J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 317
August 22, 2018
Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
Just think: if the New York Times had been willing to play ball with Nate Silver, they could have things of this quality���rather than more of their standard politician-celebrity-gossip and "Javanka are going to save us all" that has done so much to empower the Orange-Haired Baboons of the world: Nathaniel Rakich: 538 Election Update: How Our House Forecast Compares With The Experts��� Ratings: "FiveThirtyEight���s forecast is a tad more bullish on Democrats��� chances overall than the three major handicappers...
Why are Fox News's victims so easily-grifted with respect to making them scared of liberal universities?: Jacob T. Levy: "I���ve made a lot of arguments in my life to people who didn���t want to hear them. I argued about sodomy laws and Bowers vs Hardwick with my grandmother when I was 15...
Michael Tomasky: Hail to the Chief: "It���s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists...
Kate Aronoff: What the ���New York Times��� Climate Blockbuster Missed: "Nathaniel Rich���s article illustrates American failures, not global ones...
Dan Drezner: The invisible heroism of Paul Ryan: "Back in March,��I wrote.... 'Why, exactly, is Paul D. Ryan being so quiet? What does he hope to accomplish at this point? I don���t know. I would love to hear from someone who does'...
Socialism with German Nationalist Characteristics: Sheri Berman: Weekend Reading: "Even Hilferding recognized that his position doomed the SPD to continued sterility. In a letter to Karl Kautsky, he wrote: 'Worst of all in this situation is that we cannot say anything concrete to the people about how and by what means we would end the crisis. Capitalism has been shaken far beyond our expectations but... a socialist solution is not at hand and that makes the situation unbelievably difficult and allows the Communists and Nazis to continue to grow'...
F--- you, @jack. Use Twitter if and only if you find it useful. But everyone is now under a moral obligation to diminish its profits and hasten its obsolescence: Steve Randy Waldman: "F--- @twitter for killing their third-party clients: " for the second time. I wish it were credible for me to say I���m leaving the platform. It���s not credible. Twitter has market power, I will use the platform, but increasingly I wish the company ill...
Nate Silver: How FiveThirtyEight���s House Model Works
Rory McVeigh, David Cunningham, and Justin Farrell: Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and Its Enduring Impact on Political Realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000: "Short-term movement influence on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks...
Wise to people who want to be journalists in our current age: (1) Don't expect backup from your peers. (2) rather, the reverse. (3) Falsehood comes faster than you can report it, let alone debunk it: Alexey Kovalev: A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media: "Congratulations, US media! You���ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear. We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now���with a short hiatus when our leader wasn���t technically our leader���so quite a few things during Donald Trump���s press conference rang a bell. Not just mine, in fact���read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times..."
There was an opportunity to pass a corporate tax cut���excuse me, "reform"���that would be durable. The Republicans did not do it. So now there is a tax code that has little depth as far as support is concern. And so there is likely to come an opportunity to run the table. The master of legislative and technical detail Greg Leiserson and Equitable Growth Fearless Leader Heather Boushey provide a roadmap: Heather Boushey and Greg Leiserson: Taxing for Equitable Growth: "Tax reform... when the time comes, here are the three areas progressives must focus on...
Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva: Misperceptions about Immigration and Support for Redistribution: "The debate on immigration is often based on misperceptions about the number and character of immigrants...
How, again, is Donald Trump supposed to win a breath-holding contest with an authoritarian r��gime that both controls its media and sees little downside in redirecting resources to cushion the impact on potentially noisy losers?: Paul Krugman: How to Lose a Trade War: "Trump���s declaration that 'trade wars are good, and easy to win' is an instant classic, right up there with Herbert Hoover���s 'prosperity is just around the corner'
In retrospect, this from the usually-reliable Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold looks really, really, really awful, no? But they really should have known better: Anyone who goes the extra mile to give the version of Kevin Hassett on display these days the benefit of the doubt is likely to wind up naked on the Moon. That, I think, is the real lesson here���shading your thoughts to think more highly of Kevin these days either out of comity or because you think he is broadly on your policy side will put you in the same position as those who surrender their dignity to Donald Trump: Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold: Kevin Hassett���s Defense of Tax Reform is Right on Point: "The Tax Policy Center... had recently issued a report suggesting that the ���Big Six��� tax-reform proposal would add nearly $2.4 trillion to the budget deficit over the next ten years, raise taxes on many upper-middle class households, and slash taxes for the top 1 percent. Mr. Hassett was invited to respond to the report. His remarks were, unsurprisingly, unsparing. After all, the government���s top economist shouldn���t sit quietly while premature invectives are launched at the administration���s signature fiscal proposal...
