J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2285

links for 2010-06-14

Karoli: Where The Right Foams and Froths About Improved Health Through Improved Lifestyles







People Playing Chess on Roller Coasters







Did Bloggers Really Wear Red Capes and Goggles and Blog from High Altitude Balloons?







Bruce Bartlett: (Technical) Debt Default: It Could Happen Here







De Dreu et al.: The Neuropeptide Oxytocin...

Mark Thoma on Glenn Rudebusch vs. Raghuram Rajan

Mark Thoma:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/06/rudebusch-the-feds-exit-strategy-for-monetary-policy.html: Glenn Rudebusch looks at the Fed's exit strategy for its special liquidity facilities, the lowering of short-term interest rates, and the increase in the Fed's securities holdings. Along the way he tries to dispel worries about the "inflation monster"(see figure 4). The bottom line for interest rates is that "it seems likely that the Fed's exit from the...

Fiscal Austerity Programs in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Dan Gross:

The New Global Politics of Deficit Reduction: If British voters thought they had replaced the dour visage of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown with an optimistic one in fresh-faced Tory David Cameron, they were sadly mistaken. On June 7, the 43-year-old Cameron brought down the hammer, telling the British public that the most urgent issue ahead “is our massive deficit and our growing debt.... Tony Blair’s motto was “Cool Britannia.” Cameron’s is likely to be “Austerity Now!”

...

I Haven't Heard Anything that Hints That This Sort of Thing Is a Consideration at All...

Andrew Gelman:

Is it 1930? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports:

Goldman Sachs' latest forecast (and they've been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the...

The Bad Logic Of Fiscal Austerity

Paul Krugman:

The Bad Logic Of Fiscal Austerity: So, one more time: here’s an attempt to put together some key arguments about why the rush to fiscal austerity is deeply misguided.... [T:]he US Treasury can currently issue long-term inflation-protected securities at an interest rate of 1.75%. So the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is $17.5 billion, or around 0.13 percent of GDP.... Almost surely, the true budget cost of $1 trillion in stimulus would be...

The New Due Date to Get the Completed Ms. to Editor Tim Sullivan Is August 1...

Just saying.

Paul Krugman writes:

Economics and Politics: Brad DeLong’s excellent but somehow never published book on the economic history of the 20th century:

...the unwillingness to use policy to prop up the economy during the slide into the Depression was backed by a large chorus, and approved by the most eminent economists. For example, from Harvard Joseph Schumpeter argued that there was a “presumption against remedial measures which work through money and credit...

New York Times FAIL

Richard Green puts his finger on the reason why Clark Hoyt was a wrong person to put as the New York Times's ombudsman:

Richard's Real Estate and Urban Economics Blog: A line in Clark Hoyt's final column bothers me. He writes:

There is also no question that The Times, though a national newspaper, shares the prevailing sensibilities of the city and region where it is published. It does not take creationism or intelligent design as serious alternatives to the theory of evolution.

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: June 14, 1940

Churchill:

[There:] arrived a telegram from... President [Roosevelt:] explaining that he could not agree to the publication of his [earlier:] message to [French Prime Minister:] Reynaud. He himself, according to Mr. Kennedy, had wished to do so, but the State Department, while in full sympathy with him saw the gravest dangers.... He renewed the assurances about furnishing all possible material and supplies, but he then said he had told Ambassador Kennedy to inform me that his message of...

DeLong Smackdown Watch for June 14, 2010: Robert Waldmann on the Fauna of Animal Farm

Hoisted from comments:

Robert Waldmann: There were no turkeys on the animal farm. You are suffering from US centrism (I would write Walnut Creek centrism, but at least you didn't claim that the animal farm was threatened by a bobcat). The word appears only once in the book:

http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/animal_farm

and then in the lyrics of "Beasts of England" where, in a plain sop to livestock internationalism, an exotic beast is mentioned clearly to...

links for 2010-06-13

Felix Salmon on Landon Thomas's Profile of Ed Hugh

FZ: "I agree with virtually everyone out there who's complaining on camera and in print that our response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been just terrible. Except that by "our" I don't mean the government's or the country's but ours—the media's. Reporting on a massive technological breakdown that is having huge environmental consequences, our focus over the last week has been on whether the...