J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 311

Comment of the Day: Jim Bales: Special Relativity Is Bake...

Comment of the Day: Jim Bales: Special Relativity Is Baked into Maxwell's Equations: "Relativity is so baked into Maxwell's Equations that, in the '80s (I believe) some people who don't believe in Relativity started their own Journal entitled 'Galilean Electrodynamics'...

...in the realization that they needed a non-relativistic version of Maxwell's Equations if they were going to convince anyone not already convinced that Einstein was wrong. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to succeed. (Note that, at times, Physicists may refer to quasi-static approximations of Maxwell's equations as "Galilean Electrodynamics". This is not the same thing as the "Einstein was Wrong" crowd's use of the term!)...

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Comment of the Day: I deleted a an anti-anti-Trump trolli...

Comment of the Day: I deleted a an anti-anti-Trump trollish comment, but this reply to it seems worth keeping: JEC: There is something deeply mentally, morally, and psychologically wrong here���with Glenn Kessler, with his bosses, and with his colleagues: "'He makes it very clear that he is responding to a reader's question about a part of O'Rourke's quote, to which he posts a video link. I simply fail to see how responding to a reader question about a statement made internally in a quote is the same as making something up and attributing it to the candidate.'...

...Well, you just did exactly the same thing. Did you notice?

Let me explain. You wrote "he is responding to a reader's question about part of O'Rourke's quote���." That's flatly false. Specifically, "Unarmed black children are being killed at a frightening level by law enforcement," is not "part" of O'Rourke's quote. It is a completely different claim that happens to use some of the same words. It is, at best, a misinterpretation of O'Rourke's statement.

The correct answer to the reader's question is: "O'Rourke didn't say that. What he did say is factually correct and fairly states a real problem."

Now, if one wants to do a story on whether police are gunning down unarmed black pre-teens in large numbers, that would be a perfectly valid story to write. But it wouldn't appear in a column devoted to fact-checking the things candidates say....

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Lyndon Johnson said: "You do not take a person who, for y...

Lyndon Johnson said: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.... It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.... Equal opportunity is essential, but not enough." However, one of our problems is that that does not seem to be working for even those African-Americans who can and do walk through all of our society's formal and status gates to opportunity: Khaing Zaw, Jhumpa Bhattacharya, Anne Price, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr.: A College Degree and Marriage Fail to Yield Significant Wealth Gains for Black Women: "[In] the story of the American Dream... a college education is viewed as a key driver of upward mobility and the primary vehicle to eradicate racial differences...

...In reality... a college degree... does little to undo the massive differences in wealth across race.... Black women have far less wealth than white women regardless of level of education.... Single white women with a bachelor���s degree have seven times the wealth of their black counterparts, $35,000 and $5,000 in median wealth, respectively.

Marriage is another avenue that traditionally has been invoked as a means of increasing wealth for women. However... more and more people with higher incomes and college educations are choosing to marry one another.... Marriage does little to help equalize wealth.... Racial wealth disparities widen among married women with a bachelor���s degree, as married white women have more than five times the amount of wealth as their black
counterparts...

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Let me welcome to Equitable Growth Will McGrew, who sends...

Let me welcome to Equitable Growth Will McGrew, who sends us to a very insightful study of government failure and bureaucratic blockage in the New Orleans school system. Since we economists do not have an effective grammar of government failure, there is a tendency (on my part at least) to somewhat overlook it: Will McGrew: "A timely and necessary piece from Haley Correll: quality public schools should be available to all kids in New Orleans, not just those whose parents have the time, information, and resources to navigate the complex application system...

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Nick Rowe: The 1 vs 3 Model of Quick Recessions vs Slow R...

Nick Rowe: The 1 vs 3 Model of Quick Recessions vs Slow Recoveries: "Business cycles are not symmetric; if you flipped the time-series data upside-down the fluctuations would look different...

...It's as if there were some "normal" level of economic activity, and the economy sometimes falls below "normal" temporarily, by greater or lesser amounts, but rarely rises much above "normal". Recessions are bigger than booms. Big news is usually bad news.... Why? Here's a story (I think it makes sense):

A simple model of a monetary exchange economy is the Wicksellian Triangle. The apple producer wants to consume bananas; the banana producer wants to consume cherries; the cherry producer wants to consume apples. But it's hard to coordinate 3 people meeting in the same place at the same time so they can do a 3-way swap in the central Walrasian market. They can only meet pairwise, so they have to use money. And let's suppose they use some 4th good as money (because my story is simpler that way). So we have a circular flow of money clockwise around the Wicksellian triangle; and a flow of fruit counterclockwise.