Should Kansas's (and Missouri's) Future Be "a Lot More Like Texas"?: Hoisted from the Archives: Three paragraphs later Burrough is writing of... "an oppressive post-Civil War government of Radical Reconstructionists..." To talk in the twenty-first century of oppressive Radical Reconstructionists who thought the 14th Amendment ought to mean something is to play not just the race card but the entire race deck...
Am I the only one who remembers journamalist Erica Grieder's carrying water for Texas Governor Greg Abbott's tinfoil hat fear of Operation Jade Helm?: "Greg Abbott���s announcement... that he would direct the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm... has been widely derided as political pandering, stoking paranoia, wasting state resources, and making Texas look silly. Way harsh, guys..." Bending over backward to claim tinfoil hat behavior is not tinfoil hat behavior is never "balance", guys: Cassandra Pollock and Alex Samuels: Hysteria Over Jade Helm Exercise in Texas Was Fueled by Russians, Former Cia Director Says: "Gov. Greg Abbott's decision in 2015 to ask the Texas State Guard to monitor a federal military exercise.... A former CIA director said Wednesday that the move emboldened Russians to next target elections...
Michael Tomasky: Hail to the Chief: "It���s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists...
It is necessary to remember, every day, what Dan Froomkin reminds us of: THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This was a private cabinet meeting. Yes, there are always lots of leaks and lots of complaisant reporters who work for sources generating a cloud of misinformation in an attempt to seek personal advantage in the court that is the White House. But "our principal is an idiot" is a message that people in the White House rarely wish to send. But that is, as Dan Froomkin points out here, the message that the Whire House insiders are saying: Dan Froomkin: THIS IS NOT NORMAL: "In private FEMA remarks, Trump���s focus strays from hurricanes...
Opposition to Medicaid expansion was one of the cruelest deeds of reactionaries in the 2000s: Ralph Northam: "As a doctor, I believe ensuring all Virginians have access to the care they need is a moral and economic imperative. This budget expands Medicaid and will empower nearly 400,000 Virginians with access to health insurance, without crowding out other spending priorities...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: "What you're seeing is an active ethnogenesis; Trump's base are recreating themselves as something that's not 'Americans'...
The wise Ian Buruma on the Trumpists' attempts to construct a global Fascist International: Ian Buruma: Steve Bannon���s European Adventure: "The reputed mastermind of Donald Trump���s presidential campaign has launched a full-scale effort to unite Europe's right-wing forces and bring down the European Union...
David Rothkopf: "A brief note to my Republican friends: (and other supporters of the president): Keep your eye on the penny. It is about to drop...
Dan Davies: " overseas by trying to excuse their shitty behaviour by going 'oh it's a British thing' should have their passports removed. You're meant to be on your best behaviour, tool..."
Aspen: Security: Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel
Some of My Less Polite Thoughts from Aspen
Dan Davies: "Expats who give us a bad name overseas by trying to excuse their shitty behaviour by going 'oh it's a British thing' should have their passports removed. You're meant to be on your best behaviour, tool...
Is this right? Is this robust? If it is, this is amazing: Kevin Drum: College-Educated Republican Women are Extinct: "College-educated white women? They support Democrats by a net of nearly 50 points. And it shows no signs of bouncing back and forth...
Sharply distinguishing "ideology" from "partisanship" seems to me to be a potentially fatal flaw in what is otherwise an absolutely brilliant essay. We East African Plains Apes think in groups: we outsource a great deal of what we believe to others whom we trust. Thus "partisanship" and "ideology" reinforce each other massively. But that also means that when thought-leader elites change what the partisans with access to audiences say, people's "ideologies" will change as well���without the thinking about it much, if it all: Nathan P. Kalmoe: Uses & Abuses of Ideology: "Ideology is a central construct in political psychology, and researchers claim large majorities of the public are ideological, but most fail to grapple with evidence of ideological innocence in most citizens...
Kevin Drum: "I���ve been blogging for 15 years, and there���s never been a day when I wanted to stop...
