J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 246

ProGrowthLiberal (2015): Stephen Moore Tries to Claim The...

ProGrowthLiberal (2015): Stephen Moore Tries to Claim There Is a "Debate" About North Carolina Employment Statistics: "Stephen Moore has another silly parade of disinformation.... Moore wants to claim employment has soared... says there was a 'debate' about how many people dropped out of the workforce. Paul Krugman addressed this last year:

Employment in North Carolina hasn���t actually shown any upward bump. Here���s employment in NC and the nation as a whole.... There has been a sharp drop in the NC labor force, probably in large part because workers who could no longer get unemployment benefits���which require that you search actively for work���gave up on what they knew was a hopeless quest. The point is that to the extent that there has been a distinctive drop in North Carolina���s measured unemployment rate, it has to do with reduced job search rather than increased employment....

And Moore wants to say there was a debate?.... I guess the Wall Street Journal will publish even the dumbest of dishonesty....

#noted

Everyone who gets a C in first-semester statistics knows ...

Everyone who gets a C in first-semester statistics knows that if your sample is random you do not have to double the number of data points when the population doubles. You do not have to increase the number of data points at all. And in the interest of trying to lowball civilian war deaths. Fake and fuzzy math in the service of trying to loball civilian war deaths is not just stupid. It is evil: Stephen Moore (2006): 655,000 War Dead? A Bogus Study on Iraq Casualties: "I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war.... The key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points.... Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound.... Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million...

#noted #reasoning #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbabaoons

Hoisted from the Archives from 2016: Ben White: "Ben Whit...

Hoisted from the Archives from 2016: Ben White: "Ben White: Morning Money: "Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore... [were] confident he and Kudlow could help nudge Trump away from his protectionist trade policies.... Moore noted that Trump has largely stopped talking about big tariffs on Chinese goods. Kudlow added: 'I think Mr. Trump does not want to see a wall of tariffs. He's actually pushed that rhetoric aside in recent months'...

#hoistedfromthearchives #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility

Hoisted from the Archives from 2010: If You Did Not Think...

Hoisted from the Archives from 2010: If You Did Not Think UCLA Law Professor Steve Bainbridge Had Lost His Mind���or Perhaps Had No Mind to Lose���You Do Now...: I genuinely thought this was a joke when I first saw it. But, no, people who deal with him every week have persuaded me UCLA law professor Steve Bainbridge really does think Paris Hilton is the tenth worst American of all time. The misogyny is strong in this one: "20 Worst American... Aldrich Ames... John Wilkes Booth... James Buchanan... Aaron Burr... Robert Byrd... Jefferson Davis... Louis Farrakhan... Nathan Bedford Forrest... Rutherford B. Hayes... Paris Hilton...

#hoitedfromthearchives #orangehairedbaboons

Menzie Chinn (2014): Does a Low Tax/Right-to-Work/Low Min...

Menzie Chinn (2014): Does a Low Tax/Right-to-Work/Low Minimum Wage Regime Correlate to Growth: "MIf a higher ALEC-Laffer ranking resulted in faster growth, then the points should line up along an upward sloping 45 degree line. This is not what I see.... Kansas and Wisconsin, ranked 15th and 17th in terms of the ALEC-Laffer 'Economic Outlook Rankings', are doing equally badly relative to US employment growth. In contrast, Minnesota (ranked 46th) is outperforming the United States and those two states.... What about California?... Ranked 47th by ALEC-Laffer, and yet is doing the best in terms of employment amongst the four states.... The higher the ranking according to Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (currently chief economist of Heritage), and Jonathan Williams, the poorer the employment growth...

#noted

Paul Krugman: Lecture in Melbourne... in Honor of... Max ...

Paul Krugman: Lecture in Melbourne... in Honor of... Max Corden: "One of the things I'm revisiting is the 'China shock' issue, which I think remains widely misunderstood. The claim is not that rapid import growth cost the U.S. jobs on net. It is that the jobs created were different from the jobs lost, and in particular in different places. That is, economic geography played a crucial role. The forces of localization mean that many localities, especially smaller towns and cities, are highly specialized in particular industries���and get hit hard if those industries shrink for whatever reason...

...A case in point: furniture production is one of those sectors that lost a substantial fraction of its jobs to imports. At a national level those job losses were tiny, lost in statistical noise. But furniture production was highly localized in Hickory, NC. So if you look at job losses from the industry's peak in 2000 to the eve of the Great Recession, relative to total employment, it was minor for the nation, fairly big for NC, devastating for Hickory. In terms of modeling, the interaction between economic geography and trade means that the medium-term distributional impacts look more like specific factors���labor specific to particular industries���than the kind of broader distributional issues we often consider...

