failures: Why Apples dust excuse is bullshit! [Teardown + Explanations] : apple: "What the actual cause is, honestly I don't know. My suspicion is that the metal dome experiences metal fatigue and slowly begin to lose connection, or that that little U-shaped cutout in the centre of the dome weakens and starts to easily bounce when pressed, making contact 2+ times.... Always have AppleCare, even if paying extra to cover a flaw that should be properly dealt with is morally questionable and a shitty thing to do...
John Maynard Keynes: Obituary for Alfred Marshall: "Economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.... An easy subject, at which very few excel!...
Forrest��Capie: Money and Business Cycles in Britain, 1870���1913
Joseph Schumpeter (1927): The Explanation of the Business Cycle
Matthew Yglesias (2011): Demand Denialism: "Fr��d��ric Bastiat... his 'What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen', which I���ve seen a lot of people cite as the foundation for their opposition to stimulus policies. It���s an extremely insightful essay, but I think the correct way to understand it is as precisely laying down the theoretical conditions in which stimulative policies do work...
Deficit Denialism: Frederic Bastiat Actually Favored Expansionary Fiscal Policy in Recessions Edition: It has always seemed to me that very, very, very few of the people who cite Frederic Bastiat have actually read him. Most have not even read all of "What Is Seen and Unseen". For example: "There is an article in the Constitution which states: 'Society assists and encourages the development of labor.... through the establishment by the state, the departments, and the municipalities, of appropriate public works to employ idle hands'. As a temporary measure in a time of crisis��� this intervention��� could have good effects... as insurance. It��� takes labor and wages from ordinary times and doles them out, at a loss it is true, in difficult times...
Why Can't More People Actually Read Frederic Bastiat?: John Holbo's jaw drops as he reads Alex Tabarrok praise the carried interest rule.... Indeed, Alex Tabarrok does crawl out on a limb and applaud all tax loopholes as islands of freedom on the road to serfdom.... I would say that, in a democracy, one pays a progressive share of one's income to fund the many useful and convenient services and actions the government undertakes.... Methinks Frederic Bastiat would have agreed with me: "Often, nearly always if you will, the government official renders an equivalent service to John Goodfellow. In this case there is... only an exchange.... I say this: If you wish to create a government office, prove its usefulness."... Frederic Bastiat. I wonder how many people really read him these days?...
Karl Marx (1857): The Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in England
Ben Thompson: Apple���s Earnings, Google���s Earnings, Amazon Earnings: "Available evidence strongly suggests that iPhone demand in China is very elastic: if the iPhone is cheaper, Apple sells more; if it is more expensive, Apple sells less. This is, of course, unsurprising, at least for a commodity, and right there is Apple���s issue in China: the iPhone is simply less differentiated in China than it is elsewhere, leaving it more sensitive to factors like new designs and price than it is elsewhere...
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: Noah Smith: What We Want Doesn���t Always Make Us Happy: "Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook). This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility���more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy. But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward...
Half of the opening paragraphs of War and Peace are in French: Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace: "��h bien, mon prince. Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des ����������������, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous previens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j'y crois)���je ne vous connais plus, vous n'etes plus mon ami, vous n'etes plus ������ ������������ ������, comme vous dites. ����, ������������������������, ������������������������. Je vois que je vous fais peur, ���������������� �� ��������������������������...
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: Hilzoy: "'With winds expected to be 240 kilometers per hour (150 mph) at landfall,: Tropical Cyclone Fani would be the strongest storm to hit the region since a similar system struck Odisha in 1999, resulting in at least 10,000 deaths.... A storm surge in excess of 6.5 feet is likely to occur in some locations, with the surge affecting millions in low-lying areas. The Bay of Bengal is notorious for allowing storms like this one to pile huge amounts of water into highly populated areas'...
