J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 188
May 2, 2019
It's not a disconnect between utility and happiness, its ...
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...
...Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug���in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over.... Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Alex Rees-Jones found that on surveys, people usually predict that the things they say they���d pay money for would also boost their happiness���but not always.
So what should society do about the disconnect between utility and happiness?... Basing policy on happiness surveys might also be a mistake if these surveys aren���t good measures of true happiness. Such surveys might reflect cultural expectations.... But it also unwise to simply dismiss the disconnect between happiness and utility simply because happiness is hard to measure. If people are consistently making mistakes that lead to a less happy society, it���s a problem that should be addressed. Bentham and the original utilitarians would demand no less....
#noted
Ben Thompson: Apple���s Earnings, Google���s Earnings, Am...
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...
#noted
May 1, 2019
Note to Self: Thomas Jefferson born in 1743; Sally Heming...
Note to Self: Thomas Jefferson born in 1743; Sally Hemings born in 1773; she is pregnant by 1788...
#notetoself
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 1, 2019)
Lindsey Graham: CNN New Day: ���You Know How You Make America Great Again? Tell Donald Trump To Go To Hell���:n "Trump���s a Race-Baiting, Xenophobic, Religious Bigot. He Doesn���t Represent My Party. He Doesn���t Represent The Values That the Men And Women Who Wear the Uniform are Fighting For...
Ben Thompson: Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, and the SaaS Opportunity: "For all of the disruption that the enterprise market has faced thanks to the rise of software-as-a-service (Saas), Microsoft was remarkably well-placed to take advantage of this new paradigm, if only they could get out of their own way...
Charlie Stross: [Social Architecture and the House of Tomorrow(http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...): "The bedroom, wardrobe, bathroom, and some type of food storage/preparation area, aren't going away. Other spaces will also be around, and social/spatial insulation will be in demand. At the high end, the elite (whoever they are) will try to ape the living arrangements of previous century's elites, as a status signal if nothing else. What else is conceivable? What am I missing that should be as obvious as the multimodal shipping container in 1950, or photovoltaic panels on house rooftops in 1990?...
Students who come to a country to study are one of the most important elements of any country's soft power: they should be encouraged and cosseted. They become its friends. And God knows the Britain that Cameron and May have made will need lots of friends: Financial Times: British Universities and the Brexit Dimension: "Britain���s universities are a rare export success for its services-driven economy.... As well as the monetary benefits the UK gains soft power and ties of affection with future business leaders, technocrats and politicians. Whatever happens, Britain will need these friends...
Neil Turok: The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers: The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn, U.S. Vice President Richard M. Johnson���s Black Wife
David Mills: The Vice President and the Mulatto: "Race, sex and politics in 19th-Century America.... Brenda Gene Gordon, a 67-year-old white woman in Chandler, Ariz.... How on earth could Brenda Gordon not have known that her great-great-great-grandfather was Vice President Richard M. Johnson? Wasn���t this fact passed proudly from generation to generation inside her family? No, it was not.... Julia Chinn... was, by law, a Negro. And in Johnson���s time (not to mention since), this was scandalous. 'I grew up never hearing the names Richard M. Johnson (even in Kentucky history classes) or Julia Chinn', Mrs. Gordon wrote to me during a recent email exchange...
Henry R. Robinson: An Affecting Scene in Kentucky
Abigail Adams: Letter to John Adams, 31 March - 5 April 1776
Wikipedia: Otto Bauer
I would suggests to Senator Rick Scott���indeed, I would suggest to all the Republican senators�����that this is sufficient reason to vote against Stephen Moore, unless this is the face the REpublican Party wants to put forward to minority voters for the next two generations: Margaret Hoover: Firing Line: "Stephen Moore explains his 2016 joke about Donald Trump moving into the White House and kicking 'a black family out of public housing'. Moore says, 'That is a joke I always made', adding he didn���t mean it 'like a black person' lived there. 'I shouldn���t have said it', he says...
Ella Nilsen: Infrastructure: Trump and Democrats��� maybe-doomed meeting on infrastructure, explained - Vox: "2 trillion in the nation���s roads, bridges, and rural broadband, according to Democratic leaders.... Democrats are thrilled with that number; Republicans likely won���t be. Trump himself admitted his plan 'may not be typically Republican', according to the source...
Emily Stewart: How Occupy Wall Street Animated Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the Left: "Occupy Wall Street was seen as a failure when it ended in 2011. But it���s helped transform the American left...
