J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 219

Doug Jones: Coals to Newcastle: "320-304 million years ag...

Doug Jones: Coals to Newcastle: "320-304 million years ago: It seems like Gaia really went on a bender in the late Carboniferous, getting drunk on oxygen. By some estimates, the atmosphere was over 30% oxygen back then, compared to 21% today. Living things took advantage of the opportunity. Insects apparently face an upper limit in size because they rely on diffusion through tracheas instead of forced respiration through lungs to get oxygen into their bodies. With more oxygen in the air, this limit was raised. The Carboniferous saw dragonflies with a wingspan up to 70 centimeters, and body lengths up to 30 centimeters, comparable to a seagull...

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The past year has seen one-fifth of the jump in investm...

The past year has seen one-fifth of the jump in investment that the boosters of the Trump tax cut were claiming would happen back in last 2017. One fifth. And I haven't seen a peep from anyone even expressing curiosity on why their miss was so great: Tyler Cowen (November 2017): Yes, a Corporate Tax Cut Would Increase Investment: "A common criticism of the current Republican tax plans is that they will not boost private investment. While I have major reservations about these plans as a whole, this particular objection is oversold. The most likely result is that lower corporate tax rates will lead to more investment projects and thus more aggregate economic activity.... When companies have more 'free cash' at hand, they tend to invest more.... The... 'giveaway' to business... is precisely the mechanism that tends to boost investment...

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Odd from the usually-reliable and very smart Mohamed A. E...

Odd from the usually-reliable and very smart Mohamed A. El-Erian. Yes, the great and good were much too optimistic a year ago���but that is not economists' fault, save for those economists who have betrayed their calling by becoming cheerleaders for Trump, Brexit, austerity, and plutocracy. Yes, the Federal Reserve needs reform���but its decisions that it does not are not the fault of we outsiders who have been pointing out how it might do better. And on Trump's trade war with China... the major things that need to be said are political and administrative: Trump and his administration are incompetent, and everything they touch turns to s---, so game-theoretic and welfare-economic disquisitions on how to manage trade are simply beside the point:

Mohamed A. El-Erian: Why Economics Must Get Broader Before It Gets Better: "In...12... went from celebrating a synchronized global growth pickup to worrying about a synchronized global slowdown.... Neither the extent nor the speed of the change in consensus seems warranted by economic and financial developments, which suggests that economists may have misdiagnosed the initial conditions.... Professional economists still have not spoken up clearly enough about the challenges facing the US Federal Reserve���s communication strategy.... Economists should be urging the Fed to adopt an approach more like that of the Bank of England, which emphasizes scenario analyses and fan charts. Economists could also be doing more to inform���and perhaps even influence���the Fed���s ongoing review of its policy frameworks and communications strategy.... The Sino-American trade conflict.... The vast majority of economists have trotted out the conventional argument that tariffs (real or threatened) are always bad.... Those who wanted to make a productive contribution to the debate should have taken a more nuanced approach, applying tools from game theory to distinguish between the 'what' and the 'how' of trade warfare. These are just three recent examples of how economists have dropped the ball...

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Excellent testimony from Heather Boushey, our Fearless Le...

Excellent testimony from Heather Boushey, our Fearless Leader at the WCEG. But am I allowed to whimper that focusing too much on the EITC and the CTC may distract attention from the fact that SSI and SSDI are broken, and that the interface between the safety net for the employed and the safety net for the non-employed is very broken?: Heather Boushey: Testimony Before the Ways and Means Committee: "At the bottom end, one easy step is to preserve and expand evidence-backed refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which lifted 8.9 million American out of poverty in 2017. In the middle, it is important to make sure the fruits of growth are widely shared and to make the economy work for workers and families. Some proven ways to do this include making sure every family can afford to send their children to high quality, affordable childcare and offering a national paid family and medical leave. It can also mean investing in infrastructure. And we need to know much more about the top. Many of the statistics we rely on to inform us about the state of our economy are measures of the average...

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Why the focus of the Republican business lobby's power in...

