J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 232

CERN: W3 Servers: "Note: this page is here for historical...

CERN: W3 Servers: "Note: this page is here for historical interest only; the content hasn't been updated since late 1992...

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Dunning-Kruegerrands, and Dunning-Kruegerranderss: Paul K...

Dunning-Kruegerrands, and Dunning-Kruegerranderss: Paul Krugman: "Both Ferguson and Taylor signed the infamous letter declaring that Bernanke's policies would produce runaway inflation. Ferguson also, also infamously, fell for bogus claims that inflation was really much higher than reported. You might think that such experiences would make people wonder, at least a bit, about whether they understood monetary economics as well as they thought they did. (Yes, I've made mistakes���and promptly owned up to them. They haven't.) But no. I'm on record as saying that crypto is a mishmash of technobabble and libertarian derp. But I guess that I should add that it's also a giant draw for sufferers from Dunning-Kruger syndrome...

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Wise words about how we think we understand things and un...

Wise words about how we think we understand things and underestimate uncertainty. What I am not clear about is whether modern tools of communications are truly a source of disruption, or whether it was just that from 1952 to 2007 all of the big surprises (e.g., fall of the Berlin Wall) were good ones: Charlie Stross: Someone Please Cancel 2019 Already?: "The event horizon in politics in a democracy is no more than... the maximum time between elections.... Consider Germany in January 1934, and how outlandish and dystopian the situation would have sounded if you'd described it to a German citizen in January 1929. (30% unemployment! A dictator and a state of emergency! Concentration camps! Anti-Jewish laws!)... The value proposition of democracy is that it provides for a peaceful transfer....But when you get a faction, party, or regime that no longer subscribes to the idea of democracy and refuses to back down gracefully, you get back the old problems... pressure for change builds up and when it erupts the effects can be devastating and unpleasant���especially, as we've had a crash-course reminder... when the tools of communication make it really easy for dangerous demagogues to draw a following...

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Endorse: for the upper middle class who own stocks, Jack ...

Endorse: for the upper middle class who own stocks, Jack Bogle was the greatest philanthropist of this or any age. He could have claimed to have alpha magic and collected a vast fortune, but he worked for his clients and the public instead: Barry Ritholtz: Remembering Jack Bogle: "Warren Buffett.... 'The person who has done the most for American investors... Jack Bogle. For decades, Jack has urged investors to invest in ultra-low-cost index funds... [has] amassed only a tiny percentage of the wealth that has typically flowed to managers who have��promised their investors large rewards while delivering them nothing���or... less than nothing.... Jack was frequently mocked by the investment-management industry. Today,��however, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he helped millions of investors realize far better returns on their��savings than they otherwise would have earned. He is a hero to them and to me'...

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Yes, it looks lie the world economy is now entering a rec...

Yes, it looks lie the world economy is now entering a recession���one that the U.S. is so far escaping: Brad Setser: China's Slowdown and the World Economy: "China, it now seems, has entered into a real slump.... China's total imports remained pretty strong though until the last couple of months. But they have now turned down. Sharply.... China (still) isn���t that important a market for the rest of the world���s manufactures. China���s overall imports (of goods) are significant, at around $2 trillion. But about a third are commodities, about a third are parts for re-export (think $800 billion of processing imports vs. exports of around $2.4 trillion), and a bit less than a third are imports of manufactures that China actually uses at home.... A fall in Chinese auto demand has a big impact on Chinese domestic output (most Chinese cars are made in China, with largely Chinese parts, thanks to China���s tariff wall), a measurable impact on the profits of some foreign firms with successful Chinese JVs, a modest impact on German exports and, at the margin, a measurable impact on global growth in oil demand...

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Still Haunted by the Shadow of the Greater Recession...

key: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0UtILjGfChXSFFUBSCJ3PTf1g

pages: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0eLbd_zXINsC-YRNSL1zQxIdA

html: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/02/haunted-by-the-shadow-of-the-greater-recession.html

#highlighted #presentations #greatrecession #macro #economicgrowth #economichistory #economics #finance #monetaryeconomicss

Simon Wren-Lewis: The Tory Party Lost Its Way from 2010, ...

Simon Wren-Lewis: The Tory Party Lost Its Way from 2010, Not 2016: "'I have had it up to here with the Conservative party.' So writes a one time editor of the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona. It is a good read: for example 'a chilling populism is now creeping into the language of mainstream Toryism: the language of treachery, snarling tribalism and impatience with anything that smacks of prudence, compromise or caution'. He is talking about Brexit of course, and he is entirely right. What he misses, in my view, was that this problem did not begin with the EU referendum, but six years earlier, with the Tory ���modernisers���, Cameron and Osborne...

