J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 304
September 13, 2018
John Scalzi: The Whatever Digest, 9/13/18: "I���m a fan o...
John Scalzi: The Whatever Digest, 9/13/18: "I���m a fan of Lindsay Ellis��� deconstructions of film and TV.... But her most recent video isn���t about either of those... it���s about YouTube... and talks about how the people who are making shows and videos there are making them seem 'authentic'...
...Along the way she talks... about the emotional cost of keeping up that veneer of authenticity on a regular basis, for people who, ultimately, one doesn���t know, even if they feel like they know you���in part because that���s what you were aiming for. I found this video even more interesting than I find most of Ellis��� videos, because the issues she���s addressing are ones I���m familiar.... The version of me here is tuned���it���s a public persona... not... false... but... tweaked for the blog, as it were.... I well aware of how much I do what Ellis��� talking about in the video, in my own fashion and mode, so it���s also interesting for me to see other people talking about...
Lindsay Ellis: YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!):
#shouldread
#weblogs
Using the Solow Growth Model
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0-Vd07R6V__-6f43gx1FHoOGw
#berkeley
#teaching
#macro
#MRE
#Solow
#economicgrowth
Consumption and Well-Being in the Solow Model
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0PaBDMHyICsXAsdntSocU1HdA
#berkeley
#teaching
#macro
#MRE
#Solow
#economicgrowth
Reviewing the Solow Model
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0PNdIo_tBhTExjrI8KoCcw8AQ
#berkeley
#teaching
#macro
#MRE
#Solow
#economicgrowth
Hurricane Florence
Hurricane Florence Update Statement
Hurricane Florence Tropical Cyclone Update
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL AL062018
900 AM EDT Thu Sep 13 2018
...HEAVY RAINBANDS WITH TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS SPREADING OVER
THE NORTH CAROLINA OUTER BANKS...
...LIFE-THREATENING STORM SURGE AND RAINFALL EXPECTED...
Data from an Air Force Reserve Unit Hurricane Hunter aircraft and
NOAA Doppler weather radars from Morehead City and Wilmington,
North Carolina, indicate that Florence has changed little. Maximum
sustained winds remain near 110 mph (175 km/h). The latest minimum
central pressure based on data from the aircraft is 957 mb (28.26
inches).
SUMMARY OF 900 AM EDT...1300 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...33.2N 75.2W
ABOUT 170 MI...275 KM ESE OF WILMINGTON NORTH CAROLINA
ABOUT 215 MI...345 KM E OF MYRTLE BEACH SOUTH CAROLINA
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...110 MPH...175 KM/H
PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 315 DEGREES AT 12 MPH...20 KM/H
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...957 MB...28.26 INCHES
$$
Forecaster Stewart
September 12, 2018
If those of us on the left and center are ever going to r...
If those of us on the left and center are ever going to restart a technocratic debate with those on the right, it will be because thinking on the right becomes dominated by people link Brink Lindsey and his posse, rather then the current crew who are haplessly triangulating between their funders and their political masters: Brink Lindsey: [Welcome to capturedeconomy.com(https://capturedeconomy.com/welcome-t...): "WA new website dedicated to the problems of 'regulatory capture' and 'rent-seeking'���economist-speak for the pursuit of profits through politics...
...The capitalist market economy functions well when rival firms compete to see who can best serve customers��� needs, but there is an abiding temptation for firms to try to rig the game instead���to rewrite the rules of the game in a way that advantages the established and politically connected at the expense of consumers, competitors, and everybody else. When this happens, as it does all too often today, the market economy is perverted into an engine of insider privilege and unjust enrichment. At capturedeconomy.com, we intend to shine a spotlight on this dark underbelly of capitalism.
This website is an outgrowth of the book The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. We are launching the site with a focus on the four policy areas that served as case studies for the book: financial regulation, intellectual property protection, occupational licensing, and land-use regulation. In all of these policy domains, rent-seeking and regulatory capture have resulted in warped rules that undermine innovation and growth while adding to runaway gains at the top of the income distribution. We hope to add additional policy areas over time, as the four in question are unfortunately represent only part of our captured economy.
