J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 21

Malik: How I Stay Sane in 2020���Noted

Om Malik: How I Stay Sane in 2020 https://om.co/2020/09/04/how-i-stay-sane-in-2020/: ���Twitter: no alerts, view in latest tweets mode, never use it between 7 pm and 7 am. Forget about using Twitter on the weekends. Liberally mute accounts and mute words. Block accounts that exceed the boundaries of propriety. Set your trends location to a place where you don���t know the language or is sparsely populated. I also��use the Nuzzel app.... Instead, I want to read a whodunnit. And drink some great coffee.... Download a couple of albums from Bandcamp. On the first Friday of every month, all money goes to the artists. Given the persistent smoky conditions, and my desire to not be outside as much, I also have some shows I want to watch this weekend: Young Wallander: If you were a fan of Kurt Wallander, a fictional detective created by Swedish writer Henning Mankell, then this one would be an excellent series to watch on Netflix. Enola Holmes: Wait, Sherlock Holmes has a sister? Enough said���more goodness on Netflix. Sadly it is not launching till September 23rd. But for now, the trailer will do!���

.#noted #2020-09-12

Is America in Decline? || Pairagraph

Pairograph: Is America in Decline? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/fc2f8d46f10040d080d551c945e7a363: Life expectancy at birth in the United States today is 78.6 years. Life expectancy at birth in Japan today is 84.5; in Singapore, 85.1; in Switzerland, 84.3; France, 83.1; in Germany, 80.9. U.S. life expectancy is on a par with Poland, Tunisia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Albania; below Peru, Columbia, Chile, Jordan, and Sri Lanka; and only a year greater than China.

The United States currently has ~300 deaths per hundred million people per day from the coronavirus plague. The United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Canada each have less than 10...

,,,The United States has the amazing spectacle not just of Donald Trump as president, but of a huge number of American worthies���from Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House, from Paul Ryan to Chris Christie, from Dean Baquet and Maureen Dowd and James Bennet to James Comey, all of them deciding that rather than do their proper jobs they would work to raise the odds that Trump would obtain and maintain power and increase the likelihood that he would do major damage in order to boost their personal positions in various ways.

As one of my friends from a not-rich part of East Asia says: "Students from my country come to the U.S. these days. They see dirty cities, lousy infrastructure, and the political clown show on TV, and an insular people clinging to their guns and their gods who boast about how they are the greatest people in the world without knowing anything about what is going on outside. They come back and tell me: 'We have nothing to learn from those people! Why did you send me there?'"

This is a very different vibe from what we had twenty years ago, at the end of the Clinton-Gore years, when the U.S. was victorious in the Cold War, trying to build a freer, more integrated, more peaceful, and more prosperous world; riding the wave of the great internet boom; and had���for the first time in a generation���seen eight years in which typical Americans' wages and salaries were rising rapidly. And now it has been another generation since we have seen typical Americans' wages and salaries rise rapidly.

This is a very different vibe from 70 years ago, when we had the U.S. of the great post-WWII boom and the Marshall Plan that was also, finally, turning its attention to advancing Civil Rights.

This is a very different vibe from 100 years ago, when Leon Trotsky would talk about how he regretted leaving New York for Petrograd, for he was "leaving the furnace where the future was being forged."

This is a very different vibe from 180 yeas ago, when Alexis de Tocqueville was preaching to one and all that everyone needed to closely examine America, for understanding it was the key to understanding the world's democratic future.

The only argument that America is not in decline is that other countries have worse problems. That may well be true. But that strikes me as too low a bar.

.#endoftheamericancentury #highlighted #history #politicaleconomy #slouchingtowardsutopia #2020-09-12


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Eichengreen: Pandemic���s Most Treacherous Phase���Noted

Barry Eichengreen: The Pandemic���s Most Treacherous Phase https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-pandemic-crisis-will-worsen-in-october-by-barry-eichengreen-2020-09: ���The more dangerous phase of the crisis in the US may actually be now.... Fatalities are still running at roughly a thousand per day... matches levels at the beginning of April.... Many surviving COVID-19 patients continue to suffer chronic cardiovascular problems and impaired mental function.... [This] new normal['s]... implications for morbidity���and for human health and economic welfare���are truly dire.... Americans[']... current leaders are willing to accept 40,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths a day... inured to the numbers... impatient with lockdowns. They have politicized masks.... Congress seems incapable of replicating the bipartisanship that enabled passage of the CARES Act at the end of March.... If the economy falters a second time, whether because of inadequate fiscal stimulus or flu season and a second COVID-19 wave, it will not receive the additional monetary and fiscal support that protected it in the spring.... If steps are not taken to reassure the public of the independence and integrity of the scientific process, we will be left only with the alternative of ���herd immunity,��� which, given COVID-19���s many known and suspected comorbidities, is no alternative at all���

