J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 315

How Much Is Left of Donald Trump's Brain? The Level of Cognitive Decline Here is Close to Being Absolute...

Rob Beschizza: President Trump colors U.S. flag wrongly in classroom photo opg: "Maybe Trump should kneel before it a while, so he at least knows what it looks like. I've created a useful graphic of the Trumpamerica Flag:

#orangehairedbaboons

On Removing My Tweed Jacket at the Start of Lecture...

A word about this peculiar costume���the closest thing you can get to goretex if all you have is a sheep���that I am now taking off...

Because of central heating, these male formal and semi-formal clothes aren't comfortable these days even in Oxford and Cambridge, England, where they were originally developed. They are really only comfortable in Scotland. That is well-and-good if you teach at the University of Edinburgh or in Glasgow���or, perhaps, in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, or maybe in Washington or Oregon.

It used to be that these clothes were comfortable here in Berkeley. But, because of global warming, the climate here these days is a lot like what I remember Santa Barbara being like half a century ago when I was a child. When I got a job here at Berkeley in the mid-1990s, I looked forward to living in a place in which tweed jackets and such were comfortable both inside and out. The fact that these clothes were actually comfortable here was a factor���a small factor, but a factor. Increasingly, however, that is no longer the case. A problem resulting from global warming, albeit a small problem.

In the United States���for the entire Global North, in fact���global warming over the next century essentially means that the climate March is about 3 miles north each year. There are possible catastrophes involving the disappearance of things like the Rocky Mountain, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades snowpack. That does not mean less water falling. That does mean it won't store it up nicely during the winter in a place whjere it will have lots of potential energy and hence be easy to transport. It would expensive but doable for the Global North to deal with things like this for the next century.

Elsewhere...

Elsewhere are 2 billion subsistence farmers living in the six great river valleys of Asia, from the Yellow all the way around to the Indus. These 2 billion subsistence farmers do not have a lot of money. They do not have a lot of skills. They do not have a lot of resources. They would have a very hard time moving elsewhere and making a living other than as farmers in the six great valleys of river valleys of Asia���the six that have supported most of human civilization for the past 5000 years, and which rely on there being enough snow on the Tibetan and other high plateaus of Asia and that snow melting at the right time at the right speed so that the rivers neither extravagantly and catastrophically flood nor extravagant and catastrophically dry up. That they will do one of these two is, I fear, the big medium-term threat from global warming. What is going to happen to those 2 billion people?

And then there is the short-term threat: a global warming-enhanced typhoon in the bay of Bengal, roaring north with a storm surge toward the 250, million people living essentially at sea level in the greater Ganges Delta. How do we prepare for that? How do we deal with that? What should we be doing now? What will we do afterwards?

Things to think about.

At the moment global warming makes the climate of Berkeley somewhat more pleasant for those of us who do not want to wear tweed. But global warming has other, dire consequences outside Berkeley, in all likelihood in my lifetime, and certainly in yours...

#globalwarming
#moralresponsibility
#politicaleconomy
#berkeley

Comment of the Day: Kaleberg: Noah Smith: China Invents a...

Comment of the Day: Kaleberg: Noah Smith: China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy: "Maybe communism just needed better central planners. Chinese policy has been heavily influenced by the teachings of Qian Xuesen...

...a onetime professor at JPL before he was kicked out of the county during the 1950s red scare. While much of his work was on nuclear weapons and the surveillance state, his systems engineering approach is widely used in China. It isn't a magic bullet, and it has its dark side, but it avoids a lot of ideological traps that both capitalists and more traditional communists fall into. Whenever I think about running China, I am always glad that I am not the one riding that tiger. I don't expect the Chinese miracle to run forever, but everyone running the place knows what is likely to happen if the tiger ever stops...

#shouldread

Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: Jacob Levy: I don���t...

Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: Jacob Levy: I don���t think there���s anything���anything���on which I���ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "This is it, but I think the process is a bit more complicated. People who have made up their minds on a topic and committed themselves to it are still susceptible to arguments that work through repetition to undermine authority figures...

...The usual recommended course is to a) lay out the facts, as straightforwardly as you can and admitting where the argument is weak, b) show an authority figure pushing a line of thought that either completely or partially contradicts the facts (i.e. the argument the people in question believe), c) reiterate the original facts, pointing out where the authority figure is wrong, d) invite discussion. Or, to put it another way, conduct the argument like it would be in an active university classroom.

People who have made up their minds, particularly when they have a limited education, really dislike this. First, they don't like to see authority figures who support ideas they agree with attacked; it's an indirect attack on their judgment. Second, many of these folks like what the psychologists call "simple arguments"; i.e. an argument with 3 - 4 steps that reaches a conclusion, however illogically, they agree with. They tend to think that when people use more complicated arguments, particularly those that use evidence to buttress their points, are trying to fool them and disorient them from their beliefs (which is what they are). Problem = the folks who are making the arguments are often people who have studied the topics involved for most of their lives and who have both better knowledge and institutional prestige (most people respect colleges and college teachers) behind them.

The obvious answer is to assault the basis of the knowledge accumulated by colleges and universities. That way you can brush off or ignore the expertise that makes the repetitive arguments so effective; "Colleges don't admit all the relevant arguments! They are ignoring our legitimate concerns to undermine our opinions! They can be safely ignored and our own authorities can still be trusted!" Their evidence = "political correctness" and the dis-invitation of right wing speakers.

Well, to some extent they are right. Post-secondary institutions are discriminating about what they'll admit as legitimate argument and they often dismiss the simple arguments these people favor out of hand. Problem = they usually have good reason for doing so based on expertise and established methods of testing arguments. And that brings us back to the original problem. If you present evidence that, in fact, colleges and universities are generally the most open institutions in American and are willing to entertain a range of opinion found nowhere else in our public life, then you will almost invariably tick these people off.

Re-orienting how you think is hard and not many people like to do it. They should, but they don't...

#commentoftheday

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Josh Marshall: We Know Trump...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Josh Marshall: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We���re Having a Hard Time Admitting It: "The problem isn't Trump's manifest guilt; the problem is that, in a two party system, the majority-of-power party is guilty...

...Y'all need, not merely to remove Trump, not merely to make entirely certain a whole lot of generalized white collar corruption ends with its perpetrators dying truly poor���I own one pair of shoes and no boots, poor���but to make an end of the Confederacy. Which is not a small project...

#shouldread

This is, I think, both right and wrong. China has an... i...

This is, I think, both right and wrong. China has an... interesting property-rights system���your property is secure not through title deeds and such but through networks that link you to party and government officials. It's hard to argue that it does not work. It is easy to argue that it shouldn't work. But it does work, and this does, I think, have something to do with China's stabilization policy success. China has Keynesian demand management���and is willing to use it. China has interest rate tools, but they are in general effective at boosting only exports and construction. And China has effective financial repression, with which it appears to do a lot to manage banking and investment and thus the flow of aggregate demand. I have not seen a good analysis of how China's credit-based stabilization policy really works. I would like to see one. But fiscal policy and monetary policy ought���away from the zero lower bound at least, be powerful enough tools to do the job, and in all likelihood better tools to do the job: Noah Smith: China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy: "The nation has avoided a recession for a quarter-century. Few countries��can make the same claim...

...In the U.S. and other developed countries, there are three basic philosophies of macroeconomic stabilization.... Keynesianism, which centers around fiscal stimulus, mainly in the form of increased government spending.... Monetarism, which holds that getting economies out of recession is the job of the central bank, which can lower interest rates.... [Liquidationism holds] that recessions are a healthy and normal phenomenon... promoted... during the Great Depression, and enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the 1980s, eventually even winning a Nobel for one of its leading proponents.... It���s possible that there���s something else out there ��� a good way to stabilize the economy other than fiscal or monetary policy. And it���s possible China may have been the one to hit upon this alternative.

