J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 357
June 2, 2018
June 2, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
DeLong Smackdown Watch (Edward Luttwak/Clark Hoyt/David Shipley/Greg Mankiw)_: It tells us���both the handling of Luttwak's and the handling of Mankiw's piece tell us���that the New York Times editors don't think that they have a responsibility to try as hard as they can to carry out their trusted-intermediary function.... I can't think of a reason to keep the organization around...
The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear of Inflation Fear, or Something Like That: Paul Krugman: "This time around there���s no wage-price spiral in sight.... And since there isn���t a wage-price spiral, we don���t need higher interest rates.... When the surge in commodity prices levels off... inflation will subside on its own..."
The Magic Asterisk: Lessons from the Master, David Stockman, on Fiscal Policy Republican Style: William Greider's ethics suck. They always have. In 1981 he allowed his people to write and his bosses to print stories on the front page of the Washington Post that he knew were false. But he writes well...
Robert Samuelson Edition): Mark Thoma on Robert Samuelson: Economist's View: "His Readers are Now Dumber for His Efforts". Matthew Yglesias makes the same catch: "Knowledge Not Required: One might think one would have to know what one was talking about to write an op-ed for The Washington Post but of course if that were the case then Robert Samuelson would be unemployed..."
Nicole Cliffe on John Carreyrou on Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes: Bad Blood: Weekend Reading
Nicole Cliffe: Theranos: Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou
What a healthy and sustainable industry...
The most amazing thing about the Theranos book is how utterly and completely nothing ever worked?
The finger stick never worked, the cartridge never worked, their famed analyzer never worked so they were using a jailbroken competitor���s machine. When they DID run a test using their own tech it was completely and utterly unreliable: You have Addison���s disease! You are pregnant, sir! You are already clearly dead from prostate cancer! The fancy advertising firm they were paying gobs of money to was like ���you...you can���t say any of these fantastical things on your marketing materials unless they���re true, you do realize that?���
The moment where a shiny new employee is excited to finally get to look under the hood of their famed analyzer (the Edison) and instead of the microfluidics process he was expecting, it was just a janky robot arm jerkily moving a pipette, like a science fair project.
Also she was sleeping with her second in command and hiding it from the board and he fired like twelve people a week and had no impulse control and wasn���t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Ad I don���t know HOW many deals she closed by saying the army was already using their units for battlefield analysis all over Afghanistan! the army had turned her down, flat!
My fav ridiculous claim? the ad firm was like ���ok you���re claiming the most accurate lab tests in the world, what���s the data there?��� & it becomes clear that since a recent study said 93% of lab errors are human error, surely their shiny Magic 8 Ball must be better bc no humans. (The ad people were like ���uhhhh has legal signed off on this claim?��� And legal saw it and was like: ���you cannot say that in print���. So instead Holmes just said it constantly in interviews and presentations bc that scammer chick wasn���t going to EVER let facts interfere w her pitch).
MADAM! This is your exact strategy to date! And you are hiding your commercial analyzer from the manufacturer so they won���t find out you���re hacking it so it doesn���t report back!:
I���m not EVEN getting into when she hires David Boies to litigate-murder all of their enemies and their enemies��� families and doctors who were like: ���why are all of your tests completely inaccurate?���
It was super interesting to learn WHY fingersticks aren���t used for huge test panels: not just that you need literally more blood than they give you, but also bc the blood gets mixed w various bits of tissue and red blood cells often wind up getting ruptured in the squishing out. Which is why all the actual blood scientists were like ���oh wow how did you solve the hemolysis issue w the fingerstick and actually run hundreds of tests?��� and they were like ���PROPRIETARY TECH��� when in fact they meant: ���we���re just doing venous draws & lying on all marketing docs���.
The wildest moment for me? Hearing myself say ���oh, good for you, Murdoch��� when despite being HEAVILY invested in Theranos and lobbied and threatened day and night by the
It was his biggest-ever non-media investment and running the piece was obviously gonna crater it but even literal monsters can have their own weird ethical code. (I think he���s taking it as a write off and is not actually losing anything but I���m not there yet and honestly seeing anyone say no to Boies is fun right now.)
ELIZABETH HOLMES was like ���do you think it would be a good idea if I suddenly revealed I was assaulted at Stanford? I feel like that would distract people from the WSJ stories.���
I CANNOT WITH YOU!
Anyway, buy the book, it���s Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, and also GIVE TYLER SCHULTZ A HUG, he���s a baby lion and helped burn down his own (and his grandfather���s) house and they went after him like GOBLINS:
oh wow, man���s hot:
Like a younger Chris Pine, I���m so stoked for the eventual movie.