Professional Republican economists against Moore: Mankiw. Professional Republicans for Moore: Lindsey, Siegel, Taylor (secondhand). Staying silent on Moore was, I think, a damaging vice signal���and a lot of people were willing to send it. Opposing Moore was not a virtue signal or even an exercise of virtue but rather a no-brainer: only Mankiw would do it: Reuters: Moore Withdraws for Consideration from Fed Post: Trump - Reuters: "U.S. President Donald Trump���s pick to fill a seat on the Federal Reserve has withdrawn from consideration... Trump said on Twitter.... Just hours earlier, Moore had told Bloomberg TV that he was ���all in��� and that he expected to be nominated within three weeks...
Dan Drezner: Let���s Grade the State Department���s Director of Policy Planning on Her Grand Strategy Musings!: "Once upon a time, the director of policy planning for the State Department was a pretty prestigious job.... Brian Hook, the director of policy planning under Rex Tillerson, was granted a tremendous amount of authority but stumbled badly. He was a relative neophyte attempting to counsel a complete neophyte on the ins and outs of the job. He did... poorly. When Mike Pompeo came on, he hired Kiron Skinner.... She has thought about this stuff for a while. She has the academic credentials and publishing record.... Since coming on in September of last year, however, Skinner has made some odd statements...
Sam Bell recalls this from two years ago. The Bernanke and the Yellen Feds are, I think, going to be judged as harshly as the Burns Fed of the 1970s for assuming that they knew the state and structure of the economy. The more tentative, more willing to gather information Greenspan Fed of the 1990s looks much much better in retrospect: Sam Fleming: Is It Finally Time For a Pay Rise for American Workers?: "John Williams... San Francisco Fed president, says that while inflation may have been weak recently, this should not detract from the bigger picture. ���It���s not like inflation is moving in the wrong direction or is out of sync with what you���d expect for where the economy is,��� he said last month. 'We have gotten rid of all the slack'...
From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Silicon Valley to account���to get the social media companies to thin of themselves as informaiton utilities rather than misinformation utilities: Carole Cadwalladr: My TED Talk: How I Took on the Tech Titans in Their Lair: "Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter... saying that Nazism was 'hard to define'.... They needed to go 'deep'.... Anderson gave credit to Dorsey for actually showing up. And it���s true he did. He showed guts for doing what Zuckerberg and Sandberg would not. But... what came across... was the complete absence of emotion���any emotion���in Dorsey���s face.... Dorsey appeared���and I can���t think of any other way of saying this���insentient.... Dorsey can see the iceberg but doesn���t seem to feel our terror. Or understand it. In an interview last summer, US journalist Kara Swisher, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg how he felt about Facebook���s role in inciting genocide in Myanmar���as established by the UN���and he couldn���t or wouldn���t answer...
Paul Krugman: The Zombie Style in American Politics: "Russia didn���t help Donald Trump���s presidential campaign. O.K., it did help him, but the campaign itself wasn���t involved. O.K., the campaign had a lot of Russian contacts and knowingly received information from the Russians, but that was perfectly fine.... We���re not even talking about an ever-shifting party line; new excuses keep emerging, but old excuses are never abandoned...
Chye-Ching Huang: Fundamentally Flawed 2017 Tax Law Largely Leaves Low- and Moderate-Income Americans Behind: "The fundamental flaws of the 2017 tax law: 1) it ignores the stagnation of working-class wages and exacerbates inequality; 2) it weakens revenues when the nation needs to raise more; and 3) it encourages rampant tax avoidance and gaming that will undermine the integrity of tax code.... The 2017 tax law largely left behind low- and moderate-income Americans���and in many ways hurts them.... A restructuring of the law can fix these flaws...
Robert Waldmann: "I think their contributions to thought about methodology would be worth zero if correctly assessed, but are worth much less due to their influence. This is more true of Prescott, but I think I explain how Lucas's efforts are worth less than nothing here https://t.co/6fJuiQRVRk...
Wikipedia: Russian Conquest of Central Asia
Wikipedia: Russian Nobility
Measuring Worth: Logarithm of US Real GDP Per Capita (2012 Dollars)
Measuring Worth: Logarithm of UK Real GDP Per Capita (2013 Pounds)
A. K. Cairncross: Review of "Business Cycles in the United Kingdom, 1870-1914" by J. Tinbergen
NIESR: The UK Business Cycle���Dating and Implications
Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics: An updated graph that Claudia Goldin had me make two and a half decades ago. The nonfarm unemployment rate since 1890...