For the last quarter-century, growth in China has been remarkably stable. Though there have been ups and downs, the country has never recorded a recession in that time. During that period, real gross domestic product growth has never fallen lower than 6 percent.... Most fast-developing countries stumble at some point.... How did China accomplish this feat? Monetary policy was certainly used as a stabilization tool, but its interest rate moves haven���t been particularly dramatic. China did make use of fiscal policy in the Great Recession, running a deficit of about 7 percent of GDP in 2009. But the stimulus was over quickly.... In addition to spending more, China also directed banks to lend lots more money.... That lending was often wasteful and probably hurt productivity, but saving the economy from going off a cliff could easily have been worth it, especially since a deep recession might have threatened the country���s political stability. In the years since the crisis, China has again and again turned to credit policy to stabilize its economy���encouraging banks to lend more when there���s a risk of recession, and clamping down on credit when real estate bubbles threaten to spin out of control....

Many economists would see this approach as hopelessly ad hoc, haphazard and interventionist.... And yet, it seems to have carried China successfully through several crises, while always averting the catastrophic financial crash that outside observers have been warning about for years. Is there a lesson for developed economies here?... Macroeconomists should think about credit policy as an important supplement to the traditional fiscal and monetary tools of recession-fighting.

#shouldread

Aretha Franklin: A Change Is Gonna Come: For the Weekend

Aretha Franklin: A Change Is Gonna Come:

#fortheweekend

Hysteresis: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads

The empirical studies are finding more and more hysteresis���more hysteresis in the sense of a persistent downward shadow cast by a recession than I would have believed likely. I keep hunting for something wrong with these studies. But there are too many of them. And they all���at least all those published that cross my desk���point in the same direction: Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark: Stabilising the real economy increases average output: "DeLong and Summers (1989)... argue that (demand) stabilisation policies can affect the mean level of output and unemployment...

As Chief Acolyte of the "hysteresis view", I must protest! The "hysteresis view" has proved correct: Beno��t C��ur��: Scars that never were?: Potential output and slack after the crisis: "To be clear... I do believe that deep recessions can have effects on the supply capacity of the economy that may take some time to unwind...

We are not yet at maximum feasible employment: Jared Bernstein: Employment Breakeven Levels: They���re higher than most of us thought: "We know neither the natural rate of unemployment nor the potential level of GDP...

Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: February 2018 Report Edition: "The quits rate continues to hold steady at 2.2 percent. The rate has been 2.2 percent on average for the past 3 months as well as the past year..

Nick Bunker: "What does this tell us?: ".@de1ong asked so here it is: the Beveridge Curve with the prime employment rate instead of U3...

Josh Bivens: The fuzzy line between ���unemployed��� and ���not in the labor force��� and what it means for job creation strategies and the Federal Reserve: "Jobless people are classified into... either unemployed or not in the labor force...

Nick Bunker: JOLTS and the Beveridge Curve

Valerie Cerra and Sweta C. Saxena: The Economic Scars of Crises and Recessions: "According to the traditional business cycle view... our new��study casts doubt on this traditional view and shows that all types of recessions...

Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: The Output Gap is no longer a sufficient statistic for inflationary pressure: "From 1955 to 2007 prosperity grew at an average rate of almost two and a quarter percent each year...

Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: "Spoiler: There���s room for the job market to improve...

Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney: Explaining the Decline in the U.S. Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence: "Within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important...

Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���A jolt in the markets��� edition: "This week marks the 25th anniversary of President Bill Clinton���s signing the Family and Medical Leave Act into law...

Danny Yagan: EMPLOYMENT HYSTERESIS FROM THE GREAT RECESSION: "This paper uses U.S. local areas as a laboratory to test whether the Great Recession depressed 2015 employment...

This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new tec...