It only takes 1 person to reduce the circular flow of money. If the apple producer decides he wants to hold more money, he can unilaterally decide to slow down or stop spending his money. He does not need anyone else's consent to do this; because exchange requires mutual consent. Quantity traded is whichever is less: quantity demanded; or quantity supplied. The change in his stock of money equals the flow in minus the flow out; he needs the cherry producer's consent to increase his flow in, but can reduce his flow out to the banana producer unilaterally. And if the apple producer decides to slow down or stop his spending, the whole circular flow of money and fruit slows down or stops too. The circular flow of money is like an "O-ring" model; a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

>It takes all 3 people to increase the circular flow of money. The apple producer needs to spend more quickly, the banana producer needs to spend more quickly, the cherry producer needs to spend more quickly. (And each of those 3 decisions requires the mutual consent of both parties to the trade of money for fruit, because the apple producer cannot buy more bananas unless the banana producer agrees to sell more bananas. And only if all 3 have an excess supply of fruit matched by an excess demand for money will that consent be readily forthcoming.... The supply-side will usually not be a constraint in a recession, or if the economy is monopolistically competitive, which it mostly is. The circular flow of money is like 3 cars circling a one-lane roundabout, they all need to go faster for any one of them to go faster.... The same thing applies if we take the derivative with respect to time and talk about the rate of acceleration.... The rate of deceleration of cars on the Wicksellian roundabout is determined by the rate of deceleration of the car whose driver wants to decelerate the most; the rate of acceleration of cars on the Wicksellian roundabout is determined by the rate of acceleration of the car whose driver wants to accelerate the least.... The Wicksellian triangle is really a many-sided Wicksellian polygon... 1 vs n rather than 1 vs 3...

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Comment of the Day: Rust Belt Refugee: On Removing My Twe...

Comment of the Day: Rust Belt Refugee: On Removing My Tweed Jacket at the Start of Lecture...: "Not long ago, my coworkers and I would schedule our trips to the Vine St. Peet���s soon after lunch to avoid afternoon wind and fog.Rarely get fogged in during business hours these days...

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He is the best young organizer-activist I have seen: Will...

He is the best young organizer-activist I have seen: Will Bunch: Dying from ALS, Ady Barkan will save U.S. democracy if it's the last thing he does: "A onetime running and outdoor enthusiast who now uses a motorized wheelchair to zip around, Ady Barkan says it���s been getting harder just within the last few weeks for him to lift his fork and eat his meals...

...His words are slurred and no longer come as quickly.... But two years after doctors told the now-34-year-old Barkan that he���s terminally ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis���better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig���s disease���he can still raise his right fist.... ���Stand up and help make my voice louder, because ALS is taking that away from me!��� Barkan exhorted a packed reception room in Philadelphia City Hall where a couple of hundred people had wedged in and others were turned away from hearing his labored yet forceful words.... When Donald Trump was elected president on Nov. 8, 2016 ��� roughly a month after Barkan was diagnosed with ALS���there were a lot of folks on the left side of America���s political dial who vowed to resist the incoming president���s blend of authoritarianism and bigotry as if it���s the last thing they do. But few meant it the way Ady Barkan did. ���The explicit reason I���m doing all of this is because our democracy is under incredible threat and we don���t have much time to save it���so I���m doing whatever I can to save and strengthen our democracy,��� Barkan told me after the event, gazing with curiosity outside Gym���s fifth-floor City Hall office at the iconic Jacques Lipchitz sculpture called Government of the People. ���The personal reason that I���m doing it is because it makes me feel hopeful and empowered and connected to people around me,��� he quickly added....

���We���re on the verge of a political revolution,��� Barkan said with clear enthusiasm. ���Think about how dark our political life is���and then think that 27 months from now we can have the most progressive president in 80 years! We could have a progressive Congress!��� Barkan hopes he lives long enough to see it.

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Comment of the day: JEC: There is something deeply mental...

Comment of the day: JEC: There is something deeply mentally, morally, and psychologically wrong here���with Glenn Kessler, with his bosses, and with his colleagues. In a Washington Post with good journalists, there would be a substantial number of resignations today: "Wow. Kessler et al fail basic Fact Checking Journalism 101 here...

...The formula is pretty simple: you read what the candidate actually said, then you evaluate whether what they said was true and fairly stated (i.e. not designed to be misleading). Here's what you don't do: make up something, attribute it to the candidate, pronounce it false, then say "it's all a matter of interpretation." Kessler claims that "a reader" is responsible for the fabricated claim, which -- to the Post's credit, I suppose -- is flatly debunked by the candidate's words quoted above the article. But why spend a column investigating a statement the candidate didn't make?

The Post's problem, of course, is that Democrats don't tell enough lies. Actual fact checking takes on an unseemly partisan tilt when one party is responsible for 80% of the falsehoods...

#commentoftheday
#journamalism
#orangehairedbaboons

Historical Patriarchy

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/00hc0TFwhajEqn5JFBPhNbTog

Comment of the Day I have noticed this a lot over the pas...

Comment of the Day I have noticed this a lot over the past fifteen years. Journalists are very, very bad at citing their sources���it is one minor reason why they have a low reputation. That and their overaddiction to beat sweeteners, when not playing opinions-of-the-shape-of-the-earth-differ: Kansas Jack: The New York Times Has a Serious Quality Control Problem: "Has anyone else noticed that interesting, novel observations at Vox.com, especially by Matt Yglesias, come out a week later, slightly altered in the NYT? Is it just me who thinks that?...

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