Why the focus of the Republican business lobby's power in the areas of tax cuts and deregulation alone? Why the lack of concern for business complaints about "immigration crackdown[s]... tariff wars... government shutdowns"? One large piece of the answer, I think, is gerentocracy���the transformation of the Republican base, even the rich base, into a group of relatively old people who no longer see change as their potential friend and entrepreneurship as even possible for them, but who seek solely to hold on to their rents: Edward Luce: The Fading of the US Multinational Lobby: "When Apple���s iPhone sales undershoot, as they did last week, China suffers. Or so the theory goes.... What is bad for some of America���s biggest brands is apparently good for its president. It is hard to overstate the departure from how US presidents normally behave...

...Yet the clout of the most powerful US business lobbies was in decline before Mr Trump took the job. He has only crystallised this. Groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable, complain loudly about Mr Trump���s immigration crackdown, his tariff wars and government shutdowns. The White House pays scant attention. Theirs was a Faustian bargain. Business pocketed Mr Trump���s corporate tax cut last year���and the rolling deregulation. They must swallow the rest. It is not as though Mr Trump lacks business friends. But they differ from the traditional crowd. Almost none run publicly listed companies. They tend to be property developers, private equity billionaires, casino magnates, and heads of family-owned companies. They swim in different waters to C-suite executives. Many are based in middle America and cater to a purely domestic market. They are little affected by the tariff wars Mr Trump has unleashed. Nor do they worry about public relations. Apple and Nike may oppose a US state when it bans transgender bathrooms, or restricts gay rights. Their stakeholder reputation demands it. America���s multinational companies remain staunch internationalists. Mr Trump���s friends are nationalist-populists. Diversity and inclusion are not obligatory...

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Rhonda Sharpe is praising us here at Equitable Growth for...

Rhonda Sharpe is praising us here at Equitable Growth for trying to diversify the economics profession: Rhonda V. Sharpe: On Twitter: "L @LipstickEcon E @ @equitablegrowth T @ @TrevonDLogan ' S @SandyDarity D @drlisadcook I @itsafronomics V @ValerieRWilson E @Em_Gorman R @rbalakra S @SadieCollective I @IAFFE F @femme_economics Y @YanaRodgers T @TrevonDLogan H @HBoushey E @eliselgould...

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W. V. Harris: Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire (97...

W. V. Harris: Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire (9781107152717): "William V. Harris sets out to explain, within an eclectic theoretical framework, the waxing and eventual waning of Roman imperial power, together with the Roman community's internal power structures (political power, social power, gender power and economic power). Effectively integrating analysis with a compelling narrative, he traces this linkage between the external and the internal through three very long periods, and part of the originality of the book is that it almost uniquely considers both the gradual rise of the Roman Empire and its demise as an empire in the fifth and seventh centuries AD. Professor Harris contends that comparing the Romans of these diverse periods sharply illuminates both the growth and the shrinkage of Roman power as well as the Empire's extraordinary durability...

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Today's Republican Party is grifters all the way down: Am...

Today's Republican Party is grifters all the way down: American Enterprise Institute edition:. And the New York Times loves to give them space, space, and more space:

Mark Schmitt: mschmitt9: "Am I the only one who remembers that this is the same @arthurbrooks who published a book in 2010 called +The Battle_, literally calling for 'a culture war' over economic policy??: Arthur Brooks: @arthurbrooks: 'Contempt makes persuasion impossible ��� no one has ever been hated into agreement, after all���so its expression is either petty self-indulgence or cheap virtue signaling, neither of which wins converts... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political-polarization.html

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Mark Thoma sends us to: Stumbling and Mumbling: The 1% vs...

Mark Thoma sends us to: Stumbling and Mumbling: The 1% vs the 0.1%: "Many of you might react to the FT���s story about the 'squeezed 1%' by getting out the world���s smallest violin. I think this is a mistake. It reminds us that the damage done by inequality extends beyond the general social and economic harm. It hurts even those who are a long way up the income ladder...