Nisha Gopalan: China's Bay Area Plan Has Holes, Concerns for Hong Kong: "The plan gives scant detail on how Hong Kong and Macau will be integrated without eroding their special status.... Late Monday, the��official Xinhua News Agency released details of the State Council���s Greater Bay Area plan���a project to knit together Hong Kong and Macau with nine mainland cities into a global innovation hub to rival California���s Silicon Valley. The trouble is, there���s little new on how authorities plan to make this grand vision into a reality...
The Hoarse Whisperer: "The last time Barr engineered a cover-up, people didn���t have cellphones, e-mail or the internet. He���s the caveman of coverups. No wonder he���s so bad at it...
Katherine Eriksson, Katheryn Russ, Jay C. Shambaugh, and Minfei Xu: Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing
This is... not right. Prospectively, Barro was modeling a permanent supply-side boost to the level of GDP driven by higher investment to the tune of an extra 800 billion dollars annually. Barro's prospective model conclusion was not of a temporary demand-side boost. His shift to the demand side in his paper with Jason was a six-month-later climb-down. I know this. He knows this. I know he knows this. He knows I know he knows this. Why bother saying this? I think the point is to fuzz the issue: Barro made three assessments���one that the TCJA would boost output by 4% and it might achieve its full effect in 10 years, one that the TCJA would boost output by 7% with an 0.4% first-year effect, and a third with Jason Furman hat was not so much a model-based forecast of the impact but a reduced-form claim that if pst correlations held. It is this last that he now focuses on: Robert Barro: My Best Growth Forecast Ever: "America���s real GDP growth rate of 3.2% for the first quarter of this year is impressive, as was the 3% average growth in 2018 (measured from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018). Since the end of the Great Recession���from 2011 to 2017���the US economy grew by only 2.1% per year, on average. What accounts for the recent acceleration?...
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: "Facebook had been 'warned' beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint... raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim 'factual inaccuracies'.... What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. 'Let���s see what they come back with in the morning', she said. Spoiler: they never did. That night, though, there was what was described to me as 'an emergency dinner' between Anderson and a cadre of senior Facebook executives. They were very angry, my spies told me. But Anderson, one of the most thoughtful people in tech, seemed unruffled. 'There���s always been a strict church and state separation between sponsors and editorial', he said. 'And these are important conversations we need to have. There���s a lot of people here who are very upset about what has happened to the internet. They want to take it back and we have to start figuring out how'. At the end of my talk, he invited Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook to come and respond. Spoiler: they never did...
An event coming on May 16: Preparing for the next recession is perhaps the most productive and urgent policy-analysis task op[en today: Equitable Growth: Preparing for the Next Recession: Policies to Reduce the Impact on the U.S. Economy - : "A Hamilton Project and Washington Center for Equitable Growth Policy Forum.... Historically, the U.S. has responded to recent recessions with a mix of monetary policy action and discretionary fiscal stimulus. However, since monetary policy options may be limited during the next recession, policymakers should consider adopting a range of fiscal policy measures now to help stabilize the economy when a future downturn inevitably occurs. This can be achieved with a range of fiscal policy responses aimed at expediting the next recovery through strengthening job creation and restoring confidence to businesses and households...
It is difficult to understand Uber's prospectus as anything other than "if we release information, we will scare off more potential buyers than we will attract". That makes us wonder what such information would reveal. And it leads to a class-action of Uber's IPO as a���in all likelihood very successful���attempt at affinity fraud: Rett Wallace: Uber���s Enormous, Vague IPO Prospectus Is an Outrage: "The 431-page updated prospectus was filled with lawyerly phrases and volumes of information on potential risks, but it left many serious professional investors wondering why a company that loses $3bn annually would be worth that much. The information that financial analysts would need simply wasn���t in there. A solicitation for so much money with so little information is an outrage, and a sign that something of central importance has gone wrong in US public markets in recent years...