Kevin Drum: About That Hillary Clinton Dirt: "There���s something about the whole Trump Tower meeting that might be obvious to everyone by now, but I���m not sure it is. It might not even be especially important. For what it���s worth, though, here���s what I think happened...
Seems to me I can think of many reasons why his friends would have told him this would not be a good book to write: Joe Patrice: Law School Professor Has New Murder Mystery: "Law professor who quit Twitter in a temper tantrum is back with a new book.... Earlier this year, the conservative Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago advertised an event to discuss whether or not immigrants were 'toilet people'...
I have a question for Stanford's Michael @McFaul... We know that "If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation in mating, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ballpark estimates), and if the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation of lifetime incomes would be 0.01..." (see Bowles and Giants (2002)). That is only two percent the observed intergenerational correlation. Why, then, is it important to invite to your campus to speak someone whose big thing is the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, and racial differences thereof? And if one were going to invite to your campus to speak someone, etc., why would you pick somebody who likes to burn crosses? Wouldn't a healthier approach be to regard such a person���who focuses on the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, harps on genetic roots of differences between "races", and likes to burn crosses���as we regard those who know a little too much about the muzzle velocities of the main cannon of the various models of the Nazi Armored Battlewagon Version 4?: Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "The Bell Curve cited literature from Mankind Quarterly, which no mainstream scholar cites, because it is an unscholarly racist journal... http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2017/04/who-wants-charles-murray-to-speak-and.html
What was really existing socialism, comrade? This was really existing socialism: Yen Ho: Our Handling of 'The Great Wind': "In the tasks of editing and publishing the poem, we were in error...
Epistemic Sunk Costs, Political Bankruptcy, and Folding Your Tent and Slinking Away: The Approaching End of the Trump Grift?
August 21, 2018
Alexandra Petri: Play the ���woman card��� and reap these...
Alexandra Petri: Play the ���woman card��� and reap these ���rewards���!: "���Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don���t think she���d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she���s got going is the��woman���s card,��� Trump said Tuesday night, after winning 5 primaries...
...h yes, the woman���s card. I have been carrying one of these for years, proudly. It is great. It entitles you to a sizable discount on your earnings��everywhere you go (average 21��percent, but can be anywhere from 9 percent to 37 percent, depending on what study you���re reading��and what edition of the��Woman Card you have.) If you shop with the Woman Card at the grocery, you will��get to pay 11 percent more for all the same products as men, but now they are pink. Hook up the Woman Card to��your TV and you will get a barrage of commercials telling you that you��did something wrong with your face and must buy ointment immediately so as not to become a��Hideous Crone...
#shouldread
Minimum wages and the distribution of family incomes in the United States - Equitable Growth
In my opinion, Arindrajit Dube is one of the best economists around in figuring out what we should control for and why in order to achieve real econometric identification. The contrasting pole is simply to throw in a bunch of controls until you have produced the numbers you want. In my view, we do not teach what should be controlled for and how enough, so people pick it up on the fly. Arindrajit has picked it up, and is a master: Arindrajit Dube: Minimum wages and the distribution of family incomes in the United States: "I find that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces poverty among the nonelderly population by 2.1 percent and 5.3 percent across the range of specifications in the long run...
...There are also reductions in shares earning below 125 percent and below 75 percent of the poverty threshold. For my preferred model with the richest set of controls, the falls in shares below 75 percent, 100 percent, and 125 percent of the poverty threshold are 5.6 percent, 5.3 percent, and 3.4 percent, respectively, from a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage.... Since minimum wage policies are not randomly assigned across states, it is important to account for any bias that may arise from differences across states raising the minimum wage as compared to those which do not.... There is a strong regional clustering.... Economists disagree... on the best way to account for such biases.... I report results using eight different specifications with alternative...state-level controls that subsume most of the approaches.... Starting with the classic model that assumes all states are on parallel trends (known as the two-way fixed effects model), I progressively add regional controls (division-period effects), state-specific linear trends, and state-specific business cycle effects. This exercise allows the evolution of family income distribution to differ across states in many different ways. Moreover, all of these controls have been shown to be important....
All of these specifications find that increases in the minimum wage reduce the nonelderly poverty rate.... The specification with all three sets of control... performs the best in a variety of falsification tests...
#shouldread
Why are Fox News's victims so easily-grifted with respect...