18 replies 1 retweet 154 likes
Austin Clemens: If some Theranos people don't go to jail then like why is anyone in jail
bmaz: The thing is, most all of this was either known or strongly suspected by professionals in the lab business, but their questions were blizkrieged by Holmes and Theranos until Carreyrou broke through at WSJ.
Kitten T. Britches, Esq.: I work in the lab and the lab is the red headed step child of medicine. The only thing people want from us is numbers. And it���s amazing how many doctors don���t care if those numbers are accurate. Yes, you read that right.... just give me a number they say.
Jackie Luo: the anna delvey of tech companies
Arjun: I tried to explain what happened to someone and they just couldn't get past this point, and kept insisting that, surely!, something must have been successful and worked! and it's like, nope, most of it either never worked or barely worked at all
Outilmache: What worked was the tech genius sizzle. Why is it surprising a lot of wealthy people thought that was good enough? Rich people got mountains of money they need to park somewhere.... Holmes was amazing at performing as a genius billionaire. And our society loves that.
Raychelle Burks: This WW pulled an fairly transparent long con shrouded only in white privilege, black turtleneck sweaters, and Chanel No 5. I hope Laura Linney is cast in the lead.
Stefanie Bennett: Is this Bad Blood? I had zero interest in reading it but now, I clearly need to get my hands on it.
0 replie
Will Stancil: I'm 70 pages in and it's 2007 and Theranos is worth like $40m and all the top people are leaving and the board is imploding and nothing works, and it's all very scandalous and disastrous - and then I think, wait, this keeps up for ANOTHER NINE YEARS AND TEN BILLION DOLLARS?????? Honestly the lesson here is that if you want to engage in egregious tech fraud, go ahead, no one will stop you for at least four presidential administrations, you can do anything if you believe in it
ppyajunebug, phd: As a scientist and a fan of both schemes and people getting what's coming to them, I cannot WAIT to read this book
Amanda Whalen: I���m a clinical laboratory scientist and what she was trying to do boggled my damn mind. Finger stick blood is GARBAGE but yes let���s monitor potassium levels on it.
Kitten T. Britches, Esq.: I am too, you like the part about diluting the blood before you analyze it? Yeah, like that will lead to accurate results.
Billy Joel���s Fifth Wife: I���ve never read a book this fast, it was a delicious dish of a book. However I���m so confused how people were drawn to EH���s personality, everything about her seeemed off putting. Get it together George!!!...
June 1, 2018
Patrick Iber: "Before we spend all day calling for Niall ...
Patrick Iber: "Before we spend all day calling for Niall Ferguson's tenure to be revoked: I don't think he has tenure...
...He's a fellow at the Hoover Institution, located on the campus of Stanford University, but not a professor at Stanford as far as I can tell. When I was an anti-war activist and Stanford undergrad (precisely the kind of person Ferguson is now targeting), one of our campaigns was to clarify Hoover's relationship to Stanford, because it doesn't meet or need to meet academic standards. No luck there because the administration wanted the donations and the retention power than Hoover can provide for conservative faculty. But notice that Ferguson is listed as a fellow at the 'Hoover Institution, Stanford University'. That comma is doing a lot of work. It's deliberate obfuscation.
Meanwhile, look at the History Department website: Ferguson is not there: https://history.stanford.edu/people/faculty. So if you want to make someone uncomfortable, I think the right move is to ask Stanford why it's acceptable for one of the world's leading universities to allow a conservative think tank to trade off its name while its fellows attack enrolled students. Tenure is not at stake here.
Here's my email to Stanford's president:
Paul Krugman: "An ugly story from Stanford. But I think B...
Paul Krugman: "An ugly story from Stanford. But I think Brad gets only a small piece of the issue when he talks about Stanford's intellectual quality control problem...
...This is also part of a much bigger issue: the sorry state���ethical as well as cognitive���f conservative intellectuals in the 21st century. Remember, these are the people liberal intellectuals are supposed to listen to and learn from. I've written about this before: media organizations and others are under constant pressure to give voice to "serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence"; except those unicorns no longer exist. And it's not just the absence of any new ideas for three or four decades; it's not just the inability to admit mistakes when predictions (like predictions of soaring inflation and interest rates from efforts to rescue the economy) end up being completely wrong. There's also just a combination of mean-spiritedness and unwillingness to abide by even the most basic rules of decent behavior separating having political views from being a pure apparatchik.
