J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 235

"Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't j...

"Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work": Apenwarr: Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway: "Let's get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It's what everyone else does! Or do they? The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn't do in the last 6 hours. Or if not an article, then a video or documentary. That's not what I want to read or to watch, but I sometimes get sucked in anyway, and then it's recommendation apocalypse time, because the algorithm now thinks I like reading about Trump, and now everything is Trump. Never give positive feedback to an AI...

...This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate.... Someone who works on web search once told me that they already have an algorithm that guarantees the maximum click-through rate for any web search: just return a page full of porn links. (Someone else said you can reverse this to make a porn detector: any link which has a high click-through rate, regardless of which query it's answering, is probably porn.)

Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work. In other words, celebrities (ideally attractive ones, or at least controversial ones), or politics, or both. They walk that line as closely as they can, because that's the local maximum for their profitability. Sometimes they accidentally cross that line, and then have to apologize or pay a token fine, and then go back to what they were doing....

When (non-Amazon) vendors get the idea that I might want something... because I visited their web site and looked at it... their advertising partner chases me around the web trying to sell me the same thing... even if I already bought it.... The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on... well, based on what?... Some complicated matrix-driven formula humans can't possibly comprehend, but which is 10% better? Probably not. Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop.... You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are....

This whole ecosystem is amazing. Let's look at online news web sites. Why do they load so slowly nowadays? Trackers. No, not ads-trackers. They only have a few ads, which mostly don't take that long to load. But they have a lot of trackers, because each tracker will pay them a tiny bit of money to be allowed to track each page view. If you're a giant publisher teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and you have 25 trackers on your web site already, but tracker company #26 calls you and says they'll pay you $50k a year if you add their tracker too, are you going to say no? Your page runs like sludge already, so making it 1/25th more sludgy won't change anything, but that $50k might....

It's not just ads... What about content recommendation algorithms though? Do those work? Obviously not. I mean, have you tried them. Seriously. That's not quite fair.... Pandora's music recommendations are surprisingly good, but they are doing it in a very non-obvious way.... Apparently... Pandora spent a lot of time hand-coding a bunch of music characteristics and writing a "real algorithm" (as opposed to ML) that tries to generate playlists based on the right combinations of those characteristics.... If Pandora can figure out a good playlist based on a starter song and one or two thumbs up/down clicks, then... I guess it's not profiling you. They didn't need your personal information either.

Netflix: While we're here, I just want to rant about Netflix, which is an odd case of starting off with a really good recommendation algorithm and then making it worse on purpose.... Once upon a time Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service.... It was absolutely essential that at least one of this week's DVDs was good enough to entertain you for your Friday night movie.... Eventually though, Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less.... Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business. The thing is, you don't need a risky, privacy-invading profile to recommend a mainstream movie.... As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away.

Some very expensive A/B testers determined that this is what makes me watch the most hours of mindless TV. Their revenues keep going up. And they don't even need to invade my privacy to do it. Who am I to say they're wrong?...

#noted

Would somebody please tell me what the Brexiters want? ...

Would somebody please tell me what the Brexiters want?

Do they want to stay in the customs union? Do they want a hard border in the Irish Sea? Do they want a hard border within Ireland? What is Theresa May asking for? What are the "alternative arrangements to prevent a hard border with Northern Ireland" and yet allow the collection of customs and the exclusion of commodities that do not meet European standards that they seek?

14.5% of British GDP is exported to the EU. 3.5% of EU GDP is exported to Britain. Demonstrating that being in the EU is a good deal relative to other options is an important value for the EU. Evans-Pritchard never says���nor does he comment that the German economists whom he praises also call for the UK government to abandon its "red lines". What is Theresa May willing to give up that the EU values in order to secure the removal of the Irish Backstop?:

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: German Anger Builds Over Dangerous Handling of Brexit by EU Ideologues: "A group of top German economists has told the EU to tear up the Irish backstop��and ditch its ideological demands in Brexit talks, calling instead for a flexible Europe of concentric circles that preserves friendly ties with the UK.... The report implicitly rebuked the European Commission for mishandling its negotiations with Britain and for trying to use the legal advantage of the Article 50 process to dictate a harsh settlement, with little regard for long-term strategic and diplomatic interests...