Why are Fox News's victims so easily-grifted with respect to making them scared of liberal universities?: Jacob T. Levy: "I���ve made a lot of arguments in my life to people who didn���t want to hear them. I argued about sodomy laws and Bowers vs Hardwick with my grandmother when I was 15...
...Drug legalization, open borders, rejection of ideal theory, rejection of methodological individualism, &c &c. I���ve defended Black Lives Matter and attacked white supremacy in front of post-2016 mostly-GOP audiences. 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.
���You���re a university professor? How interesting! How brave you must be! Do the terrible students attack you like they do that nice young Milo?��� ���No, it���s not at all like that. Not even a little. Here are some numbers, here���s some evidence, here���s how availability bias works...��� This REALLY SERIOUSLY bothers people. Like, I can see them trying to be restrained and civil with me even though as far as they���re concerned I���ve just emptied my bowels on the floor or something.
It happens when I write, too��� my Chronicle essay about free speech on campus got angrier feedback (and from off-campus people even though the Chronicle has a mostly on-campus audience) than my LAT op-ed describing Trump as a moral nihilist. It���s worrisome...
#shouldread
An excellent piece from Marinescu, Dinan, and Hovenkamp: ...
An excellent piece from Marinescu, Dinan, and Hovenkamp: one of our working papers laying out how the analysis of how antitrust policy should be done given that compensated firms face their counter parties not just in the product but in labor markets. I think this is the most important thing I have seen out of our shop here at Equitable Growth this week*Ioana Marinescu, James G. Dinan, and Herbert Hovenkamp*: Anticompetitive mergers in labor markets: "Increased market concentration in labor markets threatens to facilitate coordinated interaction among employers that could lead to lower output and wage suppression in employment markets...
...Because most mergers are challenged prior to their occurrence, the threat is not of observed coordinated interaction, but rather of an ���appreciable danger��� that it may occur if the merger is permitted to proceed. We outline the major issues that enforcers are likely to encounter in assessing mergers threatening competitive harm in labor markets. Mergers affecting the labor market require some rethinking of merger policy.... Horizontal mergers threatening labor market competition present a significant competition problem but also unique legal issues.... Labor market concentration... is very high, perhaps as high or higher than product market concentration. This suggests that a mature policy of pursuing mergers because of harmful effects in labor markets could yield many cases.... Those reviewing mergers cannot simply assume that lack of competition in the product market entails the same for the labor market...
#shouldread
August 19, 2018
Monday DeLong Smackdown/Hoisted: Greenspanism Looking Pretty Good...
Oy: This was perhaps the biggest thing I got most wrong in 2008. It's not saved by the weasel-words at the end: "If the tide of financial distress sweeps the Fed and the Treasury away--if we find ourselves in a financial-meltdown world where unemployment or inflation kisses 10%--then I will unhappily concede, and say that Greenspanism was a mistake...: Greenspanism Looking Pretty Good...: Martin Wolf is gloomy:
A year of living dangerously for the world: It is now almost a year since the US subprime crisis went global. Many then hoped that the repricing of risk would be no more than a brief interruption.... Such hopes have been disappointed.... So where is the world economy now? And where might it go? Here are some preliminary answers to these questions.
The answer to the first comes in two main parts: continued financial distress and commodity price rises.... Equity investors are not the only people worried about the health of banks. The banks themselves are also worried. Spreads between rates of interest on inter-bank lending in dollars, euros and sterling and expected official rates... [o]n six-month loans... are now as high as at the two previous peaks, in September and December of last year.... This is no mere liquidity crisis. The banks are expressing concern about the solvency of their peers....
Meanwhile, the price of oil is close to $150 a barrel.... has doubled over the past year. In real terms, the price of oil is now 25 per cent higher than in 1979.... [W]hy are commodity prices soaring when the world economy is slowing?... Producers will leave oil in the ground if the rise in real oil prices is expected to be faster than the return on the alternative assets. What determines the current price then is the expected future price. The most important drivers have been the prospective growth in the demand of emerging countries, particularly China, and gloom about alternative sources of supply....
So what happens to the world economy next?... It is hard to see any outcome other than a sustained slowdown in the world economy.... [R]isks could combine in dangerous ways. An attack on Iran might push the price of oil above $200.... If the ongoing deleveraging of the US economy weakened US consumption, the economy might go into a deep recession. US fiscal deficits would then soar and long-term US interest rates might jump. This could make the debt dynamics of the US government look very unpleasant. A flight from the dollar and dollar bonds might even ensue. Who would then want to be running the Federal Reserve?