Our goal is to make the site a comprehensive repository of academic research and journalistic analysis of the policy areas we cover. To begin with, we���ve created a large ���reference library��� of sources that predate the website; each ���reference card��� contains bibliographical information, an abstract or a pull quote, and a link to the original publication. From this date forward, all new academic studies and news stories will be noted and linked on this blog, with new reference cards added to the reference library for each new source.
With this basic design, our goal is to make capturedeconomy.com an indispensable resource for policymakers, journalists, and concerned citizens who are interested in this issue space. Rent-seeking thrives in the dark, obscure corners of democratic life���so let there be light!
Please let us know if you found this article helpful...
#shouldread
Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand arg...
Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand argument to people who are allergic to "supply and demand" with a spoonful of sugar. He has three types of housing: newly-built yuppie fishtanks, old housing that can switch between working-class and yuppie, and newly-built "affordable housing" unattractive to yuppies: Noah Smith: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand": "YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents...
...In Northern California, where I live, YIMBYs tend to get into fights with progressives about market-rate housing. YIMBYs don't want to build only market-rate housing, but they think market-rate housing has to be an important component. NorCal progressives, in contrast, tend to think that market-rate housing is bad-either they think it lures more high-earners into a city and pushes up rents (induced demand), or they object to private housing developers making profits, or market-rate housing just sounds like cities catering to the needs of richer residents instead of poorer ones. Instead, the progressives tend to support what they call "affordable housing"-either public housing, government-subsidized housing, or privately-subsidized housing mandated by inclusionary zoning.... I think it's very important to build market-rate housing. And though the forces of supply and demand are probably at work, I don't think the supply-and-demand model captures exactly why market-rate housing is important. So in this post, I want to try to explain the YIMBY position without invoking supply and demand....
...Tech businesses have ever more of an incentive to cluster together in cities.... [If] tech workers... are going to work in the city, these tech workers are going to want to live in the city. Where will they live? Some will move into shiny new glass-and-steel apartment complexes downtown: Looks kind of like a fishtank, doesn't it? A beautiful fishtank for yuppies. But these beautiful giant yuppie fishtanks have limited space. So some of the incoming techies will go looking for apartments in other parts of town-neighborhoods occupied by long-time residents.... The incoming techies have lots of money to spend, and landlords-the people who own the units where the long-time working-class residents live - know this. Therefore, they have an incentive to raise the rent, which usually means the working-class residents have to move and the techies will occupy the nice old Victorian apartments pictured above.... The result: Displacement, gentrification, and an increasing rent burden on everyone not protected by rent control.��
The YIMBY solution to the problem described above is simple: Build more of the pretty glass fishtanks to catch the incoming yuppies as they arrive. Most of the yuppies would probably rather live in the fishtanks. The fishtanks tend to be located downtown, near to where the yuppies work (SoMa, Embarcadero, etc.), rather than in the older residential neighborhoods. Additionally, the fishtanks are pretty and modern and new, with gyms and common space and other stuff yuppies like. Probably more attractive for the average yuppie than an aging Victorian far out in the Mission or Haight with no built-in community or on-site services.... Long-time working-class residents and struggling artists and disadvantaged minority families are highly unlikely to go live in a yuppie fishtank. That means that every unit of yuppie fishtank housing-i.e., new market-rate housing-that you build will either A) be occupied by a yuppie, or B) sit empty on the market. Landlords want to fill all of their units, so if there are too many fishtanks and (B) happens, they'll drop the rent until more yuppies move in.... If the new fishtank units catch the incoming yuppies and prevent them from invading long-time residential working-class neighborhoods, that's good!...