...The report is led by Clemens Fuest and Gabriel Felbermayr from the Ifo��in Munich but includes the chairmen of the advisory boards of both the German finance and economics ministries. It proposes a new supranational trade body in which the EU and Britain both are members with full voting rights. It would cover goods but exclude services, intellectual property, foreign investment, or social areas such as health....

The EU���s trade officials are the shock troops of the European Project. The plan is unlikely to be accepted, but is indicative of the shifting mood in senior policy circles in Germany. There is a growing sense that the EU has been captured by an ideological priesthood. It is failing to adapt to the realities of a complex Europe that is pulling in different directions and must be managed with supple statecraft....

The report has some shrewd observations as to what might actually happen in a no-deal rupture. Britain would not impose a hard border in Ireland. The EU would then be in an awkward predicament. If it compelled Dublin to erect border infrastructure against its will, it would face an Irish nationalist backlash. It would also face demands for financial compensation at a time when it might not be able to count on all of the UK���s ��39bn exit fee. Prof Felbermayr said Britain might immediately tear down its global customs barriers and opt for unilateral free trade-at least for a while-leaving European exporters struggling to compete in the UK markets against the cheapest products in the world. If so, the chaos at customs posts would chiefly be on the EU side, at their ports. They would not be ready to handle rules or origin and clearance procedures on such a scale, causing havoc to EU supply chains. Prof Felbermayr said European companies would be up in arms, blame their own governments and pressure the EU to drop the tariffs: ���I don���t think anyone in Brussels has really through this through.���...

#noted

Hari Kunzru: Fool Britannia: "Heroic Failure: Brexit and ...

Hari Kunzru: Fool Britannia: "Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, by Fintan O���Toole.... The battle over Europe has been fought not over the... open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic... NHS funding, or traffic flow through Dover, let alone harmonized airline regulations or the trading benefits of a Canada-plus model... but through Spitfires, Cornish pasties, singing 'Jerusalem' on the last night of the Proms, and what the Irish historian and journalist Fintan O���Toole calls 'the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit'...

...O���Toole���s... is an acid and entertaining examination of what he calls, after the scholar Raymond Williams, the ���structure of feeling��� that has made the project of leaving the European Union politically possible.... The equation of a ���European superstate��� with a project of German domination is part of what O���Toole calls the ���mental cartography��� of English conservatism.... The European Union is, to these people, just a stealthy way for the Germans to complete Hitler���s unfinished business.... As the possibility of No Deal looms larger, the government is planning to import emergency supplies of food and medicine, and police are being deployed in expectation of civil unrest in Northern Ireland. These are not the ���sunlit uplands��� that our dollar-store Churchills promised....

It is Britain���s misfortune to have been ruled by such people, entitled men who don���t feel they need to master a brief and sneer at those who have to endure the consequences of their actions. The form of patriotism they have promoted with their shallow, friable charm is less a spur to excellence than a form of historical arrested development.... Particularly strong outside London, English nationalism has also become an identity of resistance to globalization, a process that has accelerated the disconnection of the capital���s fortunes, which are dependent on finance, from those of the rest of the country.... The English, whose opinions have been formed by the shallow charmers and their enablers, seem fundamentally unable to conceive of a relationship with Europe that is not one of either subjection or domination...

#noted

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (February 12, 2019)

Hoisted from the Archives: Cosma Shalizi (2007): Those Voices Again...: : "Q: Do you ever get tired of beating that dead horse? A: It's not dead yet; that horse will keep kicking until the last person who thinks there's something to The Bell Curve is hanged in the entrails of the last Durkheimian...