#noted

Note: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives: Note: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War:

Harry Dexter White: Treasury Assistant Secretary* who was the major force behind the Bretton Woods Conference and the institutional reconstruction of the post-World War II world economy. He accepted enough of John Maynard Keynes's proposals to lay the groundwork for the greatest generation of economic growth the world has ever seen. It was the extraordinary prosperity set in motion by the Bretton Woods' System and institutions--the "Thirty Glorious Years"--that demonstrated that political democracy and the mixed economy could deliver and distribute economic prosperity.

George Kennan: Author of the "containment" strategy that won the Cold War. Argued--correctly--that World War III could be avoided if the Western Alliance made clear its determination to "contain" the Soviet Union and World Communism, and that the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union would lead it to evolve into something much less dangerous than Stalin's tyranny.

George Marshall: Architect of victory in World War II. Post-World War II Secretary of State who proposed the Marshall Plan, another key step in the economic and institutional reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II.

Arthur Vandenberg: Leading Republican Senator from Michigan who made foreign policy truly bipartisan for a few years. Without Vandenberg, it is doubtful that Truman, Marshall, Acheson, and company would have been able to muster enough Congressional support to do their work.

Paul Hoffman: Chief Marshall Plan administrator. The man who did the most to turn the Marshall Plan from a good idea to an effective aid program.

Dean Acheson: Principal architect of the post-World War II Western Alliance. That Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and the United States reached broad consensus on how to wage Cold War is more due to Dean Acheson's diplomatic skill than to any single other person.

Harry S Truman: The President who decided that the U.S. had to remain engaged overseas--had to fight the Cold War--and that the proper way to fight the Cold War was to adopt Kennan's proposed policy of containment. His strategic choices were, by and large, very good ones.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: As first commander-in-chief of NATO, played an indispensable role in turning the alliance into a reality. His performance as President was less satisfactory: too many empty words about "rolling back" the Iron Curtain, too much of a willingness to try to skimp on the defense budget by adopting "massive retaliation" as a policy, too much trust in the erratic John Foster Dulles.

Gerald Ford: In the end, the thing that played the biggest role in the rise of the dissident movement behind the Iron Curtain was Gerald Ford's convincing the Soviet Union to sign the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet Union thought that it had gained worldwide recognition of Stalin's land grabs. But what it had actually done was to commit itself and its allies to at least pretending to observe norms of civil and political liberties. And as the Communist Parties of the East Bloc forgot that in the last analysis they were tyrants seated on thrones of skulls, this Helsinki commitment emboldened their opponents and their governments' failures to observe it undermined their own morale.

George Shultz: Convinced Ronald Reagan--correctly--that Mikhail Gorbachev's "perestroika" and "glasnost" were serious attempts at reform and liberalization, and needed to be taken seriously. Without Shultz, it is unlikely that Gorbachev would have met with any sort of encouragement from the United States--and unlikely that Gorbachev would have been able to remain in power long enough to make his attempts at reform irreversible.
*Also, almost surely an "Agent of Influence" and perhaps an out-and-out spy for Stalin's Russia. If so, never did any intelligence service receive worse service from an agent than Stalin's Russia did from Harry Dexter White....

#hoistedfromthearchives #politics #security #history #highlighted

Is employer-side monopsony the reason the effective labor...

Is employer-side monopsony the reason the effective labor demand appears to be so inelastic when incresaes in the minimum wage are concerned? Or are we just not being creative enough? And why does the idea that, in America today, minimum-wage increases are "job killers" continue to have rhetorical purchase?: Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer: The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs: Evidence from the United States Using a Bunching Estimator: "Infer[ring] the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it... using 138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016. We find that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over five years following the increase. At the same time, the direct effect of the minimum wage on average earnings was amplified by modest wage spillovers at the bottom of the wage distribution...

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On how to do microfoundations right: Atif Mian: In Conver...

On how to do microfoundations right: Atif Mian: In Conversation with Heather Boushey: "Our number of theories is much larger than the number of observations we have, which is a limiting factor of macroeconomics just from an empirical standpoint.... This is where I feel micro data comes in.... Let me just give you one quick example.... The 2000s... you see credit going up, you see aggregate income going up as well.... If it were higher incomes that were driving credit growth, then since income growth is concentrated in the top 1 percent, we should really expect the top 1 percent to borrow a lot more.... Yet that clearly was not the case. So, even a basic breakdown of the data along a more micro level starts to give you a lot more insights than you might be able to deduce from just looking at the macro aggregates...

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