J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 195

I am still recovering from my joint appearance at San Fra...

I am still recovering from my joint appearance at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club with Steve Moore, and my having to listen to an extraordinary number of things from his mouth that simply were not true. It is draining to find oneself thinking over and over again: "But this is different than you said last year" and "but that prediction will be so obviously wrong in six months".

Menzie China has a similar reaction: Menzie Chinn: Why Isn���t Stephen Moore Still Bragging about Coal As #1?: "Recall from July 2017, when Stephen Moore wrote an article entitled 'When It Comes To Electric Power, Coal Is No. 1'? No more. Now, lying has never been an impediment to Mr. Moore claiming something that was untrue (see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] )���but in this case perhaps it���s just so clearly untrue, he was chastened. So much for ���winning��� (coal edition). Not that I���m complaining: http://econbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/powergenshares-1.png

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There are many, many ways of generating adverse selection...

There are many, many ways of generating adverse selection effects that confound statistical studies, and very very few good instruments. Thus I have found myself always very suspicious of the whole "assessing charter schools" literature���not suspicious particularly against any one side, but just suspicious:

Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, Greg Phelan, and Steven G. Rivkin (April 2018): The Evolution of Charter School Quality: "Quality dynamics among Texas charter schools from 2001-2011.... Exits, improvement of existing charter schools, and higher quality of new entrants increased charter effectiveness relative to traditional public schools...

...Reduced student mobility and an increased share of charters adhering to "No Excuses"-style curricula contribute to these improvements. Although student selection into charter schools becomes more favorable over time in terms of prior achievement and behavior, such compositional improvements appear to contribute little to the charter sector gains. Moreover, accounting for student composition in terms of prior achievement and behavior has only a small effect on estimates of the higher average quality of "No Excuses" schools...

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It looks as though declining rates of marriage and increa...

It looks as though declining rates of marriage and increasing rates of cohabitation among the American working class are not���whatever hordes of American Enterprise Institute funders are eager to pay people to say���in any sense "sociological breakdown", but rather economic precarity:

Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett, and Matthew Stimpson: Job Quality and the Educational Gradient in Entry into Marriage and Cohabitation: "Men���s and women���s economic resources are important determinants of marriage timing.... Declining job quality and rising precarity in employment and suggests that this transformation may matter for the life course...

...The 1980-1984 U.S. birth cohort from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.... Men and women in less precarious jobs���jobs with standard work schedules and jobs that provide fringe benefits���are more likely to marry. Further, differences in job quality explain a significant portion of the educational gradient in entry into first marriage. However, these dimensions of job quality are not predictive of cohabitation...

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David Glasner: Arthur Burns and How Things Fell Apart in ...

David Glasner: Arthur Burns and How Things Fell Apart in the 1970s: "Believing the Fed incapable of controlling inflation through monetary policy, restrictive monetary policy affecting output and employment rather than wages and prices, Burns concluded that inflation could controlled only by limiting the wage increases negotiated between employers and unions. Control over wages, Burns argued, would cause inflation expectations to moderate, thereby allowing monetary policy to reduce aggregate spending without reducing output and employment. This, at any rate, was the lesson that Burns drew from the short and relatively mild recession of 1970 after he assumed the Fed chairmanship in which unemployment rose to 6 percent from less than 4 percent, with only a marginal reduction in inflation...

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David Glasner: Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur B...

David Glasner: Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur Burns Should Have Read ��� but Didn���t: "These mistakes all stemmed from a failure by Burns to understand the rationale of an incomes policy. Burns was not alone in that failure, which was actually widespread at the time. But the rationale for such a policy and the key to its implementation had already been spelled out cogently by Ralph Hawtrey in his 1967 diagnosis of the persistent failures of British monetary policy and macroeconomic performance in the post World War II period, failures that had also been deeply tied up in the misunderstanding of the rationale for���and the implementation of���an incomes policy...

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Amy Finkelstein

Amy Finkelstein: Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference: A Suggested Interpretation of Hendren: "In a pair of interconnected, important and impenetrable papers, Nathan Hendren has provided a framework for translating estimates of the causal effects of policies into welfare analyses of these policies. In this brief note, I describe the framework-which Hendren has named 'The Marginal Value of Public Funds' (MVPF)-and how it can be used for empirical public finance welfare analysis. I also discuss how the MVPF relates to 'traditional' public finance welfare analysis tools such as the marginal excess burden (MEB) and marginal cost of public funds (MCPF). Finally, I describe several recent empirical applications as a way of further illustrating and clarifying the approach...

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Is it really INBOX ZERO if one has snoozed 365 messages? ...

Is it really INBOX ZERO if one has snoozed 365 messages? Asking for a friend...

#notetoself

Carole Cadwalladr: Facebook's role in Brexit���And the Th...

Carole Cadwalladr: Facebook's role in Brexit���And the Threat to Democracy: "The UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters -- and linking the same players and tactics to the 2016 US presidential election���Cadwalladr calls out the 'gods of Silicon Valley' for being on the wrong side of history and asks: Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?...

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horsesatemymoney: "Abbreviated version of prospectus: We ...

horsesatemymoney: "Abbreviated version of prospectus: We don't make money. We probably will never make money. Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along. We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either. We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too. We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators. We don't pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities. We don't employ anyone (or we say we don't) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals. We don't actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars. We have an app but other cab companies also have apps. Current investors want to get out and so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us. Also we need more money to fund the businesses that don't make money. We are expanding into more business lines that don't make money and we need more money to fund those. We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don't worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor...

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Arthur Goldhammer: Grieving for Notre Dame: "The survival...

Arthur Goldhammer: Grieving for Notre Dame: "The survival of the towers, the facade, the windows, the walls, the buttresses���all this is more than I hoped for in those first moments of grief. It was as though France herself had emerged from the smoke and gloom, a survivor���hurting, naked, and vulnerable, but still France. Of course, Notre Dame herself has been through this before. When Paris was liberated in 1944, de Gaulle went to the cathedral for a Te Deum mass. The moment was captured on film by Henri Cartier-Bresson. On the night of the fire, almost 75 years later, President Macron also went to Notre Dame and announced that the damage would be repaired. In 1944 Notre Dame stood witness to the rebirth of France. In 2019 the French president stood witness to the survival of Notre Dame. One good turn deserves another...

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