Note to Self: Kim Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital: "Monday, February 11, 2019 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (PST). IRLE. 2521 Channing Way. Berkeley, CA 94720: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674919335: "With the winds of trade war blowing as they have not done in decades and Left and Right flirting with protectionism, Kimberly Clausing shows how a free, open economy is still the best way to advance the interests of working Americans. She offers strategies to train workers, improve tax policy, and establish a partnership between labor and business...

Please Help Me Out Here!: The Charge of the Brexit Brigade: ���Forward, the Brexit Brigade!��� Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered...

It Is Saturday Morning, and Joe Weisenthal Is Trying to Start a... Symposium... on Twitter: Make mine Professor Cornelius Ampleforth���s navy-strength bathtub gin: Joe Weisenthal: @TheStalwart: "Should I do a tweetstorm on what I think mainstream Keynesians like @paulkrugman @Nouriel and @ObsoleteDogma get wrong about Bitcoin?... I think most Keynesian types see Bitcoin as a horribly inefficient medium of exchange, whose loudest advocates include many scammers, charlatans, misanthropes, and Austrian economics adherents. And tbh, this is basically all true. But...

This Is Nuts. When's the Crash?: The highly-estimable FT Alphaville has long had a series: This is nuts. When's the crash?. That is my reaction to learning that Hoover Institution senior fellows are now crypto... It is not at all clear to me whether they are grifters or griftees here... I had known about John Taylor, but had thought that was a strange one-off. And now Niall Ferguson. Is anybody even pretending to have a business model other than pump-and-dump? I think the only appropriate response is here: Moon Lambo...

Dan Goodin: Fire (and Lots of It): Berkeley Researcher on the Only Way to Fix Cryptocurrency: "Nicholas Weaver says bitcoin and other digital coins recapitulate 500 years of failure... characterized bitcoin and its many follow-on digital currencies as energy-sucking leeches with no redeeming qualities. Their chief, if not only, function, he said, is to fund ransomware campaigns, online drug bazaars, and other criminal enterprises...

Genius no-longer-quite-so-young whippersnapper Ezra is, I think, massively overly polite here: As Ezra Klein say, Jill Abramson is part of a system that regards giving credit to others for the work they have done as a sign of weakness: Spend any time drinking with other reporters and ask them about New York Times journalists. You may well hear that they go out of their way to pretend that they have done work actually done by others, and have a strong positive aversion to acknowledging even the existence of other journalists. This attitude appears baked into their culture. This does not strike me as something the would be true of any group of people worth admiring. And Abramson appears to have it in spades. I would note that Abramson���and, increasingly, the rest of the New York Times���these days appears to be doubling-down on anti-blogging: access not explainer journalism; stenography for favored sources not working for readers. I am not sure why they want to double-down on this, just as I am not sure why Jill Abramson thought she should carry here disdain for others working on the story beyond the book-publishing and academic plagiarism red lines, but it seems to be what they do���like saving 15% or more on car insurance: Ezra Klein: @ezraklein: "I've long admired Jill Abramson, but the definition of plagiarism she gives here is a... looser one than has been true at the publications I've worked at, and I think it shows less generosity in citation than is appropriate...

James Fallows (2012): As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize

Ed Luce: Only the UK Leads America in Its Rush to Kakistocracy: "Democrats talk[ing] about being 'socialists'... mean the kinds of things centre-right governments support in Europe... universal health coverage, tough regulation of monopolies and sharply progressive taxation. They do not mean Venezuela. That contrast alone is enough to give hope about the relative health of US democracy. But it is no reason to crow. If Britain is the only big democracy that is screwing up worse than you, it is best to keep calm and change the subject...

