J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 187

Chye-Ching Huang: Fundamentally Flawed 2017 Tax Law Large...

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...

#noted

Paul Krugman: The Zombie Style in American Politics: "Rus...

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...

...On one side, we have Rudy Giuliani saying that 'there���s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'. On the other side, we have Jared Kushner denying that Russia did anything beyond taking out 'a couple of Facebook ads'.... It can seem very strange if you still think of the G.O.P. as a normal political party, one that adopts policy positions and then defends those positions in more or less good faith. But... standard operating procedure... multiple levels of denial combined with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited. I first encountered this... over the issue of rising inequality... [in] the early 1990s it was already obvious that growth in the United States economy was becoming ever more skewed.... The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn���t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn���t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth. You might think that the right would have to choose one of those positions, or at least that once you���d managed to refute one layer of the argument, say by showing that inequality was indeed rising, you could put that argument behind you and move on to the next one. But no: Old arguments, like the wights in Game of Thrones, would just keep rising up after you thought you had killed them. And this is still going on...

Even as you read about the superrich buying $240 million apartments and demanding ever-bigger mega-yachts, there���s a whole industry of people denying that inequality has gone up. You see the same thing on climate change. Global warming is a myth���a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it���s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can���t do anything about it without destroying the economy. As in the case of inequality, refuted climate arguments never go away. Instead, they become intellectual zombies that should be dead but just keep shambling along. If you think Republican arguments on climate have gotten more sophisticated, wait for the next snowstorm; I guarantee you���ll hear the same crude denialist arguments ��� the same willful confounding of climate with daily weather fluctuations���we���ve been hearing for decades....

In each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith. What I mean by that is that in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don���t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren���t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda. Thus, inequality denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend policies that benefit the rich at the expense of working Americans. Climate denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend fossil fuel interests. Russia denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend Donald Trump.

All of this is or should be obvious. After all, it���s a pattern that goes back decades. But my sense is that the news media continue to have a hard time coping with the essential fraudulence of most big policy debates. That is, reporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn���t interested in the facts. I understand the pressures that often lead to false equivalence. Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn���t. But pretending that good faith exists when it doesn���t is unfair to readers. The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren���t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They���re a war in which one side���s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies...

#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: 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...

#noted

For the Weekend: Watch a Single Cell Become a Complex Organism in Just Six Minutes

Jason Kottke: Watch a Single Cell Become a Complex Organism in Just Six Minutes: "...

#fortheweekend #biology

May 3, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change

Today: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employment Situation Summary: "Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 263,000 in April, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.6 percent.... Notable job gains... in professional
and business services, construction, health care, and social assistance..." 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. The unemployment rate is broken as an indicator of the business-cycle state of the labor market.

Today: Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Staff Nowcast: "May 03, 2019: The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.1% for 2019:Q..." In the past week, good news about employment and personal consumption largely offset by bad news about manufacturing.

 

Key Points:

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Nothing has changed���your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. Specifically, it is still the case that:

U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2%/year.
There are still no signs the U.S. has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating.
Thus there are till no signs that the U.S. has gone beyond or is even at "full employment".
There are still no signs of interest rate normalization: secular stagnation continues to reign.
Printing money (and bonds) to increase the global supply of safe assets and using the proceeds to buy useful stuff continues to look like good business cycle-management policy.
The unemployment rate is broken as an indicator of the business-cycle store of the labor market.
The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut:

To the extent that it was supposed to boost the American economy by boosting the supply side through increased investment in America, has been a complete failure.
To the extent that it was supposed to make America more unequal, has succeeded.
Delivered a substantial short-erm demand-side fiscal stimulus to growth that has now ebbed.

(A 3.2%/year rate of growth of final sales to domestic purchasers over the seven quarters starting in January 2017, pushing the level of Gross National Income up by 2.1% from this demand-side stimulus.)







A change from 3 months ago: The Federal Reserve's abandonment of its focus on policies that are likely to keep PCE chain inflation at 2%/year or lower does not mean that it is preparing to do anything to avoid or moderate the next recession.
A change from 1 month ago: The U.S. grew at 3.2%/year in the first quarter of 2019���1.6%-points higher than had been nowcast���but the growth number you want to put in your head in assessing the strength of the economy is the 1.6%/year number that had been nowcast.
A change from 1 week ago: The disjunction between household- and establishment-survey views of the labor market continues to grow: since December seasonally-adjusted establishment payrolls have grown by an average of 210000 a month, while the CPS reports that the seasonally-adjusted number of workers with jobs has fallen by 80000 a month.

#highlighted #macro #forecasting

Sam Bell recalls this from two years ago. The Bernanke an...

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'...

#noted

Dan Drezner: Let���s Grade the State Department���s Direc...

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...

#noted

Staying silent on Moore was, I think, a damaging vice signal���and a lot of people were willing to send it...

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...

#noted

In The Absence Of Global Warming Such a 95%-Ile Cyclone Would Have a Maximum Windspeed at Landfall of 210Km/Hr Rather than 240

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'...

#noted

Half of the opening paragraphs of War and Peace are in Fr...

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, ���������������� �� ��������������������������...

...������ ���������������� �� �������� 1805 �������� ������������������ �������� ���������������� ����������, ���������������� �� ������������������������ ���������������������� ���������� ��������������������, ���������������� �������������� �� ������������������ ���������� ��������������, �������������� ���������������������� ���� ���� ����������. �������� ���������������� �������������� ������������������ ��������, �� ������ ������ ����������, ������ ������ ���������������� (���������� ������ ���������� ���������� ����������, ������������������������������ ������������ ��������������).
�� �� ��
�� ��������������������, ���������������������� ���������� �� �������������� ������������, �������� ���������������� ������ ���������������� ���� ��������:

"Si vous n'avez rien de mieux a faire, M. le comte (������ mon prince), et si la perspective de passer la soiree chez une pauvre malade ne vous effraye pas trop, je serai charmee de vous voir chez moi entre 7 et 10 heures. Annette Scherer"...

#noted #bookd