Bret Stephens's claims that although "people" do, he would never never use an official position to retaliate against someone who had annoyed him are worth what you think they are. His promises are worthless because, somewhat paradoxically, his claim that people do retaliate is wrong. Most people, and sane people, have considerable tolerance for those who punch up. someone who claims people don't is telling you who they are: Laura McGann: NYT Columnist Bret Stephens Inadvertently Explains Why Women Don���t Report Sexual Harassment: "In an exchange about the price of rude emails, Stephens confirms retaliation is real.... Stephens explains... if someone like Kalaf.... offends a person who is important or ends up important in the industry, he risks being blackballed from jobs and prizes���even years later.... 'Imagine, for instance, that one day you are up for a big journalism award. Imagine, next, that someone you���ve insulted sits on the prize committee. Or suppose you apply for a dream job at a major publication, and your CV gets passed around. It���s fine to make unnecessary friends, but extremely unwise to make unnecessary enemies.' Stephens writes in a postscript to Kalaf that he���s judged the Livingston Award and the Pulitzers, but he���s ethical and wouldn���t behave this way...
It is very common to attribute the collapse of Roman Republican institutions and the rise of Imperial dictatorship to a loss of moral virtue on behalf of the Roman electorate���who are supposed to have fallen prey to demagogues and voted for bread-and-circuses as the underlying foundations of liberty collapsed underneath them. That story is not true. Here Sean Elling sends us to Edward Watts on the real story���recently enriched plutocracy breaking political norm after political norm in an attempt to disrupt what had been the normal grievance-redressing operation of the system: Sean Illing: Mortal Republic: Edward Watts on what America can learn from Rome���s collapse - Vox: "The Roman republic destroyed itself. Are we on a similar path?... Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California San Diego, has just published a new book titled Mortal Republic that carefully lays out what went wrong in ancient Rome ��� and how the lessons of its decline might help save fledgling republics like the United States today...
The extremely sharp Josh Bevins correctly calls out as "remarkably stupid, even relative to my expectations baseline" a piece by former Trump Federal Reserve nominee Herman Cain. The 1980s and 1990s simply did not see a "stable dollar" in any sense those words might ever possibly mean: https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340240a4a39f6a200b-pi: Herman Cain: The Fed and the Professor Standard: "The 1980s and 1990s brought prosperity across the board. This success was driven by a voting bloc of Fed governors, such as Wayne Angell and Manley Johnson, who favored a stable dollar and were able to swing the consensus. The dollar is a unit of measure���like the foot or the ounce���and keeping units of measure stable is critical to the functioning of a complex economy. The result of their stable-dollar policy was prosperity...
Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson: Jump-Starting America:
SEDAC: Population Estimation Tools:
Bay Area Book Festival: Festival Keynote: Enough Is Enough: Fighting Economic Injustice: "Anand Giridharadas, Robert Reich, and Kat Taylor...
Sharon Reier: From Vienna to Harvard, A Life of Ups and Downs: "Schumpeter... establishment of the Austrian Republic... appointed finance minister.... A tangle with Austria's foreign minister deprived him of support for taming... inflation.... His battle over the nationalization of a prominent company was the pretext for an enemy faction to force him out of office in 1919. Schumpeter's next move, in 1921, was to help found and run the Biedermann Bank.... The bank collapsed in 1924 as Austrian inflation destroyed the value of the currency and therefore the value of the bank's loans and investments.... It took many years to pay off his creditors. If his political and business life were turbulent, so were his private affairs. In 1912, Schumpeter fell in love with Annie Riesinger, the 12-year-old daughter of a building porter. He offered to pay for her education until she was old enough to marry him, and his proposition was accepted. In 1926, a year after she had become the second of his three wives, Annie died in childbirth at the age of 26, along with the couple's infant son. In "The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter," Schumpeter's biographer, Robert Loring Allen, suggested that this personal tragedy triggered manic-depressive episodes. In 1937, he was married for the third time, to Elizabeth Boody, a fellow Harvard economist...
UC Berkeley Sociology Department: Mara Loveman
Alex Abad-Santos, Allegra Frank, and Alissa Wilkinson: Avengers: Endgame: Does the ���Time Heist��� Plan to Beat Thanos Make Sense?: "Endgame���s implausible ���heist��� plot could have ruined the movie. Instead, we loved it...
Alex Abad-Santos, Allegra Frank, Todd VanDerWerff, and Alissa Wilkinson: Avengers: Endgame, Iron Man, and More: All 22 Marvel movies, Ranked: "Marvel has 11 years of superhero movies under its belt. But which ones are the best?...
Richard H Thaler: "Love this solution to ordering the names of authors in economics, where alphabetical is the norm. Special symbol indicating certified randomization. Now endorsed by @AEAjournals...