Tom Scocca*Author*: Can a Journalist as Important as Jill Abramson Be a Plagiarist?: "Here���s one part of one set of Moynihan���s examples: 'In December 2006, Mojica and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn���t be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary Christmas in Darfur' . 'In December 2006 he and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn���t be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary Christmas in Darfur'. That���s a string of 29 words... and a string identically presenting 28 of the same words, published in Abramson���s book as Abramson���s writing. The one-word difference is that Abramson swapped out the subject���s name for a pronoun. Abramson���s passage was plagiarized. Jill Abramson is a plagiarist...

Note to Self: Monday, February 11, 2019 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (PST). IRLE. 2521 Channing Way
Berkeley, CA 94720: Kim Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674919335: "With the winds of trade war blowing as they have not done in decades and Left and Right flirting with protectionism, Kimberly Clausing shows how a free, open economy is still the best way to advance the interests of working Americans. She offers strategies to train workers, improve tax policy, and establish a partnership between labor and business...

The learned and much-worth-listening-to Eric Alterman has darkened my day. I do, however, think it is time for everyone whose career was boosted by making the Faustian bargain of catering to Marty Peretz's bigotries, prejudices, and envies to exit the public sphere, quietly. Perhaps I should make an exception for Peter Beinart, who has done some atonement: Martin Peretz (2007): Tyran-a-Soros: "GEORGE SOROS LUNCHED with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris���s words, to promote a 'common European foreign policy' (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities...

Wikipedia: Tablet of Destinies

I confess, I have never understood why so many people have been so eager to credit Charles Murray as a quantitative social scientist rather than as a latter-day James J. Kilpatrick or Murray Rothbard. Nor have I understood why Jason DeParle was so eager to... sweeten the beat in his 1994 profile of Murray, rather than to ask even one follow-up question about the KKK and the civil rights movement in Iowa in 1960. Here Phil Cohen pushes back: Philip N. Cohen: Charles Murray: A White Man���s Cross Burning: "There are powerful individuals representing institutional interests, such as Charles Murray, who spent decades on the dole of non-profit organizations funded by the foundations of the rich.... He and his defenders have always impugned those who assign racist motives to his work.... A biological racial hierarchy in genetic intelligence.... A coalition that includes Murray, defends itself from that charge by claiming it���s not racist if it���s true, and it has fallen to human geneticists to debunk their claims.... Shawn Fremstad reminded me that Murray and his friends burned a cross in 1960.... Here is the very cursory story, in a 1994 New York Times profile [by Jason de Parle]��for the release of his book��The Bell Curve...

Brad Setser: The Case for a Significant German Stimulus Is Now Overwhelming: "In 2017 and 2018 the argument that Germany needed to stimulate essentially rested on the need to move toward a more balanced global economy, and��the value additional German stimulus would provide to its trading partners. Demand growth inside Germany was solid, and the German economy was humming.... Now, well, Germany itself has clearly slowed, and its economy could use a boost...

Orange-Haired Baboons: With Erick Erickson���as with all of the American right���ultimately it's all about the grift...

John B. Donaldson and Rajnish Mehra: Average Crossing Time: An Alternative Characterization of Mean Aversion and Reversion: "The mean reversion/aversion distinction is largely artificial.... The ���Average Crossing Time���... both unifies these concepts and provides an alternative characterization. Ceteris paribus, mean reverting processes have a relatively shorter average crossing time as compared to mean averting processes...

CRT: @StoryofEverest: "For those that missed Janelle Monae���s full performance at the Grammys, here you go...

Dominic Ford: Custom Astronomical Graph Plotter

Bernhard Mueller: The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Crypto Maximalist: "The first rule of maximalism is that there is no maximalism. You���re simply a normal person that, based on objective facts, concluded that there���s only one valid cryptocurrency.... You see the big picture. Your cryptocurrency has gifted you sunglasses of truth. Elegantly juggling monetary economics, socioeconomics, game theory and computer science, you have untangled the complex dynamics of real-world distributed multi-agent systems, paving the way to a fair and efficient new world economy. Keep in mind that others may simply lack the education, critical thinking skills or plain intelligence to achieve this comprehensive level of understanding.... Other coins have fake communities that are orchestrated by malicious groups or individuals. They won���t shy away from spending billions to purchase followers and attack your network and social media channels. Yours is the only community bound by ethical rules while the others use every trick in the book. Your coin is doing everything right...