The good news is that the world economy has held up surprisingly well. The bad news is that the risks remain squarely on the downside...
My reading is somewhat different. Back in the second half of the 1990s, various people went into Alan Greenspan's office. "Raise interest rates!" they said. "Let unemployment go up! The Phillips curve can't have shifted in this far! The natural rate of unemployment can't have fallen so far so fast! These stock market valuations can't be rational! We are headed for a big crash, or a big inflationary spiral--unless you change course now!"
Alan Greenspan responded that there was no sign of overly-tight labor demand, no sign of accelerating demand-pull or wage-push inflation that would warrant interest rate increases. People were indeed investing enthusiastically in high-tech start-ups and those buying stocks at outsized price-earnings ratios. But the people doing the buying and investing were relatively well-off, and were grownups. If it turned out to be a serious bubble, and if the unwinding of the bubble triggered a financial panic and threatened to produce a high-unemployment recession, then would be the moment for the Federal Reserve to step in and clean up the mess. In the meanwhile, it would be a shame to destroy millions of jobs and wreck a period of 4%+ economic growth just because the Federal Reserve thought that it knew better than grownup investors what prices they should be paying for stocks and shares in high-tech startups, and feared that there might be trouble in the future.
Similarly, in the middle years of the decade of the 2000s, various people went into Alan Greenspan's office. "Raise interest rates!" they said. "Let unemployment go up! Long-term interest rates cannot stay this low for long! The sustainable pace of construction can't have risen so far so fast! These real estate valuations can't be rational! We are headed for a big crash, or a big inflationary spiral--unless you change course now!"
Alan Greenspan responded that there was no sign of overly-tight labor demand, no sign of accelerating demand-pull or wage-push inflation that would warrant interest rate increases. People were indeed building houses and buying mortgages and taking out home-equity loans enthusiastically at outsized price-rental and mortgage-value income ratios. But the people doing the buying and investing were relatively well-off, and were grownups. If it turned out to be a serious bubble, and if the unwinding of the bubble triggered a financial panic and threatened to produce a high-unemployment recession, then would be the moment for the Federal Reserve to step in and clean up the mess. In the meanwhile, it would be a shame to destroy millions of jobs and wreck a period of 3%+ economic growth just because the Federal Reserve thought that it knew better than grownup investors what prices they should be paying for mortgages and houses, and feared that there might be trouble in the future.
The unwinding of the dot-com bubble in 2000-2002 went remarkably well: no significant macroeconomic distress, and less financial panic and distress than I believed possible. The unwinding of the real estate bubble in 2007-2009 is so far not going well. There is, by contrast, more financial distress than I believed possible. Who thought that quantitatively sophisticated hedge funds would have enormous unhedged exposure to subprime risk? Who would have thought that highly-leveraged investment banks with an originat-and-sell business model would keep lots of the securities they had originated in their own portfolios--and kept them because they were high yield for their rating, i.e., because the market did not believe they were as low risk as the investment banks had bamboozled the ratings agencies into claiming? Who would have thought that those buying subprime mortgage securities from the likes of Countrywide had done no investigation into how Countrywide was screening out borrowers?
But so far--look: In the dot-com boom of the 1990s we were the winners. The rich investors of America built out a huge amount of fiber-optic cables and conducted an enormous amount of experimentation in business models from which we all benefit. In the real-estate boom of 2000s the rich investors of America and the world built an extra four million houses and loaned the rest of us money at remarkably low interest rates for five years. Those who moved into newly-built houses with teaser-rate mortgages wish those teaser rates would continue--but they won't, and in the meantime they got to live in a nice house for quite a low rent. Those of us who took out big home equity loans wish the low interest rates would continue--but they won't. And those of us who felt rich because our house values have appreciated wish we still could think of ourselves as sleeping on a pile of gold--but we can't.
The dot-com bubble and the real-estate bubble were bad news for the investors in Webvan, WorldCom, Countrywide, FNMA, and securitized subprime mortgages. But they were, by and large, good news for the rest of us. And investors are supposed to take care of themselves.
