J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 240

Marko Kloos: "I don���t know who first called Bitcoin ���...

Marko Kloos: "I don���t know who first called Bitcoin ���Dunning-Krugerrands���, but I applaud that person every time I read an article about cryptocurrency fails like this https://gizmodo.com/crypto-exchange-says-it-cant-repay-190-million-to-clie-1832309454...

#noted

Cal Daily News: Campus Must Prioritize The Health of Cal ...

Cal Daily News: Campus Must Prioritize The Health of Cal Football Players: "Sure, the rules and regulations surrounding football go far beyond Cal, and the NCAA has revised rules regarding targeting and kickoffs to lower injury risk, but there���s still much the campus can do. A significant percentage of the revenue from football games���Cal���s most lucrative sport���should go toward CTE research and support for the players who are most likely to develop it. If the campus truly wants to support its athletes, it needs to prove it...

#noted

Jonathan Portes (2013): Comment on Reinhart and Rogoff's ...

Jonathan Portes (2013): Comment on Reinhart and Rogoff's FT Article: "My letter to the FT... deliberately concentrates on the case for borrowing now to finance investment, where Reinhart and Rogoff have belatedly joined a growing consensus.... I omitted a couple of points where their article is simply incoherent.... They argue that we should be cautious about borrowing because interest rates might rise: 'Unfortunately, ultra-Keynesians are too dismissive of the risk of a rise in real interest rates. No one fully understands why [real interest] rates have fallen so far so fast, and therefore no one can be sure for how long their current low level will be sustained...

....Leave aside the silly straw man (repeated elsewhere) that 'ultra-Keynesians' want an 'unlimited open-ended surge in debt'. Who are these 'ultras'? Not Martin Wolf and Simon Wren-Lewis in the UK, or Paul Krugman and Brad Delong in the US. And, as Reinhart and Rogoff know perfectly well, of course we think (and hope!) that real interest rates will rise at some stage, when demand and confidence returns and the private sector wants to invest. Bringing that time forward is precisely the objective of the policies we advocate.... Reinhart and Rogoff seem to have got their logic completely inverted. ��At the moment the UK (and US) can borrow very long term at very low or even negative real interest rates; the UK index-linked gilt maturing in 2055 has a real yield below zero. ��So what Reinhart and Rogoff are arguing is that we should not lock ourselves into long-term debt at very low real interest rates now, because real interest rates might go back up.��Suffice it to say that if your financial adviser told you not to take out a long-term fixed rate mortgage now, because interest rates might go up next year, you might reasonably doubt her competence.��

As for the reference to Keynes.... Of course Keynes was worried about the inflationary impact of high deficits during the War, when demand (for both guns and butter) was effectively unlimited, and supply constrained (with full employment and much of the workforce off fighting). To say the least, that's not where we are now. ��It's always a little silly speculating what eminent dead people would do today, but it's hardly difficult to figure out what Keynes' prescription would be when unemployment is far too high and investment too low...

#noted

Laura Davison: [Rubio Tweets Tax Bill He Voted For Helps ...

Laura Davison: [Rubio Tweets Tax Bill He Voted For Helps Companies Over Workers(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...): "Florida Republican aligns himself with Democrats on tax law Stock buybacks have jumped as wages show modest increase...

...The comment by Florida���s Rubio, who voted for the tax law, echoes the message Democrats have used to criticize his party���s signature legislative achievement under President Donald Trump. They���ve said the law, which slashes the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, is a handout to corporations, which are using their savings to just repurchase more stock. Key defenders of the Trump tax plan have sought to downplay the benefit for corporations. Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Kevin Hassett said in an op-ed in April that those who described the tax cuts as helping corporations at the expense of the working class were ���wrong.��� Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said that buybacks help recycle capital through the economy, which ultimately is a good thing for all Americans.

Before the tax bill passed, Hassett said he expected reducing corporate taxes would spark ���an immediate jump in wage growth.��� Real hourly wages for all employees increased 0.8 percent in November from the prior year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

#shouldread

Cory Doctorow: How To: Make Up Swears: "the 'pyrrhic foot...

Cory Doctorow: How To: Make Up Swears: "the 'pyrrhic foot' of a 'familiar profanity compounded with a non-profane word of two unaccented syllables'... especially good for coming up with nongendered swears that are not slurs, which is useful if you're trying to insult an individual.... The best of these mean nothing, but sound wonderful, evocative and fun to say...

#noted

The first truly good conceptual framework I have seen on ...