8, Joshua Yaffa: Putin���s Russia Wrestles with the Meaning of Trotsky and Revolution
Wikipedia: New Economic Policy
Britannica.com: Fasces
#noted #weblogs
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes: from The End of Laissez-Faire (1926)
John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire (1926): "Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved-at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on 'the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition', but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonise individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume's egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favour of the business man���for the latter could attain the philosopher's summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit...
...Yet some other ingredients were needed to complete the pudding. First the corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government, many legacies of which survived into the nineteenth. The individualism of the political philosophers pointed to laissez-faire. The divine or scientific harmony (as the case might be) between private interest and public advantage pointed to laissez-faire. But above all, the ineptitude of public administrators strongly prejudiced the practical man in favour of laissez-faire - a sentiment which has by no means disappeared. Almost everything which the State did in the eighteenth century in excess of its minimum functions was, or seemed, injurious or unsuccessful.
On the other hand, material progress between 1750 and 1850 came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organised society as a whole. Thus practical experience reinforced a priori reasonings. The philosophers and the economists told us that for sundry deep reasons unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole. What could suit the business man better? And could a practical observer, looking about him, deny that the blessings of improvement which distinguished the age he lived in were traceable to the activities of individuals 'on the make'?
Thus the ground was fertile for a doctrine that, whether on divine, natural, or scientific grounds, state action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.
By the time that the influence of Paley and his like was waning, the innovations of Darwin were shaking the foundations of belief. Nothing could seem more opposed than the old doctrine and the new-the doctrine which looked on the world as the work of the divine watchmaker and the doctrine which seemed to draw all things out of Chance, Chaos, and Old Time. But at this one point the new ideas bolstered up the old. The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition���that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that���free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalisation of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of ocean.
Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing-individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin...
#weekendreading #economics #history #publicsphere
Weekend Reading: Vachel Lindsay: from Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, ���Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion...
���There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle, ���There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle, ���There were real lines drawn; ���Not the silver and the gold, ���But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and the old, ���The mean and the cold....������Oh, the longhorns of Texas, ���The jay hawks from Kansas, ���The plop-eyed bungaro and giant gassicus, ���The varmint, chipmunk, bugabo, ���The horned-toad, prarie-dog, and ballyhoo, ���From all the newborn states arow... ������And all these in their helpless days ���By the dour East oppressed, ���Mean paternalism ���Making their mistakes for them, ���Crucifying half the West, ���Till the whole Atlantic coast ���Seemed a giant spider's nest...
#weekendreading #books���
Robert Waldmann: "I think their contributions to thought...
Robert Waldmann: "I think their contributions to thought about methodology would be worth zero if correctly assessed, but are worth much less due to their influence. This is more true of Prescott, but I think I explain how Lucas's efforts are worth less than nothing here https://t.co/6fJuiQRVRk...
...And the unsensible economists who opposed the Obama stimulus will never ever admit they were wrong, because they don't do that. For example Prescott has not admitted that his early 2009 assertion that the downturn was minor was not exactly right. That is to say that there are academic economists in excellent standing (having won the Nobel Memorial prize) who will not allow mere facticity to distract them from the essential truths that they have deduced. To them the scientific method is completely alien and unwelcome.
I am thinking of Prescott, Lucas, and their acolytes. A lot of excellent scientific economic research has been accomplished recently, but I think it is important for economists to recognize that some prominent economists are enemies of science. I think their contributions to thought about methodology would be worth zero if correctly assessed, but are worth much less due to their influence.... My disagreement is not based on their policy proposals, although it is striking that in their work much has changed but the policy advice is always the same. I suspect that they work back from policy conclusions to assumptions.
But I am willing to set this suspicion aside when discussing their alleged contributions to methodology. Considered on their own terms, they are worthless if correctly understood and much worse that worthless as usually applied...
#noted
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