Things I did not expect to see. Do note that Hobsbawm does not think it necessary���or cannot be bothered to remember?���one single concrete example here: Eric Hobsbawm: In Praise of Thatcher...

17.The wise Kevin O'Rourke tells me what is going on with respect to Brexit. That Theresa May's current demand from the EU is that the EU give her permission to break Britain's word in the Good Friday agreement tells us that her thinking is not something any sane statesman can follow. And what confidence can anybody have in the word of an England that would ask for such permission, anyway?: Kevin O'Rourke: The EU Has No Incentive to Blink on the Irish Border Question: "For Ireland, no deal means a border, but that is hardly the end of the story. Sooner or later someone in the UK will decide that it is time to ���sort things out���, and that will mean further negotiations. Abandon the principle that a backstop is required and any border that emerges will be permanent. Retain it and the border may only be temporary. There is still the possibility that the UK will, after all, keep its promises. And Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, will be eviscerated by the opposition if he backs down. An accidental no-deal Brexit is frighteningly likely. It is made more likely by miscommunication and miscalculation. Now is the time for clarity about what will happen if it comes about...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey engaged with Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, Andrew Berg, and Jason Furman at the Peterson Instute on Thursday January 31: Peterson Institute: Book discussion: Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth: "Book discussion with Jonathan Ostry, @LounganiPrakash, and Andrew Berg of @IMFNews on Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth with additional comments with @jasonfurman of PIIE & Heather Boushey of @equitablegrowth. January 31, 12:15 pm...

WCEG's Raksha Kopparam makes a very nice catch, and sends us to the enter for Financial Services Innovation's ���U.S. Financial Health Pulse: 2018 Baseline Survey���: Raksha Kopparam: New Financial Health Survey Shows That Traditional Metrics of Economic Growth Don���t Apply to Most U.S. Households��� Incomes and Savings: "Single aggregate data points do not capture how economic growth is experienced by different people in very different ways.... Underscoring the importance of knowing who specifically benefits from a strong economy is a new survey by the Center for Financial Services Innovation...

20.It is starting to look like Theresa May is aiming at forcing Britain's House of Commons to make a late-March choice between Her Deal and No Deal. A British patriot would be going to the country to ask it to make a choice between Her Deal and No Brexit. But, alas, countries do not get the political and moral non-dwarfs that they need: Rafael Behr: May Thinks She���s Won. But the Reality of Brexit Will Soon Hit Her Again: "Inside the addict���s head the most important thing is getting to the next Brexit fix, scoring the best deal. But from the outside, to our European friends and family, it is obvious that the problem is the compulsive pursuit of a product that does us only harm.... Some MPs can see the situation spiralling out of control. Today 298 lined up to demand an intervention. They backed a cross-party bid to seize control of the Brexit agenda from the government... But the move failed...

