J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 292

A Baker's Dozen of Fairly-Recent Links

Marshall Berman: All That's Solid Melts into Air http://delong.typepad.com/files/berman_marshall_all_that_is_solid_melts_into_air_the_experience_of_modernity.pdf
Karen S. Freeman: How to View Web Pages on Apple Watch in Watchos 5 : "Yes, you can access web pages on your Apple Watch now...
Wikipedia: Darien scheme
Caroline M. Yoachim: Carnival Nine : #sciencefiction
James Nicoll: The Company of Strangers : "The Ginger��Star���Leigh��Brackett, Skaith, book��1... #sciencefiction
Steven Pulvirent: A Week On The Wrist: Apple Watch Series 4 : "The future of the Apple Watch is coming into focus���and I like what I'm starting to see...
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0307763781 #books
Merrill M. Flood: Experimental Games
Paul Romer (1989): Endogenous Technological Change : "Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good...
Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth : "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...
William D. Nordhaus (1996): Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not : "During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago...
William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change : "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...
Nick Stern et al.: The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change




#shouldread

Note to Self: Optional Readings by This Year's Note Prize...

Note to Self: Optional Readings by This Year's Note Prize Winners:

Paul Romer (1989): Endogenous Technological Change: "Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good...

Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...

William D. Nordhaus (1996): Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not: "During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago...

William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...

Nick Stern: The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change




#shouldread
#nottoself

Just in time for midterm exams: M. Aurelius Antoninus: :M...

Just in time for midterm exams: M. Aurelius Antoninus: :M. Cornelius Fronto: "To my teacher: I received two letters from you at the same time. In one of them, you were criticizing me and you were showing that I wrote a sentence rashly; in the second, however, you were trying to approve my work with praise. Still, I swear by my mother and by my health that I got more joy from the first letter...

...to which I often yelled out while reading: ���Lucky me!��� And someone might ask whether I am happy because I have a teacher who teaches me to write a gnome with more care, precision, and concision?�� No! This is not the reason I say I am lucky. Why then? Because I learn from you to speak the truth.

This lesson���speaking truly���is hard for both gods and men. There is no oracle so truthful that it is not also ambiguous or unclear or which does not have some obstacle which may catch the unwise who interprets whatever is said the way he wants to and understands this only after the moment when the affair is complete. But this is advantageous and clearly it is customary to excuse these things as sacred error or silliness.

But what you say���whether they are criticisms or rules���they show the path itself immediately and without deceit or riddling words. I ought to give you thanks since you teach me foremost to speak the truth and at the same time how to hear it too! Therefore, you should get a double reward, which you will endeavor that I will not pay. If you wish to accept nothing, how may I balance our accounts except through obedience? [some incomplete lines].

Farewell my good, my best teacher. I rejoice that we have become friends.

My wife says hello.

#shouldread
#berkeley

Hal R. Varian: Causal Inference in Economics and Marketin...

Hal R. Varian: Causal Inference in Economics and Marketing: "This is an elementary introduction to causal inference in economics written for readers familiar with machine learning methods. The critical step in any causal analysis is estimating the counterfactual���a prediction of what would have happened in the absence of the treatment...

...The powerful techniques used in machine learning may be useful for developing better estimates of the counterfactual, potentially improving causal inference.... Experiments... it is important to have an estimate of the counterfactual���what would have happened in the absence of the experiment. This is essentially a problem of predictive modeling, an area where machine learning offers several powerful techniques. Regression Discontinuity.... one wants to build a predictive model for behavior near the threshold. We can then use the predicted outcome for the treated group estimated using the training data from the untreated units. Instrumental Variables... variables that are thought to be independent of potential confounders.... There are good reasons why the instruments should enter the predictive model linearly, but the other covariates could easily be nonlinear.... Difference in Differences.... The goal is to estimate a predictive model of what the outcome would be for the treated group if it were not treated. To accomplish this goal, one can use a model, possibly nonlinear, of the observed outcomes of the untreated group in the posttreatment period. In each of these cases, building a predictive model is a key step in identifying the causal impact. Machine-learning tools offer powerful methods for predictive modeling that may prove useful in this context...

#shouldread
#statistics
#cognitive

TODAY!!: Blum Hall B100: Plaza Level: 2 PM: Bill Janeway: The Digital Revolution and the State: The Great Reversal

Come one, come all! There will be food afterwards...

Bill Janeway: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy 2.0 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1... "The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error: upstream exercises in research and invention and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation...

...Drawing on his professional experiences, William H. Janeway provides an accessible pathway for readers to appreciate the dynamics of the innovation economy. He combines personal reflections from a career spanning forty years in venture capital, with the development of an original theory of the role of asset bubbles in financing technological innovation and of the role of the state in playing an enabling role in the innovation process. Today, with the state frozen as an economic actor and access to the public equity markets only open to a minority, the innovation economy is stalled; learning the lessons from this book will contribute to its renewal...