This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new technology. There were people who strongly objected to printing, on the grounds that the only way to truly grok a book was to copy it out word-for-word by hand. In their view, printing produced a bunch of shallow intellectual poseurs who would have only a surface and inadequate knowledge of the books that they had not really read but only skimmed (cf.: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (1980): The Printing Press as an Agent of Change https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0521299551; Johannes Trithemius (1492): In Praise of Scribes https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0919026087). And Sokrates's attitude toward writing as a greatly inferior simulacrum and inadequate mimesis that could not create the true knowledge obtained through real dialogue is well known (cf.: Plato (370 BC): Phaedrus). Nevertheless, we believe that we have managed to adapt to printing and indeed to the creation of manuscript rather than just the oldest oral master-and-apprentice intellectual technologies. Perhaps we will find different things to be true once we will have trained our information-technology networks to be our servants as trusted information intermediaries and intellectual force multipliers, rather than (as they know are) the servants of the advertisers that pay them and thus that try to glue our eyeballs and attention to screens whether having our eyeballs and attention so-glued helps us become more like our best selves or not. But as of now the empirical evidence has become overwhelming: Susan Dynarski: For better learning in college lectures, lay down the laptop and pick up a pen: "When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings...

...Randomization assures us that, on average, the students using electronics in a study are comparable at baseline to those who do not. That means that any comparison we make of students at the end of the study is caused by the ���treatment,��� which in this case is laptop use.... Learning researchers hypothesize that, because students can type faster than they can write, a lecturer���s words flow straight from the students��� ears through��their typing fingers, without stopping in the brain for substantive processing. Students writing by hand, by contrast, have to process and condense the material.... The notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than summaries of the lectures. Taking notes can serve... the cognitive encoding of... content.... Laptops improve storage, but undermine encoding. On net, those who use laptops do worse, with any benefit of better storage swamped by worse encoding. We could try to teach students to use their laptops better....

Students using laptops can also distract.... Multitasking students learned less.... The learning of students near the multitaskers also suffered. Students who could see the screen of a multitasker���s laptop (but were not multitasking themselves) scored 17 percent lower on comprehension than those who had no distracting view. It���s hard to stay focused when a field of laptops open to Facebook, Snapchat, and email lies between you and the lecturer.... We can criticize the external validity of any of these studies. How relevant, after all, is the experience of cadets learning economics to community college students learning Shakespeare? But the evidence-based strategy is not to therefore ignore the studies but to consider the specific reasons that their results would or would not extrapolate to other settings....

Students may object that a laptop ban prevents them from storing notes on their computers. But free smartphone apps can quickly snap pictures of handwritten pages and convert them to PDF format. Even better: typing and synthesizing handwritten notes is a terrific way to review and check one���s understanding of a class...

#shouldread

Brent Simmons: I���m a Goddamn Social Media Professional:...

Brent Simmons: I���m a Goddamn Social Media Professional: "I���ve joined Mastodon, and I find myself constantly confused.... The apps I���ve tried (including the web app) are difficult to use and/or don���t do the things I want them to do, or do them confusingly...

...Please steal the best solutions from Tweetbot and Twitterrific! I don���t ever care about the firehose timelines.... Support for multiple accounts is a must.... Goddamn social media pros like me sit in front of a Mac all day, because it���s the best way to be super-efficient.... On the Mac, support for multiple accounts also means multiple windows so I can have different windows for my various accounts. (This is how I use Twitterrific on my Mac.) The most important thing is to be able to participate in conversations. It should be easy to read a thread and reply. (See Twitterrific and Tweetbot.) I want a tab for my mentions. I also want mentions in the main timeline.... I don���t care about trends. At all. Ever. The thing I care about is people talking about my things or things that interest me. Trends could (and should, really) just go away. Searching, on the other hand, is critical, and I need to set up persistent searches for my things and things that interest me. iOS apps should support Dynamic Type or at least provide a way to change the font size....

#shouldread