Cosma Shalizi (2007): Those Voices Again: "Q: Do you ever get tired of beating that dead horse? A: It's not dead yet; that horse will keep kicking until the last person who thinks there's something to The Bell Curve is hanged in the entrails of the last Durkheimian. Q: I really did not need that image, thank you very much. So you're perfectly happy to agree that there is genetic variation in the human population which affects the facility with which various cognitive skills are learned, and so mental ability? A: Sure. In a more cautious mood, instead of saying "there is" I'd say "there could be, for all we know at present, which seems to be squat". But, sure. Q: And yet, miraculously, this genetic variation is somehow not under natural selection? A: Did I say anything of the kind? I can think off the top of my head of a really obvious example of recent human evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution at that, namely the four independent evolutions of adult lactose tolerance. For that matter, over the last, oh, 515 years basically the whole human population has been put under intense selection pressure for immune systems which easily develop resistance to smallpox. My guess is that this sort of thing overwhelms any selection pressure for, say, facility of learning symbolic arithmetic (in which symbol system, by what pedagogical method?), unless there are truly weird pleiotropic genes in play.... Q: Could there be traits under selection in the present? A: I am pretty sure that genes contributing to resistance to malaria, cholera, schistosomiasis and malnutrition continue to be positively selected. Q: Any more interesting suspects? A: The prospects for influenza resistance look bright. Q: You know what I meant. A: You're asking me to pull speculations out of the air.... People are going to think I'm advancing a genetic explanation for the Flynn Effect, when it's much too strong for it to be due to any remotely plausible degree of selection...

Finally, the Federal Reserve seems to have realized that its policy of driving headlong toward a yield-curve inversion was unwise. So they are "rethinking". But I am not yet confident that they are out of the woods. While the Federal Reserve may not believe that the slowing economy will relieve inflationary pressures, financial markets still believe that the economy will slow so much as to perhaps produce a recession. This strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve is right now���even with its "rethink"���getting the balance of risks wrong: Tim Duy: Fed Holding Steady For Now: "I think the Fed will on net conclude that there exists reason to believe that the economy will slow in 2019 relative to 2018 but the degree of slowing remains uncertain and not clearly sufficient to relieve inflationary pressures. As such, I doubt that the Fed will drop its internal bias toward further tightening.... That bias is clearly evident externally in the Fed���s Summary of Economic Projections. It is also evident in the statement with this sentence: 'The Committee judges that some further gradual increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will be consistent with sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions, and inflation near the Committee���s symmetric 2 percent objective over the medium term'...

Now you can watch the video: Peterson Institute: Confronting Inequality: How Societies can Choose Inclusive Growth: "The Peterson Institute for International Economics holds an event to present the book, Confronting Inequality: How Societies can Choose Inclusive Growth, on January 31, 2019. The book���s authors, Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Andrew Berg of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with PIIE Nonresident Senior Fellow Jason Furman and Heather Boushey...

The extremely good American Economic Association Presidential Address. The takeaway: fear of government debt should be a second-order consideration in a time of low interest rates. And I would go further: because problems created by government debt can be dealt with at low societal cost via financial repression, it should be not a second- but a third- or fourth-order consideration: Olivier Blanchard: Public Debt and Low Interest Rates: "New theoretical foundations for how to think about fiscal policy and debt, which will stimulate the policy research agenda for the profession for years to come...

It is journalistic malpractice for any story about Donald Trump to not begin with these seven facts: Dan Froomkin: Some Universal Truths About Donald Trump that Bear Repeating (Over and Over Again) ��� Dan Froomkin's White House Watch: "While reading this morning���s crop of news and opinion, it struck me that there are several good examples here of stories that identify universal truths about Trump that are too often left out of the daily coverage... [but] are essential context for any story about him. And not just fact-checks or think pieces! Because how can readers possibly be expected to understand what is going on otherwise? [1] He lies all the time.... [2] He has no idea what he���s talking about most of the time.... [3] He is acting out of a profound sense of personal terror���of Mueller, of Ann Coulter, of losing the Senate Republicans.... [4] He is constantly projecting. See CNN, Trump says China is ���more honorable than Chuck and Nancy���.... [5] There is no 'White House'.... [6] He is only playing to his base, nobody and nothing else matters anymore..... [7] He is exploiting (and exposing!) how the U.S. presidency has too much unchecked power...

Fareed Zakaria: Trump's Border Wall Standoff Is Really About Avoiding Impeachment: "This is the anti-impeachment strategy. What he���s doing is locking in a base so strongly that no Republican would dare cross it because they would worry about being primaried...

