J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2282

Here's What Journalists Should Do...

Marc Ambinder asks a question:

What Should Political Journalists Do?: Jay Rosen, the New York University press critic, has written a treatise on what he calls the "actual ideology of the American press."  It is compelling and provocative, and I recommend a full read. I also think it leaves out something quite important: if the ideologies he identifies -- the pathologies, actually -- are the sum total of the media, what would Jay Rosen, if he were running the world, have us do? Is there a...

Habits of Highly Ineffective People

Dan Ariely:

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People/a>:

Procrastination....

The planning fallacy... our tendency to vastly underestimate the amount of time we’ll require to complete a task...

Texting while driving... in my class of 200 Master’s students, 197 admitted not only to doing this regularly, but also to having made driving mistakes while doing so. Also, one of the three abstainers in the class was physically blind, so we should not really count him as a saint, and...

Jobless Recovery Watch: Matthew Yglesias Reads Ed Leamer

Jeebus save us, somebody save us:

Matthew Yglesias » The Looming Structural Employment Disaster: Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA’s Anderson Forecast, summarizes the latest:

The forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.4 percent, followed by 2.4 percent in 2011 and 2.8 percent in 2012, well below the 5.0 percent growth of previous recoveries and even a bit below the 3.0 percent long-term normal growth. With this weak economic growth comes a weak labor market, and unemployment...

DeLong Smackdown Watch of the Day for June 17, 2010: Duncan Black

In response to my question:

What Do We Know About Policies to Successfully Move the Long-Term Unemployed Back to Where They Ought to Be?

Duncan Black writes:

We Could Hire Them To Dig Holes And Fill Them Up Again: I'm kidding, just, but the way to get people working is to hire them. The way to do that is not to set up a program, or a subsidy, or a grant, which is administered through some office, which is then used by some business or nonprofit, which maybe eventually...

Types of "General Gluts": Fisher, Wicksell, Bagehot

Last time we talked about Walras's Law--how excess demands and excess supplies across all the markets in the economy have to add up to zero. We learned that a depression--large excess supply in the markets for goods and services accompanied by low capacity utilization and high unemployment--is accompanied by an equal amount of excess demand somewhere in financial markets. And we learned that to eliminate one is to eliminate the other: boost demand for goods and services and you will find...

So What Do We Know About Policies to Successfully Move the Long-Term Unemployed Back to Where They Ought to Be?

We are really going to need such policies in a year. That is all.

U.S. first-time jobless claims unexpectedly rise, up 12,000 to 472,000 in latest week

I tell you. Writing the history of this episode is going to be next to impossible. "But why didn't they see?!?" is what the students are all going to ask. And I have no answer...

Liveblogging World War II: June 17, 1940

In accordance with the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin's Soviet Union occupies Latvia and Estonia, having already moved into Lithuania the previous day.

links for 2010-06-16

David Leonhardt: In Cap and Trade, a Risk of Acknowledging Costs







Derek Powazek: Your right to comment ends at my front door.

DP: "But your right to post to someone else's site rests with that someone else... anyone who doesn't get it must simply have an axe to grind. It's like assuming you have the right to go inside any house you can see from the street, and pee on the carpet.... I've seen incredible communities form...

One Medium-Sized and One Small-Sized Herbert Hoover

Let's really hope they don't mean it. Let's really hope that they are bullshitting us.

Brand-spanking-new British Prime Minister David Cameron and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt:

Reining in Europe’s deficits is  first step: We first met in Stockholm three years ago. Our discussions were all about issues such as education and climate change. The economy barely came up. But then the world was shaken by an economic catastrophe that toppled banks, destroyed businesses and ruined...