...First, some statistical context. Someone at the bottom of the top percentile of incomes is on about ��120,000 a year. The top 0.1%, however, gets over ��500,000. A very well-paid head-teacher, professor or NHS consultant might just get into the top 1%, but the top 0.1% comprises bankers, very successful entrepreneurs or bosses of big firms. As the IFS���s Paul Johnson says, ���someone ���only��� at the top 1% is much more like the average person than they are like someone at top 0.1%.��� This gulf between the 1% and 0.1% hurts the 1% in three ways. One is simply that they are aware of it. For the poor, the rich are out of sight, out of mind: in fact, they grossly under-estimate just how much the rich make. The 1%, however, see it more clearly.... A second effect... is the subject of the FT���s article....

The difference between the 1% and the 0.1% doesn���t, however, lie merely in what they can afford. There is perhaps an even bigger difference. A man (it���s usually a man) on ��500,000 can reasonably look forward to quitting work or downshifting unless he has arranged his affairs especially badly. Somebody on a low six-figure salary, however, cannot. Instead, they often face years of stress���exacerbated by managerialism���s deprofessionalization of erstwhile professional jobs and to the fact that their inability to afford homes in central London condemns them to long and stressful commutes....

In many cases���not all but many���even those on six-figure salaries are in subordinate and stressful positions. They are objectively working class, however posh they might fancy themselves to be. Which is why we need class politics. Whereas identity politics risks splitting us into mutually hostile ghettos, proper class politics has the potential to unite us���well most of us. One of the great marvels of capitalism is that we are so incapable of seeing this....

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Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (March 8, 2019)

An Antiplatonic Twitter Dialogue on What the Wish to "Preserve a Cultural Centrism" Actually Means : As Noah Smith says: "Please stop I give up you can have all my money"...
Lying Liar Kevin Hassett Lies Again... : I have here a transcript from a week or so ago of Kevin Hassett on Fox Business telling transparent lies. Seriously: why does he bother? What does he gain? Is it really the case that AEI will have him back after things like this? WILL banks like JPM Chase will pay him to speak to conferences? If so, they have really really really really bad judgment...
For the Weekend: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Prove It All Night : I am a big fan of the version of "Prove It All Night" with the 1978 Introduction...
On "On Falling Neutral Real Rates, Fiscal Policy, and the Risk of Secular Stagnation: : Global North sovereigns with exorbitant privilege issuing reserve currencies can create a lot of value. They should do so: governments should run up their debts until they satisfy demand with an equity return premium at a value we think is sensible and "normal"...

Dana Goldstein: What���s a Fl��neuse?

Robert E. Scott: Record U.S. Trade Deficit in 2018 Reflects Failure of Trump���s Trade Policies

Wikipedia: Confidence and Supply

Gmail Help: Search Operators You Can Use with Gmail

Michael Kades testified on Capitol Hill on Thursday March 7: Michael Kades: To Combat Rising U.S. Prescription Drug Prices, Let���s Try Competition

Cathy Young: Who���s Afraid of The Bulwark?: "I don���t know what The Bulwark���s endgame is, but right now, it���s among a deplorably small number of outlets that get high marks for intellectual diversity and integrity...

Wikipedia: Genetic History of the British Isles

Publius Baebius Italicus: Ilias Latina

Marcos Zapata: Guinea Pig Last Supper: "In this historic cathedral in the heart of Cusco, Peru, hangs��a one-of-a kind religious and cultural��painting��that depicts a very unordinary twist on an otherwise common image... https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340240a490f815200b-pi

Bill Black and Mark Steiner: Clinton-Era Official Says Left Should Lead Following Center-Right Failures

Ursula Vernon: An Unexpected Honor,: "Now, you���re probably all asking what whalefall has to do with awards ceremonies, or science fiction novelettes, and the answer is: absolutely nothing. But how often do I get to tell an audience this size about whalefall? So, thanks to my publishers, my husband Kevin, and thank you all. I���m glad you liked my story. Y���all have a good night...