.#covid #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-09-10

Growth, Globalization, & Political Economy in the North Atlantic, 1870-1914���Lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5oOUsPuOKo

.#acceleration #democratization #economicgrowth #economichistgory #globalization #highlighted #growth #watershed #1870-1914

2020-09-06-econ-115-module-2-intro-post-1870-growth-globalization-political-economy 10:59

As of 1870, smart money might still bet, that while the British Industrial Revolution had produced marvels of science and technology, it had not or had not yet become the permanent and decisive watershed in human destiny.

Had it lightened the toil of the overwhelming majority of humanity���even in Britain, the country at the leading edge? Doubtful.

Had it materially raised the living standards of the overwhelming majority���even in Britain? By a little.

Worldwide, the 1770-1870 British Industrial Revolution had been a big deal compared to everything that had come before. Steam power and iron-making and spinning jennies and power looms and telegraph wires had provided comforts for many and made fortunes for a few. But how humans lived had not been transformed. And there were legitimate fears.

What if there were to be a slowdown of invention, a disruption of societal institutions regulating fertility, or an exhaustion of key natural resources that supported industry? Then the pressure of higher population on resources via smaller farm sizes and fewer high-quality materials per worker might resume. It might well return humanity to the Malthusian stasis that Thomas Robert Malthus had outlined in his Essay on the Principle of Population.

Evan as late as 1919 the very sharp John Maynard Keynes was not sure the escape was permanent. In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

Malthus disclosed a Devil. For half a century all serious economical writings held that Devil in clear prospect. For the next half century [before 1919] he was chained up and out of sight. Now perhaps we have loosed him again���

Yes, from 1770-1870 technological marvels became commonplace in the North Atlantic, and visible throughout much of the world. Global population growth accelerated to about 0.5% per year, and for the first time global production exceeded 3 dollars per capita a day. But that 0.44% per year rate of growth of human technological and organizational capabilities typical of the Industrial Revolution era could have been eaten up by global population growth of 0.9% per year.

Without artificial means of birth control, with high infant mortality, and with a strong desire to have enough children to make sure some survive to take care of one���s old age���should one be lucky enough to have an old age���a population living at 4 dollars a day can and will sustain a 1.5% per year population growth rate, and a population living at 4 dollars a day does not have low enough infant mortality for large-scale fertility restriction to appear to be the desirable option.

And in the mid-nineteenth century population growth was accelerating.

Without a further acceleration���a bigger than Industrial Revolution accelerationof the underlying drivers of economic growth, today���s world might indeed be a Steampunk World. It might have a global population of our current 7.5 billion, but living at little more than the same global standard of living as 1800, with global technology and organization at about the level of 1910. We might have not 9% but rather more like 50% of the world living at or below 2 and 90% living below 5 of today���s dollars per day, with average farm sizes one-sixth of what they had been in 1800. And only the uppermost of upper classes would have what we regard as a Global-North middle-class standard of living.

we did get that extra post-1870 innovation growth acceleration.

Around 1870 the proportional rate of growth of humanity���s technological and organizational capabilities took a further fourfold upward leap, from perhaps 0.44% per year to our current 2.06% per year or so. Thereafter technology far outran population growth. And thereafter population growth in the richest economies began to decline: humans became rich enough and long-lived enough that limiting fertility became a desirable option. Each year over 1870-1914 John Stuart Mill���s belief that the progress of science and technology, of industry and enterprise had not lightened the day���s toil of any human being or effected great changes in human destiny became less and less true. By 1914 it had become more-or-less completely false.

1870-1914 was, in the perspective of all previous eras���as John Maynard Keynes looking back from 1919 wrote������economic Eldorado��� economic Utopia��� the earlier economist would have deemed it��� an unprecedented situation��� an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of [hu]man[ity]���. Globally real wages of unskilled workers in 1914 look like they stood more than half again above their levels of 1870 or so���a world-wide escape from Malthus never before seen.