#noted #weblogs

It is journalistic malpractice for any story about Donald...

It is journalistic malpractice for any story about Donald Trump to not begin with these seven facts: Dan Froomkin: Some Universal Truths About Donald Trump that Bear Repeating (Over and Over Again) ��� Dan Froomkin's White House Watch: "While reading this morning���s crop of news and opinion, it struck me that there are several good examples here of stories that identify universal truths about Trump that are too often left out of the daily coverage... [but] are essential context for any story about him. And not just fact-checks or think pieces! Because how can readers possibly be expected to understand what is going on otherwise? [1] He lies all the time.... [2] He has no idea what he���s talking about most of the time.... [3] He is acting out of a profound sense of personal terror���of Mueller, of Ann Coulter, of losing the Senate Republicans.... [4] He is constantly projecting. See CNN, Trump says China is ���more honorable than Chuck and Nancy���.... [5] There is no 'White House'.... [6] He is only playing to his base, nobody and nothing else matters anymore..... [7] He is exploiting (and exposing!) how the U.S. presidency has too much unchecked power...

#noted

The extremely good American Economic Association Presiden...

The extremely good American Economic Association Presidential Address. The takeaway: fear of government debt should be a second-order consideration in a time of low interest rates. And I would go further: because problems created by government debt can be dealt with at low societal cost via financial repression, it should be not a second- but a third- or fourth-order consideration: Olivier Blanchard: Public Debt and Low Interest Rates: "New theoretical foundations for how to think about fiscal policy and debt, which will stimulate the policy research agenda for the profession for years to come...

#noted

Now you can watch the video: Peterson Institute: Confront...

Now you can watch the video: Peterson Institute: Confronting Inequality: How Societies can Choose Inclusive Growth: "The Peterson Institute for International Economics holds an event to present the book, Confronting Inequality: How Societies can Choose Inclusive Growth, on January 31, 2019. The book���s authors, Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Andrew Berg of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with PIIE Nonresident Senior Fellow Jason Furman and Heather Boushey...

<!--more--</p>

<hr />

<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
</div>

John B. Donaldson and Rajnish Mehra: Average Crossing Tim...

John B. Donaldson and Rajnish Mehra: Average Crossing Time: An Alternative Characterization of Mean Aversion and Reversion: "The mean reversion/aversion distinction is largely artificial.... The ���Average Crossing Time���... both unifies these concepts and provides an alternative characterization. Ceteris paribus, mean reverting processes have a relatively shorter average crossing time as compared to mean averting processes...

#noted

Orange-Haired Baboons: With Erick Erickson���as with all ...

Orange-Haired Baboons: With Erick Erickson���as with all of the American right���ultimately it's all about the grift:

#oragnehairedbaboons #allaboutthegrift #acrosshehwidemissouri

I confess, I have never understood why so many people hav...

I confess, I have never understood why so many people have been so eager to credit Charles Murray as a quantitative social scientist rather than as a latter-day James J. Kilpatrick or Murray Rothbard. Nor have I understood why Jason DeParle was so eager to... sweeten the beat... in his 1994 profile of Murray, rather than to ask even one follow-up question about the KKK and the civil rights movement in Iowa in 1960.

Here Phil Cohen pushes back: Philip N. Cohen: Charles Murray: A White Man���s Cross Burning: "There are powerful individuals representing institutional interests, such as Charles Murray, who spent decades on the dole of non-profit organizations funded by the foundations of the rich.... He and his defenders have always impugned those who assign racist motives to his work.... A biological racial hierarchy in genetic intelligence.... A coalition that includes Murray, defends itself from that charge by claiming it���s not racist if it���s true, and it has fallen to human geneticists to debunk their claims.... Shawn Fremstad reminded me that Murray and his friends burned a cross in 1960.... Here is the very cursory story, in a 1994 New York Times profile [by Jason de Parle]��for the release of his book��The Bell Curve...