WebPlotDigitizer: Extract Data from Plots, Images, and Maps

Barry Rice: The Carnivorous Plant FAQ: "Q: How did the Venus flytrap get its name? A: Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh heh. Heh heh heh heh...

Rudyard Kipling.: The Merchantmen

Paolo Gerbaudo: The Age of the Hyperleader: When Political Leadership Meets Social Media Celebrity: "In an era of profound suspicion towards party bureaucracies, digital media��has delivered a new type of politician.... Political influence is now measured in part through social media metrics: likes, followers, and shares. A politician���s Twitter prowess���or lack thereof���can make or break a political career...

Erik Tarloff: The Woman in Black https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1947856979

Doug Jones: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: "339-321 million years ago...

Doug Jones: Devonian Days: "401-380 million years ago... the Devonian: Forests are spreading. The first tree, Wattieza, is kin to ferns and horsetails. It stands 10 meters tall. No leaves yet, just fronds. The first forests will absorb carbon dioxide, and cool the planet. Life is moving onto land... the 'fishapod' discovered in 2006... with both lungs and gills...

Zack Beauchamp: The Virtue of Nationalism and Whiteshift: Books that Explain Trump: "The new reactionaries: Two new books reveal the coalition of far-right nationalists and anti-PC warriors who define the modern political right: Why has President Trump gone to such extraordinary lengths to build a wall on the Mexican border?... Ethnonationalism is behind the wall and Trump���s overall immigration policy, as well as his approach to racialized issues like civil rights and police violence. It explains his affinity with a host of powerful far-right European parties.... Few scholars are interested in turning the scattered political proposals of Trump and the European far right into a coherent political program. But recently, two new books shed light on what that could look like: Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony���s The Virtue of Nationalism and University of London professor Eric Kaufmann���s Whiteshift. One is a work of political philosophy, and the other a quantitative look at the demography and views of far-right supporters. One is written by an avowed conservative, the other by a self-described liberal. One is poorly reasoned (at best), the other tightly argued. What the two books have in common is that they go beyond articulating part of the ethnonationalist worldview to actively defending core parts of it...

Financial Times: Republicans Are Craven in Their Loyalty to Trump: "A bigot, a cheat and a con artist who never expected to sell Americans on his ultimate scam: to become their president. In his portrait of Donald Trump this week, Michael Cohen went after what reputation his former client still enjoys.... How depressing... that Congressional Republicans did not do much more than impugn Mr Cohen. None mustered a substantive rebuttal of the allegations.... Not for the first time, the party finds itself in craven homage to a leader it does not even pretend is sound of character or judgment....Indeed, the party���s behaviour is consistently much more striking than Mr Trump���s.... The president is not an enigma at all. Any observant person had a sense of his temperament and ethics before (apparently to his own surprise) he was elected. Nothing his former fixer said about the president this week would have seemed implausible in 2016. It is the quickness of a great party to abase itself in his cause that continues to astonish...

Yevgeny Simkin: You���re Not the Asshole Twitter Makes You Out To Be: "Twitter is the functional equivalent of shoving tens of millions of people into a closet, wrapping them in barbed wire, and pumping them full of PCP. It���s a miracle that anyone makes it out alive. The very fact that we volunteer to go in there is a testament to how badly we want to connect, and be heard, and maybe even understood because we feel like we���re standing here, all alone, shouting from the wilderness. So don���t fall for the narrative that humans are all a bunch of ill-tempered, arrogant, imbeciles filled with rage. Definitely don���t fall for that narrative if the evidence for it is Twitter. We���re not. Under the right circumstances these qualities, which exist to some small degree in everyone, can be illuminated and brought to the fore. Twitter is practically engineered to bring the worst out in people. But the real you is the one in the grocery store, not the one being cut off on the 405...