The resulting world as of 1914 was an odd mix of modernity and antiquity. Britain burned 194 million tons of coal in 1914. The total coal-equivalent energy consumption of Britain today is only 2.5 times that. Yet 1870 still saw close to half of Americans working outside the home at work at work in agriculture. And all European countries with the exception of Belgium and Britain were behind America in their distribution of the labor force between town and country, and among farming, manufacturing, and other sectors. U.S. railroads carried passengers some 350 miles per citizen in 1913. Today U.S. airlines carry passengers 3000 miles per citizen. Yet all of Europe save France still saw the powerful political and social dominance of agrarian landlords, who still mostly saw themselves as descendants of knights who had fought for their kings with their swords.

Why does each year since 1870 see as much technological and organizational progress of four years over 1770-1870, of twelve over 1500-1770, and of 60 over the years before 1500? And how did what was originally a geographicallyconcentrated surge become global, albeit unevenly global?

We can gesture to five changes:

Surely most important, the development of the industrial research laboratory. This meant that inventors like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla could be inventors. They did not have to fulfill the ten other roles that their predecessors had had to fill, from impresario to HR manager, before. This made a huge difference: inventions could be professionally developed and then rapidly and thoroughly deployed at scale, in the form first of the mass production multidivisional corporation, and now of the looser organizations that are our global value chains.

Closely following in importance, the coming of the modern corporation. Only knowledge diffused was knowledge useful. And the corporation was the way the knowledge got out of the industrial research lab and down to the production line.

The globalization of transport, in the form of the iron-hulled screw-propellered ocean-going steamship linked to the railroad network���and subsequent follow-on developments.

The globalization of communication, in the form of the global submarine.

The lack of barriers. The most important lack, perhaps, was open borders for migration���with the very important caveat that the poorest from China, India, and elsewhere were not allowed into the temperate settlements: those were reserved for Europeans (and, sometimes, Middle Easterners). One in fourteen humans changed their continent between 1870-1914. But also important in were the lack of government blockages to trade and investment and communication. People could and did move. And finance, machines, railroads, steamships, and the telegraph nerves of production and distribution networks could follow, chasing abundant natural physical and biological resources.

And then there is perhaps the most important consequence. For reasons we do not well understand, the richer economies of 1870-1914 became ones in which mass politics was no longer an occasional outlier but instead the rule: elites found that maintaining old hierarchies of political domination and exclusion from power were on longer viable, and that they must, instead, either educate their new populist masters to the practices of self-governmen���or bamboozle them.

David Brooks: "I Am Not Going to Do My Job on November 3"���Noted

David Brooks says: "American democracy is in trouble because my journamalistic colleagues and I will not do our jobs on November 3":

Steve M.: Just Do Your Damn Jobs https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/09/just-do-your-damn-jobs.html: ���David Brooks writes: "On the evening of Nov. 3... Donald Trump seems to be having an excellent night. Counting the votes cast at polling places, Trump is winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.... Trump quickly declares victory. So do many other Republican candidates. The media complains that it���s premature, but Trumpworld is ecstatic. Democrats know that as many as 40 percent of the ballots are mail-in and still being counted... but they can���t control the emotions of that night. It���s a gut punch." Why? Why should what's happening be a gut punch? Why should it be perceived that Donald Trump is having an excellent night?... What happens on TV on election nights? On MSNBC, to take one example, Steve Kornacki stands at a digital map and discusses not just the current vote totals but the nature of the votes that haven't been counted... that the untallied votes come from precincts or counties that are stronger for one party than another. He'd give us a sense of what it would take for the candidate who's trailing to make up the deficit. And up to a point in every contest he'd say: This is why we can't call the race yet���

.#grifters #journamalism #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-09-05

Modigliani (1944): Liquidity Preference���Noted

Franco Modigliani (1944): Liquidity Preference and the Theory of Interest and Money https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-modigliani-liquidity-preference.pdf: ���As long as wages are flexible, the long-run equilibrium rate of interest is determined exclusively by real factors... the propensity to save and the marginal efficiency of investment. The condition, money saving = money investment, determines the price level and not the rate of interest. If wages are rigid... the propensities to save and to invest but the situation is now more complicated; for these propensities depend also on money income and therefore on the quantity of active money which in turn depends itself on the level of the rate of interest.... In a system with rigid wages not only interest but also almost every economic variable depends on the quantity of money.... [In] the "Keynesian [liquidity trap] case"... the long-run equilibrium rate of interest is the rate which makes the demand for money to hold infinitely elastic... [and] the rate of interest is determined exclusively by institutional factors.