So the YIMBY solution to the yuppie invasion isn't - or shouldn't be - just to build market-rate housing anywhere and everywhere. It's more like the following: A) Build market-rate housing that appeals specifically to yuppies, clustered in specific neighborhoods away from long-time working-class residential areas. B) Instead of tearing down existing housing to build market-rate housing, replace parking lots and warehouses and other inefficient commercial space with new market-rate housing. In other words, YIMBYism is about yuppie diversion. It uses market-rate housing to catch and divert yuppies before they can ever invade normal folks' neighborhoods....
Affordable housing... is popular among progressives, and is often put forward as an alternative to market-rate housing.��Although YIMBYs believe affordable housing is good... they also believe it's not a very good solution to the yuppie invasion described above. Why? Because affordable housing accommodates gentrification instead of preventing gentrification.��Suppose you're a long-time working-class resident who gets displaced by rising rents. Now the government offers you affordable housing somewhere else in the city. Well, at least you still have a place to live, and at least you're still in the city you've always lived in, right? But you have to move out of your home, which is expensive and emotionally draining. And you probably have to move to a new neighborhood, where your local ties will be weaker. In other words, it would have been better if you never had to move at all...
#shouldread
Smart proposal to unify U.S. statistical agencies in the ...
Smart proposal to unify U.S. statistical agencies in the Department of Commerce: Erica L. Groshen and���Robert M. Groves: Op-Ed: "We depend largely on three professional government agencies: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau...
...Yet for decades the work of these agencies has been hampered by laws and regulations constraining their performance. The agencies aren���t allowed to share data with each other to produce statistics, so they release information that is often inconsistent, and they cannot improve it by combining forces. Each must survey the same businesses. Each builds and maintains a costly information infrastructure uniquely designed to conduct its computational and privacy-protecting work. Most other countries have organized their statistical work to produce more harmony and integration. Over many decades, expert panel after expert panel, convened by Congress or the president, has recommended that these agencies be permitted to cooperate. Little has happened.
President Trump���s new reorganization plan proposes a solution that merits serious bipartisan consideration. It would move the Bureau of Labor Statistics���the source of statistics on jobs, wages, working conditions, productivity and prices���from the Labor Department to the Commerce Department. There, it would become a sister agency to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which tracks gross domestic product, personal income, international transactions, and corporate profits. It also would become a sister agency to the Census Bureau, which tracks population, wholesale and retail sales, manufacturing inventories and sales, residential construction, service sector activity, and homeownership. With the three principal economic statistics-producing agencies in the same home and current legal and regulatory barriers eliminated, real efficiencies could be gained and data quality could be improved.
First, the agencies could share an advanced computational infrastructure. Second, they could coordinate their data requests from businesses, lightening the burden on respondents. Third, the agencies could coordinate work to improve estimates of productivity, trade and service-industry activities and could address emerging issues such as the digital economy. All these advances would provide Americans better information to make economic decisions.
We think this proposal���s benefits are clear, and we urge Congress to give it serious consideration. Yet we must be mindful that a democracy needs legal protections that require the production of objective statistics without political interference. All three agencies have this protection now; they need to retain it when reorganized.
#shouldread
The analysis of rising inequality and its effects in the ...
The analysis of rising inequality and its effects in the United States and elsewhere over the past generation has suffered from a relative downplaying of the role of the family and how income gets earned and then transformed Into well-being. Central to this is the rapidly changing economic role of women in the workforce, but that is not all of it. We need more and better analyses of her public policy needs to shift in the context of changing family structure and rising inequality. Elizabeth Jacobs presents some of our thinking about how Equitable Growth is and will be trying to support this effort: Elizabeth Jacobs: Rethinking 20th century policies to support 21st century families: "...As a raft of research illustrates, economic growth is increasingly concentrating at the top...
...with historically high shares of national income flowing into the pockets of those at the very, very top of the income ladder. This rise in income inequality stands in stark contrast to the period of broadly shared economic growth that characterized the U.S. economy from the aftermath of the World War II through the early 1980s.