Now we are not yet out of the woods. If the tide of financial distress sweeps the Fed and the Treasury away--if we find ourselves in a financial-meltdown world where unemployment or inflation kisses 10%--then I will unhappily concede, and say that Greenspanism was a mistake. But so far the real economy in which people make stuff and other people buy it has been remarkably well insulated from panic at 57th and Park and on Canary Wharf.
July 16, 2008 at 02:54 PM in Economics: Macro, Streams: Economics | Permalink...
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Monday Smackdown: George Borjas P-Hacking His Way Along...
How George Borjas p-hacked his way to his conclusion that immigrants have big negative effects on native-worker wages: Jennifer Hunt and Michael Clemens: Refugees have little effect on native worker wages: "Card (1990) found that a large inflow of Cubans to Miami in 1980 did not affect native wages or unemployment...
...Hunt (1992)... a large inflow from Algeria to France.... Friedberg (2001) found that a large inflow of post-Soviet Jews to Israel between 1990 and 1994.... Recent studies have challenged these results by re-analysing all four of these refugee waves. This new wave of research claims that earlier work obscured uniformly large, detrimental effects, either by aggregating the affected workers with unaffected workers (Borjas 2017) or through inadequate causal identification (Borjas and Monras 2017), or both.... We find that, for all four refugee waves, the methods used in the recent re-analyses were subject to substantial bias. Correcting these biases largely eliminates the disagreement between the new and old findings...
I'm with Card on this one, very strongly. It's long past time to give this a rest...
#shouldread
An interesting paper saying that Glick and Rose's finding...
An interesting paper saying that Glick and Rose's findings are not robust. I am generally pro-customs unions. I was taught when I was knee-high to a grasshopper that the Zollverein was a big deal. And I have always been impressed by the scale of cross-state trade in the U.S., which dwarfs cross-nation trade within Europe. But I may have to rethink���and I believe I certainly have to revise up my beliefs about how precisely these effects can be estimated: Douglas L. Campbell and Aleksandr Chentsov: Breaking Badly: The Currency Union Effect on Trade: "A key policy question is how much currency unions (CUs) affect trade...
...Glick and Rose (2016) confirmed that currency unions increase trade on average by 100%, and that the Euro has increased trade by a still-large 50%.... We find that the apparent large impact of CUs on trade is driven by other major geopolitical events correlated with CU switches, including communist takeovers, decolonization, warfare, ethnic cleansing episodes, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the whole history of European integration. We find that moving from robust standard errors to multi-way clustered errors alone reduces the t-score of the Euro impact by 75%. Looking at individual CUs, we find that in no cases does the time series evidence support a large trade effect, and that the effect breaks particularly badly once we find suitable control groups. Overall, we find that intuitive controls and omitting the CU switches coterminous with war and missing data render the trade impact of the Euro and all CUs together statistically insignificant...
#shouldread
This is perhaps the most awesome inside-baseball academic...
This is perhaps the most awesome inside-baseball academic subtweet of all time. Timothy Burke: "The academic star system of the 1980s and 1990s in the humanities created a group of people who believed they were better than everyone else and a group of people who were invested in believing the stars were better than everyone else...
...This has done lasting damage to the humanities. For one, because most of the anointed stars rested their star power on supposedly understanding and contesting the operations of power. And yet they've frequently demonstrated that they neither understand it nor contest it. For another, because most of them enacted absolutely lethally phony forms of performative anti-institutionality while being the recipients of absurd institutional license and protection, a position that's been imitated by many non-stars and harmed faculty governance.
The stars should have been our leaders in a deep sense: they should have been 1st to the barricades about the casualization of labor, 1st about thinking institutional futures, 1st about thinking the humanities in resilient and imaginative ways. They not only were not first to show up as leaders, but in many of those cases have actually accelerated or contributed to the developments that they should have opposed. The star system has been a central engine for producing contradiction, self-aggrandizement, inequality and infantile anti-institutionality in humanities academia.
Stars themselves were harmed by it: many of them started as the leaders they were meant to be. But they were not tempted by some knowing Mephistophles; they built the bars of their own gilded cage. What's happened in the letter about Avital Ronell's case is only one small kaleidoscopic glint of 15 years of that kind of cluelesslessness.
It would be nice to think that this is their problem, or be modestly disgruntled and sour-grapes feeling about the inequalities. But it's far more than that: the star system made the stars our most defining public face. And this has hurt the rest of us grevously...
#shouldread
#academia
August 18, 2018
J. Bradford DeLong's Blog
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