Los Angeles Times: Today: A Trade and Truth Deficit: "Trump hasn���t been living up to a number of his biggest campaign promises, including reducing the trade deficit, but that hasn���t stopped him from boasting about them.... President Trump has long talked about reducing the trade deficit.... The gap in imported and exported goods soared to an all-time high last year, largely because of Trump���s policies. And it���s just one area where Trump is falling short of his own goals.... Facts haven���t stopped Trump from boasting about his record over and over again with exaggerations and outright untruths. But will he pay a political price among his supporters? Probably not. As Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, put it: 'Maybe 50% of Americans look at Donald Trump as struggling to accomplish things, but the other 50% looks at him as willing to take on challenges other presidents weren���t'...

Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History: "Beginning 10,000 years ago, limited-access social orders developed that were able to control violence, provide order, and allow greater production through specialization and exchange... using the political system to limit economic entry to create rents, and then using the rents to stabilize the political system and limit violence.... This type of political economy arrangement... appears to be the natural way that human societies are organized.... In contrast, a handful of developed societies have developed open-access social orders. In these societies, open access and entry into economic and political organizations sustains economic and political competition. Social order is sustained by competition rather than rent-creation. The key to understanding modern social development is understanding the transition from limited- to open-access social orders, which only a handful of countries have managed since WWII...

Mike Konczal: The Failures of Neoliberalism Are Bigger Than Politics: "Here are two statement... I associate with left neoliberalism.... The first is that neoliberal policies would create more growth. Sure, inequality might increase, but so would wages; and even if not wages, mobility up and down the income ladder.... The second is that if we get government out of corporations��� way, the market would become more dynamic, competitive and innovative. Sure, there might be some level of profits and questionable behavior in the short term, but the market itself would fix it, such that in the long term the corporate sector looked much healthier in terms of profits and dynamism. I want to ground it this way, in two intellectual statements about the tradeoffs of a policy regime, to help understand why the confidence that left neoliberalism once held over the baseline assumption of economics has collapsed.... This is a matter of ideas: ideas having failed, and us needing new ones...

Victor Davis Hanson has decided that he is an evil person who does evil by telling lies in support of other evil people. He has stopped resisting. He has recognized that this is his nature: to be a one-man definitive refutation to Sokrates's doctrine that nobody does evil knowingly: Gabriel Schofield: Sophistry in the Service of Evil : "Mounting a persuasive case for the presidency of Donald Trump turns out to be a problematic enterprise.... Throughout Trump���s career, blatant racial prejudice has been a continuous thread.... Hanson... acknowledges that Trump was 'likely wrong' in holding the view that Judge Curiel harbored some innate bias. ��But Trump, he continues, was merely 'clumsy in his phraseology' and, moreover, his identification of the American-born judge as Mexican was actually 'correct', explaining that there is never a 'commensurate outcry about identifying Swedish Americans as "Swedes" or using "the Irish" for Irish Americans'. From beginning to end, Hanson���s treatment of this episode is an exercise in sophistry. Was Trump wrong or was he just ���likely��� wrong���Hanson���s equivocating interpolation���about Judge Curiel���s innate bias as a ���Mexican���? Racism is America���s original sin, a sin that we as a nation have struggled long and hard to expiate. Yet with a drumbeat of racially charged remarks emanating from the White House, Trump has been setting the nation back to a darker time. Hanson���s casuistry about the Swedes and the Irish, and the gaping hole that is his treatment of Trump���s odious life-long record in matters of race, are worse than sophistry; they are sophistry in the service of a genuine evil. Hanson has also drunk deeply from the gourd of conspiratorial thinking. He goes on for pages about the nefarious 'deep state', which he claims has 'the unlimited resources of government at its call', and whose 'operating premises have embraced multiculturalism, feminism, and identity politics'.... It was not Trump���s but Hillary Clinton���s campaign that was tacitly colluding with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election. Trump, he insists, was actually 'a victim of Russian collusion at the very time he was being accused of it'...

New York Fed Nowcasts: 1.4% for 2019Q1, 1.5% for 2019Q2: FRBNY: Mar 08, 2019: New York Fed Staff Nowcast. The Atlanta Fed Nowcast stands at 0.5% for 2019Q1: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/cqer/researchcq/gdpnow/RealGDPTrackingSlides.pdf

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