This rise in income inequality over the past four decades was accompanied by monumental shifts in families��� economic lives. Women���s labor market participation, especially that of mothers, shot upward. At the same time, the risk-sharing relationship between firms and workers fundamentally shifted, as new forms of health insurance, retirement benefits, and other forms of nonwage compensation pushed downside economic risk onto the shoulders of workers and their families. The result: destabilized household balance sheets and families��� lives, problems that are not adequately mitigated by outdated public policies grounded in New Deal-era assumptions about the way people live their day-to-day lives....
Understanding individual workers��� economic well-being requires understanding them in the context of their families. This is all the more true as family structures in the United States continue to evolve. A family perspective also allows for a multigenerational lens. We know that children���s long-term outcomes are shaped in important ways by their early experiences, but the impact of family may matter well beyond childhood. For instance, access to parental wealth may shape risk preferences in ways that impact innovation and entrepreneurship for adults. And the needs of elderly parents may fundamentally shape adult children���s economic well-being.... The rise in women���s labor market participation, for example, creates a new set of challenges for many families, as women���s traditional role as family caregivers���for babies but also for elder relatives���is chaotically upended. Yet research on the consequences of providing paid family and medical leave show that well-designed policies may improve the outcomes of the children and elders receiving childcare and elder care, boost women���s long-term labor market outcomes, and decrease the likelihood that recipients need other public benefits such as supplemental nutrition assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Medicaid....
How have public policies evolved���or failed to evolve���to mitigate these risks? What do these risks mean for the health of the U.S. economy as a whole? And what kinds of policy interventions are best suited to solving these challenges, particularly in the context of a rapidly changing labor market where the future of work may be organized very differently���with dramatically different consequences for families depending on their places on the U.S. income and wealth ladders. This is the core set of questions that our Family Economic Security portfolio seeks to answer...
#shouldread
Regional Economics: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. yet Summers, Glaeser, and Austin are smooshing them into one: Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "In Flint, Mich., over 35 percent of prime-aged men���between 25 and 54���are not employed...
Successful place-based policies require what we used to call "local boosters". One problem with so much of the so-called "Red States" is that the local rich are no longer boosters for their communities���indeed, no longer feel a part of the community in any meaningful way: Noah Smith: How to Save the Troubled American Heartland: "James Fallows and Deborah Fallows... notice a number of common approaches among towns that are on the mend. Two of these... universities and immigration...
Seattle is pursuing (a version of) social democracy in one metropolitan area. In the 2010s we learned from some of our laboratories of democracy (cough, Kansas, Wisconsin) what really not to do. Will Seattle provide a model for what we should do?: Hilary Wething: Seattle: Paid Sick Leave And Workers��� Earnings Dynamics: "Utilize administrative data from Washington state to study the impact of Seattle���s paid sick time ordinance on...
The states have been serving as laboratories of democracy over the past decade, with Wisconsin and Kansas seeing the greatest policy swerves and serving as the most striking ominous warnings: David Cooper: As Wisconsin���s and Minnesota���s lawmakers took divergent paths, so did their economies: Since 2010, Minnesota���s economy has performed far better for working families than Wisconsin���s: "Seven years removed from when each governor took office, there is ample data to assess which state���s economy���and by extension, which set of policies���delivered more for the welfare of its residents. The results could not be more clear: by virtually every available measure, Minnesota���s recovery has outperformed Wisconsin���s..."
Sixty years ago American states���at least California���made provision for moving into an era of the knowlege-based economy: A Master Plan for Higher Education in California
I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What���s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...
Noah Smith: "This is just incredible: @davidminpdx: 'East New York's 129-day stretch without a murder is the longest since the NYPD began keeping modern records'...
Noah Smith: How Universities Make Cities Great: "Abel and Deitz find that university research expenditures have a strong effect on the number of educated people in a region���over four times as strong as the effect of degree production...
John Austin: A tale of two Rust Belts: Diverging economic paths shaping community politics: "Some communities have assets (and have advanced strategies to build on those assets)...
Paul Krugman: The Gambler���s Ruin of Small Cities: "Once... towns and small cities... served as central places serving a mainly rural population engaged in agriculture and other natural resource-based activities...
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