While there is much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray���s teen-age years, there is at least one adventure that he understandably deletes from the story���the night he helped his friends burn a cross. They had formed a kind of good guys��� gang, ���the Mallows,��� whose very name, from marshmallows, was a play on their own softness. In the fall of 1960, during their senior year, they nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scattered as a calling card. [Denny] Rutledge recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. ���There wouldn���t have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds,��� he says. ���That���s how unaware we were.��� A long pause follows when Murray is reminded of the event. ���Incredibly, incredibly dumb,��� he says. ���But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, ���How on earth could we be so oblivious?��� I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn���t cross our minds���...

This is a very incomplete story... doesn���t even tell us who first told the tale of the cross burning, or what reason that person gave for it, or how they picked the location.... My sociological question is, if they had no idea of the ���larger significance��� of cross burning, in 1960, why do it? There were lots of dumb things to do.... Investigate the context....

The fall of 1960, the beginning of Murray���s senior year of high school, was when he would have been applying to Harvard, which he went off to in 1961 (he was a history major). It was also a time when cross burning was in the news a lot, including in Iowa.... 15,000 people in the idyllic cross-burning town of Newton, where Murray���s father was a Maytag executive. And there were only 22 Black people recorded in Jasper county (where Newton is the principal city).��Does this mean race was not an issue in the minds of Murray���s gang? I���m very doubtful.... Des Moines, just 30 miles from Newton... The 1950s were the biggest decade for Black migration to Iowa.... The city had 209,000 people, of which 10,700 (5%) were nonwhite (mostly Black) by 1960. So, do you think a 1960 White executive���s family would have heard anything about the nonwhite population of the nearest city nearly doubling in the previous decade? Did aw-shucks Murray and his pool hall buddies know about all that big city stuff?...

Murray traveled around the state, and even the country, in his high school years. He was on Newton High School���s ���Crack Debate Team��� that won several statewide tournaments, including one at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in April 1960. And that summer the debate team roadtripped to California, courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce, for a national tournament. (What did they debate, anyway?)

So in 1960 Murray was the son of an executive, and a debate team champion, traveling the state and country, and applying to Harvard, while living in the next county over from a city with a booming Black population. Oh, and it was 1960: the year civil rights protesters staged sit-ins in dozens of cities across the south.... 55 articles in the Des Moines Register/Tribune archives mentioning cross burning during his high school years, 1955 to 1960. In fact, there were a number of stories about an Iowa City incident, where in April 1960 (yes, that April 1960), eight Beta Theta Pi frat brothers burned a cross on the lawn of the assistant director of student affairs, whose office was ���instrumental in the effort to remove race restrictions from the constitutions of several fraternities at the university.��� After briefly suspending the men, the university declared it a ���prank��� and reinstated them on probation:

Maybe it was a pure coincidence having nothing to do with race that the eight frat brothers burned a cross in their ���prank.��� But why a cross? Also, it was a few weeks after students picketed stores right there in Iowa City to support the sit-ins.

I see a possible parallel between the frat boys and the cross burning by Murray���s marshmallow gang. The story is they had no idea it was about race; decades later, this is the story they recite. Some key White adults helped keep the narrative from getting out of hand. I���d bet the incident didn���t make it into Murray���s Harvard admissions packet, either in his personal essay or in the form of a criminal record. Even though there was ���talk��� in town the next day. And they went on about their lives. Murray isn���t an elected office holder, and may be retired. Maybe it���s water under the racist.

Incidentally, I noticed that one of the University of Iowa cross-burning frat boys, Joel E. Swanson, seems to have gone on to become a state district court judge. (I don���t know what happened to their disorderly conduct charge.) He was a freshman in 1960, got his law degree at the University in 1967, while serving in the National Guard, and worked as a lawyer in his home town of Lake City, eventually became a judge and then retiring in 2012. Also, they have recipes.

... ...

#noted