The first truly good conceptual framework I have seen on where the future of employment growth may lie: David Autor: The Future Of Work: "Three trends... help explain where employment... may be headed.... 'Frontier work'... Jetson jobs... all about new technology... Supervisor, Word Processing (1980); Robotic Machine Operator (1990); Chief Information Officer (2000); Technician, Wind Turbines; and Intelligence Analyst (2010).... 'Wealth work',... jobs that primarily provide fancy-schmancy services to the rich... Hypnotherapist and Gift Wrapper (1980), Fingernail Former and Marriage Counselor (1990), Mystery Shopper, Horse Exerciser���our personal favorite���and Barista (2000); Oyster Preparer and Sommelier (2010).... 'Last mile'... what's left after machines have eaten the tasks... the atrophied husk remaining of a job when most of it has been automated... an airline ticket agent. A couple of decades ago... greet customers, help check baggage, and assign seats on the plane. Now... throwing bags on a conveyor belt and checking IDs. And so you can think of that as sort of the last mile, the last little bit of the job that remains...

#noted

Blogging: What to Expect Here...

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world���and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." ��� Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter���or an email..." ��� Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." ��� Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." ��� Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." ��� Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog���which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs���and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." ��� Daniel Drezner

#workingmemory #publicsphere #internet #weblogging #highoighted

Comment of the Day: Graydon: "Anyone who can put off inve...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: "Anyone who can put off investing is going to do so; there's Brexit, there's 'Ok, yeah, there isn't an adult anywhere in the Trump administration', plus there's the complete lack of statistics. Uncertainty is high and rising. Incompetence has real costs. The US has been using its favoured position as hegemon to disguise the costs of management incompetence since 1970 or so. (You can make arguments for pre-1900, and different values of 'favoured position'.) It's surpassingly unlikely the current US political norms can deliver competent management. (Those norms exist to reward specific forms of bad management.) So the choices (for the US) in a regular time would be between a long slow post-imperial slump, like Spain's, or a major social convulsion to get to some other economic system...

...Only it isn't a regular time; it's a crisis. It's the kind of crisis that doesn't exist in the historical record. (I would like to hope that the accurate analogy isn't going to be "Thirty Years War, but unable to stop".) The young have figured out that if they want to live, the current order has to go. (the young are not wrong.) Throw in that it is not possible for taxes and public spending to go down for the next couple centuries; all the ditches, dikes, dams, catchment basis, drainage allowances, bridge heights, storm sewers, and settling systems are the wrong size, everywhere. The sea is rising. The ocean is dying; so are insects. When that last collection of facts well and truly enters the public consciousness, I would think "recession" is going to be a pretty light description....

#commentoftheday

This is a very nice piece of work. Unfortunately, the maj...

This is a very nice piece of work. Unfortunately, the major conclusion I draw from it is that there is much slippage between numbers of patents on the one hand and true economically relevant Innovation on the other. So I cannot see what conclusions to raw from what is a lot of hard and ingenious work: Bryan Kelly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Amit Seru, and Matt Taddy: Measuring Technological Innovation over the Long Run: "We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify significant patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to previous and subsequent work: these patents are distinct from previous work but are related to subsequent innovations...

...Our measure of patent significance is predictive of future citations and correlates strongly with measures of market value. We identify breakthrough innovations as the most significant patents ��� those in the right tail of our measure ��� to construct indices of technological change at the aggregate, sectoral, and firm level. Our technology indices span two centuries (1840-2010) and cover innovation by private and public firms, as well as non-profit organizations and the US government. These indices capture the evolution of technological waves over a long time span and are strong predictors of productivity at the aggregate, sectoral, and firm level...

#noted

It would be good if this wing of the Republican Party bec...

It would be good if this wing of the Republican Party became very strong indeed. Of course, it is still not clear to me how Brink���s approach is different from that of the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party. Then again, a world in which the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party were to be the dominant force in the Republican Party would surely be a world with much more space for a real debate about what policies would produce equitable growth than the world we have. Plus those policies could then be implemented! I am still scarred by the fact that not single Republican legislator would support John McCain���s climate policy, Mitt Romney���s healthcare policy, or George H.W. Bush���s foreign policy when they were advocated by a Democrat who happened to be a black man. And I still do not know how I should react to this... desertion: Brink Lindsey: Republicanism for Republicans: ���This essay is addressed to those conservatives and Republicans, from leaners to stalwarts, whose loyalties to movement and party are now badly strained or even severed.... I understand what you���re going through.... We cannot simply wait for Trump to pass from the scene, or for Democrats to win big, and hope that things will then somehow go back to normal.... We need a new political language.... The answer is right under our noses, hiding in plain sight. The project... is... to develop and articulate the principles and program of the republican wing of the Republican Party...

#noted