.#noted #2020-08-31

Irwin Collier: Schumpeter's Macro Syllabus 1948���Noted

Irwin Collier: Harvard. Advanced Economic Theory, Second Term. 1948 http://www.irwincollier.com/harvard-advanced-economic-theory-second-term-schumpeter-1948/: ���Joseph Schumpeter: "Economics 103b. Spring Term 1947-48. Plan of Course and Suggestions for Reading. The plan of the course is to start from and to build upon Professor Haberler���s lectures in the Fall Term (103a). We shall start from the statics of equilibrium and then discuss at some lengths the use and limitations of the method of Comparative Statics. After this, we shall survey various Dynamic Models. These models will be made the starting points of excursions...

...into relevant fields of pure and applied theory. Professor Haberler���s reading list remains in force. Wicksell���s Lectures I��being particularly recommended. In addition, perusal of the following items will prove helpful. The more important ones are marked by an asterisk. The list is intended to cover also suggestions for the reading period:

J. Tinbergen*, Suggestions on Quantitative Business Cycle Theory, Econometrica, July 1935. F. Modigliani, Liquidity Preference, Interest, and Money, Econometrica, January 1944. N. Kaldor, Stability and Full Employment, Economic Journal, December 1938. F. Lavington, Approach to a Theory of Business Risks, Economic Journal, June 1925. L. Metzler, Factors Governing the Length of Inventory Cycles, Review of Economic Statistics, February 1947. M. V. Jones, Secular and Cyclical Saving Propensities, Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, January 1944. L. M. Lachmann, Uncertainty and Liquidity Preference, Economica, August 1937. M. Kalecki, A Theorem on Technical Progress, Review of Economic Studies, June 1941. P. A. Samuelson*, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947

.#noted #2020-08-31

Themes | Lecture

When do I say the Long 20th Century really started? 1870. Why then? The third modern watershed���the third step-up in the global pace of economic growth���globalization, and the start of the American century. When do I say the Long 20th Century really ended? 2016. Why then? Four reasons: (1) end of the American century, (2) slowdown in global-north growth, (3) failures of economic management, (4) revival of what we now call neo-fascism as a challenge to liberal democracy...

Quantities: What was the typical human standard of living back in 1870? Perhaps $4/day���$1300/year. What is the typical human standard of living today? Perhaps $35/day���$12000/year. Is there a "typical" human standard of living today? Maybe not: global inequality is much greater than it was in 1870, and even more so in 1800. A global north of 800 million with a typical standard of living of $50000/year���$150/day; a global south of 6.8 billion with a typical standard of living of $7000/year���$20/day Is the world today a utopia? Definitely not��� Is greater San Francisco today a utopia? What do you think?

Grand Narrative

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.1-grand-narrative-%23tceh.pdf

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.1-grand-narrative-%23tceh.pptx

21:00 of audio

 

Inequality & Humanity

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.2-inequality-%23tceh.pdf

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.2-inequality-%23tceh.pptx

14:00 of audio

 

What Has Gone Badly Wrong?

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.3-going-wrong-%23tceh.pdf

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.3-going-wrong-%23tceh.pptx

15:30 of audio

  Slouching Towards Utopia?

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.4-slouching?-%23tceh.pdf

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-1-lecture-3.4-slouching?-%23tceh.pptx

4:30 of audio

.#berkeley #economichistory #highlighted #lectures #tceh #themes #2020-08-30

Dasgupta on Doing Economics | Lecture

Why would one want to ���think like an economist���?: What is ���thinking like an economist���? Cost-benefit, opportunity cost, system equilibrium, marginality. This turns out to be useful for thinking about the economy. (Other things too: but mostly the economy.) But Dasgupta has a different take, a game theorist's take...

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-0-lecture-3.3-dasguptas-take-%23tceh.pptx

 

.#berkeley #cognition #economics #highlighted #lecture #rhetoric #2020-08-29

Sokrates vs. Machiavelli on the Educational Process | Lecture

On books:

Machiavelli: "I��� step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them... I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me..."

Sokrates: "The creations... if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence���. [Words] once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not..."

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-115-module-0-lecture-3.2-education-process-%23tceh.pptx

 

.#berkeley #books #cognition #educationalprocess #highlighted #lecture #2020-08-29