#noted

Note to Self: Write a Project Syndicate column about thes...

Note to Self: Write a Project Syndicate column about these, someday:

Anastas Mikoyan and Boris Ushumirskiy: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

Anya Von Bremzen: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

#notetoself #food #politicaleconomy #economichistory #books

Trying to blame poor nonwhite people and social democrati...

Trying to blame poor nonwhite people and social democratic governance for the faults of Wall Street seemed to me several bridges too far back a decade ago. Yet Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow seem to have gained rather than lost influence on the right from their eagerness to do so. They very sharp Barry Ritholtz takes exception: Barry Ritholtz (2016): No, the CRA Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis: "Two of Donald Trump���s economic advisers, Lawrence Kudlow and Stephen Moore... lay the blame for the credit crisis and Great Recession on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law designed in part to prevent banks from engaging in a racially discriminatory lending practice known as redlining. The reality is, of course, that the CRA wasn���t a factor.... Showing that the CRA wasn���t the cause of the financial crisis is rather easy. As Warren Buffett pal Charlie Munger says, 'Invert, always invert'...

...Assume Moore and Kudlow are correct, and the CRA did require banks to lend to unqualified, low-income buyers.... Here���s what we should have seen:

Home sales��and prices in urban, minority communities would have led the national home market higher, with gains in percentage terms surpassing national figures;
CRA-mandated loans would have defaulted at higher rates;
Foreclosures in these distressed urban CRA neighborhoods should have far outpaced those in the suburbs;
Local lenders��making these mortgages should have failed at much higher rates;
Portfolios��of banks participating in the Troubled Asset Relief Program should have been filled with securities made up of toxic CRA loans;
Investors looking to profit should have been buying up properties financed with defaulted CRA loans; and
Congressional testimony of financial industry executives after the crisis should have spelled out how the CRA was a direct cause, with compelling evidence backing their claims.

Yet none of these things happened. And they should have, if the CRA was at fault.... If that isn���t enough... Where did mortgages, especially subprime mortgages, default in large numbers? It wasn���t Harlem, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit or any other poor, largely minority urban area covered by the CRA. No... Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California... suburbs and exurbs...

#noted #finance #publicsphere

Are our models filing systems to remind us in shorthand f...

Are our models filing systems to remind us in shorthand form of what we think we know���in which case "we" should distrust models that say debt is good���or are they intuition pumps? As I see it, Paul Krugman strongly argues for the first; Olivier Blanchard takes some steps toward the second���which is why there is some dissonance between the tone of and the models in his presidential ddress: Paul Krugman: "A mostly good summary of interesting papers presented at the ASSA https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-07/a-new-urban-divide-and-other-gems-from-the-big-economics-shindig but tellingly misrepresents what the paper by @ojblanchard1 actually said.... It doesn't say anything like 'debt is bad but not catastrophic'. It notes that in simple models a situation like the one we're in, in which interest rates are below growth rates, is one in which debt is actually good https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2019conference/program/pdf/14020_paper_etZgfbDr.pdf.... Olivier then asks whether realistic complications reverse that result, and finds it unclear���more debt may well actually be good, and in any case probably doesn't do much harm. It's really a radical repudiation of what the Serious People have been saying. So it's misreporting to imply that it's just about downplaying the catastrophic risk aspect; the chairman of the AEA is basically saying that the whole deficit scold enterprise that dominated so much political discourse was bad economics...

#noted #fiscalpolicy #publicfinance #publicsphere

Note to Self: The Two Best Books I Read in 2018:John Ca...

Note to Self: The Two Best Books I Read in 2018:

John Carreyrou: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1524731668: John Carreyou broke the Theranos fraud story and here tells it magnificently. It is a grift of others���and a self-grift by the Theranos principals���of almost unbelievable magnitude. The only way to understand the investors and principals is, in the words of one Silicon Valley observer: ���they had seen too many of their once-peers and now-superiors get rich by doing stupid things that they thought being stupid was a viable business model���...

Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0525558802: The field of the finance and economics of the past decade���s disasters has been well plowed by authors Like Barry Eichengreen, Martin Wolf, and Gary Gorton. The brilliant Adam Tooze, however, is the first I am aware of to successfully and magisterially broaden the scope, and do a satisfactory job on the political economy and the politics as well...

#books