Roland Boer: That Hideous Pagan Idol: Marx, Fetishism and Graven Images
Karl Marx: "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation"
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): Communist Manifesto
Wikipedia: William Jennings Bryan: "Three presidential campaigns...
Wikipedia: Benjamin N. Cardozo
Wikipedia: Leon Czolgosz
#noted #weblogs
Emi Nakamura 2019 John Bates Clark Medal Winner
This is so great! And so deserved! I have always thought that the principal benefit to beiong an economist at U.C. Berkeley is how incredibly lucky we all are with our colleagues. It's nice to see the world recognizing that: American Economic Association: 2019 John Bates Clark Medal: "Emi Nakamura is an empirical macroeconomist who has greatly increased our understanding of price-setting by firms and the effects of monetary and fiscal policies. Nakamura���s distinctive approach is notable for its creativity in suggesting new sources of data to address long-standing questions in macroeconomics. The datasets she uses are more disaggregated, or higher-frequency, or extending over a longer historical period, than the postwar, quarterly, aggregate time series that have been the basis for most prior work on these topics in empirical macroeconomics. Her work has required painstaking analysis of data sources not previously exploited, and at the same time displays a sophisticated understanding of the alternative theoretical models that the data can be used to distinguish...
#berkeley #economixs
Bret Stephens's claims that although "people" do, he woul...
Bret Stephens's claims that although "people" do, he would never never use an official position to retaliate against someone who had annoyed him are worth what you think they are. His promises are worthless because, somewhat paradoxically, his claim that people do retaliate is wrong. Most people, and sane people, have considerable tolerance for those who punch up. someone who claims people don't is telling you who they are:
Laura McGann: NYT Columnist Bret Stephens Inadvertently Explains Why Women Don���t Report Sexual Harassment: "In an exchange about the price of rude emails, Stephens confirms retaliation is real.... Stephens explains... if someone like Kalaf.... offends a person who is important or ends up important in the industry, he risks being blackballed from jobs and prizes���even years later.... 'Imagine, for instance, that one day you are up for a big journalism award. Imagine, next, that someone you���ve insulted sits on the prize committee. Or suppose you apply for a dream job at a major publication, and your CV gets passed around. It���s fine to make unnecessary friends, but extremely unwise to make unnecessary enemies.' Stephens writes in a postscript to Kalaf that he���s judged the Livingston Award and the Pulitzers, but he���s ethical and wouldn���t behave this way...
#noted
April 30, 2019
Sharon Reier: From Vienna to Harvard, A Life of Ups and D...
Sharon Reier: From Vienna to Harvard, A Life of Ups and Downs: "Schumpeter... establishment of the Austrian Republic... appointed finance minister.... A tangle with Austria's foreign minister deprived him of support for taming... inflation.... His battle over the nationalization of a prominent company was the pretext for an enemy faction to force him out of office in 1919. Schumpeter's next move, in 1921, was to help found and run the Biedermann Bank.... The bank collapsed in 1924 as Austrian inflation destroyed the value of the currency and therefore the value of the bank's loans and investments.... It took many years to pay off his creditors. If his political and business life were turbulent, so were his private affairs. In 1912, Schumpeter fell in love with Annie Riesinger, the 12-year-old daughter of a building porter. He offered to pay for her education until she was old enough to marry him, and his proposition was accepted. In 1926, a year after she had become the second of his three wives, Annie died in childbirth at the age of 26, along with the couple's infant son. In "The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter," Schumpeter's biographer, Robert Loring Allen, suggested that this personal tragedy triggered manic-depressive episodes. In 1937, he was married for the third time, to Elizabeth Boody, a fellow Harvard economist...
Wikipedia: Joseph Schumpeter: "He was married three times. His first wife was Gladys Ricarde Seaver, an Englishwoman nearly 12 years his senior (married 1907, separated 1913, divorced 1925).... His second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up. As a divorced man, he and his bride converted to Lutheranism in order to marry. They married in 1925, but within a year, she died in childbirth. The loss of his wife and newborn son came only weeks after Schumpeter's mother had died. In 1937, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Elizabeth Boody...
#noted
Bay Area Book Festival: Festival Keynote: Enough Is Enoug...
Bay Area Book Festival: Festival Keynote: Enough Is Enough: Fighting Economic Injustice: "Anand Giridharadas, Robert Reich, and Kat Taylor...
#noted
J. Bradford DeLong's Blog
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