Cf.: Bill Janeway and Azeem Azhar: Entrepreneurs, the Market & the State: On Spotify

#shouldread
#finance
#behavioral
#riseoftherobots
#politicaleconomy

Causal inference in economics and marketing | PNAS

EG: Hal R. Varian: Causal Inference in Economics and Marketing: "This is an elementary introduction to causal inference in economics written for readers familiar with machine learning methods. The critical step in any causal analysis is estimating the counterfactual���a prediction of what would have happened in the absence of the treatment...

...The powerful techniques used in machine learning may be useful for developing better estimates of the counterfactual, potentially improving causal inference.... Experiments... it is important to have an estimate of the counterfactual���what would have happened in the absence of the experiment. This is essentially a problem of predictive modeling, an area where machine learning offers several powerful techniques. Regression Discontinuity.... one wants to build a predictive model for behavior near the threshold. We can then use the predicted outcome for the treated group estimated using the training data from the untreated units. Instrumental Variables... variables that are thought to be independent of potential confounders.... There are good reasons why the instruments should enter the predictive model linearly, but the other covariates could easily be nonlinear.... Difference in Differences.... The goal is to estimate a predictive model of what the outcome would be for the treated group if it were not treated. To accomplish this goal, one can use a model, possibly nonlinear, of the observed outcomes of the untreated group in the posttreatment period. In each of these cases, building a predictive model is a key step in identifying the causal impact. Machine-learning tools offer powerful methods for predictive modeling that may prove useful in this context...

#shouldread

James Davis Nicoll: Sorry to Crush Your Dreams, But We���...

James Davis Nicoll: Sorry to Crush Your Dreams, But We���re Not Colonizing Space Anytime Soon: "Robotic spaceflight has, as we all know, more than delivered on its promise. In fact, one might blame the success of robots for the slowdown in attempts at human space flight...

...(although the human tendency to expire outside of a narrow range of conditions has to be the bigger factor). Clarke���s communications satellites do exist, but it turns out that we do not need orbiting technicians to swap fresh vacuum tubes for burned out ones. There may be military applications for space flight, but really��� do we want to go there? Surely we are already capable of destroying ourselves several times over without ever leaving the planet...

#shouldread
#sciencefiction
#rapturesofthenerds

Note to Self: Prisoners' Dilemma Tweets...https://twitt...

Note to Self: Prisoners' Dilemma Tweets...

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048597577229373440

https://twitter.com/XLProfessor/status/1048599003821047809

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048609562217996288

https://twitter.com/JonWalkerDC/status/1048610059926700032

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610236418772993

https://twitter.com/akcayerol/status/1048609883036299264

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610846014763008

https://twitter.com/laseptiemewilay/status/1048610348583010305

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048610963497209856

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048611584552009728

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048612380895105024

https://twitter.com/thorgamma/status/1048614023552552966

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614093270081536

https://twitter.com/oliverbeige/status/1048613269487980545

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614520242020352

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048614537962770432

https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048614352067149825

https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048614353640022017

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048615646743785472

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048616583784873984

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1048624515289436162

https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048615957189611520

https://twitter.com/dannyschwab/status/1048629320393084929

https://twitter.com/MarkARKleiman/status/1048630608476426241

https://twitter.com/dannyschwab/status/1048632117171838976

#prisonerdilemmaorprisonersdilemma

The first write-up of the Prisoner's (or is it Prisoners'...

The first write-up of the Prisoner's (or is it Prisoners'?) Dilemma: Merrill Flood (1958): Some Experimental Games: "Summary: Two players non-cooperatively choose rows and columns of their payoff matrices in a series of 100 plays of a non-constant sum game. The purpose of this experimental game is to determine which of several theories best describes their behavior. The players, being familiar with zero-sum game theory, happen to choose a poor solution for their non-constant-sum game...

...The experiment suggests the hypothesis that people tend to start near an equilibrium point and then try to find a better equilibrium if there is one. At the end of the series of plays the players appear to be converging to a cooperative split-the-difference principle, or a cooperatiive von Neumann-Morgenstern solution, in this formally non-cooperative game. The social relationship between players appears to be an important factor. (January 1950)

There are now several theories for various special classes of games, some of which are not formally games in the von Neumann-Morgenstern sense. One theory that is of interest is that of Nash for games in which coalitions are prohibited, called non-cooperative games. One brief experiment was conducted with a two-person positive-sum non-cooperative game in order to find whether or not the subjects tended to behave as they should if the Nash theory were applicable,9 or if their behavior tended more toward the von Neumann-Morgenstern solution, the split-the-difference principle, or some other yet-to-be-discovered principle.

The two subjects AA and JW were familiar with two-person zero-sum game theory. They also knew something of the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory for non-constant sum games, but were not familiar either with the work by Nash or with the split-the-difference principle. It was originally intended that non-cooperation be enforced by keeping each subject in ignorance about the identity of his opponent, but this was not done, due to an accident at the outset; the experiment certainly seemed to be fully non-cooperative since there was no evidence of side payments, but there may well have been some implicit collusion within the rules of the game...

#shouldread
#gametheory
#prisonersdilemmaorprisonersdilemma
#behavioral

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/10/the-first-write-up-of-the-prisoners-or-is-it-prisoners-dilemma.html

For the Weekend: John Donne

John Donne: For Whom the Bell Tolls:

...No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee...

#moralphilosophy
#fortheweekend