Ferguson is as good as the modern intellectual right gets���he's done actual work as a historian, has received plenty of intellectual gongs, could do fine by playing by the rules���in fact would and does benefit from political affirmative action on behalf of conservatives. And here he is conspiring to mess up the lives of students whose political ideas he doesn't like. And unfortunately, from what I've seen he's not actually worse than a number of his right-wing peers....
Cory Heitman @HitmanHeitzie: Lmao at the weird Bond villain type language Niall Ferguson uses. This is a writer I have enjoyed on occasion but his world view is exposed as cartoonish here...
#shouldread
Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Globalization
Ken Schultz: "I���m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren���t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."
Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Stupid Trade War: "Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...
Some very interesting thoughts from Ken Rogoff. But he does not seem to recognize that Shenzhen is now at least as much a global hub of hardware and manufacturing process innovation in small-scale high-tech devices as anywhere else in the world. World class communities of engineering practice are hard to build. But China looks to be building one. I would dearly love somebody to take a deep close look at Shenzhen and tell me to what extent it is already more than just "the great assembler": Ken Rogoff: Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony?: "Over the next 100 years, who takes over, Chinese workers or the robots?...
If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters���and national security matters���come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...
National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-w... "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...
"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you���d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...
Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump���s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...
@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes et al.: Mortality from Nestl��'s Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countries: "Intensive and controversial marketing of infant formula is believed to be responsible for millions of infant deaths in low and middle-income countries (LMICs)...
Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn���t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we���ve seen in stock prices...
Martin Wolf: The Chinese economy is rebalancing, at last: "Consumption is at last becoming the most important driver of demand in the Chinese economy...
Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a ���strategic competitor��� suggests, is it to halt China���s technological progress altogether���an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...
Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...
Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, Akira Sasahara, and Yuan Xu: Reconsidering the ���China shock��� in trade: "While previous studies focus on the job-reducing effect of the surging imports from China or other low-wage countries on US employment...
Highlighted: Globalization: What Did Paul Krugman Miss?
Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...
Lant Pritchett: Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth
Wakanda and the Resource Curse: "Wakanda���s prosperity is based on its possession of vibranium, a stable transuranic elements with unique and extraordinary chemical properties..."
J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, Tim L. Squires, and David N. Weil: The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers...
Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump���s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...
Ernest Liu (2016): INDUSTRIAL POLICIES IN PRODUCTION NETWORKS: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors...
Dani Rodrik: Trump���s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race "Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost...
Simon Wren-Lewis: Labour's embrace of a customs union could end the Brexit fantasy: "The UK was always going to stay in a customs union with the EU the moment that the EU put the Irish border as one of the three items to be settled at the first stage..
Zachary Torrey: TPP 2.0: The Deal Without the US: "What���s new about the CPTPP and what do the changes mean?...
Bishnupriya Gupta: Falling Behind and Catching up: India���s Transition from a Colonial Economy: "India fell behind during colonial rule...
Dani Rodrik: What Does a True Populism Look Like? It Looks Like the New Deal: "When populism succeeds, it does so not by cosmetic gimmicks but by going after the roots of economic injustice directly...
Daniel Thomas: London life proves hard to give up for Brexit relocations: "Brexit.... Some of the most important conversations were... but in the kitchens and living rooms of those learning their fates in the first wave of company relocations...
Doug Campbell: : "This study uses new measures of real exchange rates to study the collapse of US manufacturing employment in the early 2000s in historical and international perspective...
Martin Wolf: Brexit has replaced the UK���s stiff upper lip with quivering rage: "In part, the UK is victim of its past successes...
Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin: Exchange Rate Disconnect in General Eqilibrium: "We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model of exchange rate determination...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Jeffrey Frankel: Does Trade Fuel Inequality?
David Watkins, I think, nails it: a lot of right-wingers ...
David Watkins, I think, nails it: a lot of right-wingers project either what they are doing or what they wish they could do onto the left. They do not understand that we are, in fact, different from them: David Watkins: "Today in: 'every accusation a confession'... Scott Lemieux: "Did Niall 'try to ratfuck students with the temerity to disagree with me' Ferguson churn out a rote 'campus PC is the biggest threat to free speech in America' column? I think you know the answer!... https://t.co/mP1OFXkm1G
America���s Founders vs. Trump: Now Live at Project Syndicate
Project Syndicate: America���s Founders vs. Trump: In the early years of the American republic, James Madison warned his fellow countrymen that their chosen system of governance would only survive if they adhered to the principles of representation and kept factionalism in check. In the era of Donald Trump, it would seem that these two conditions are no longer being met...
June 1, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
J. Bradford DeLong (1982): The Classical Economists Perceive the Industrial Revolution
On the Excellence of McClatchy: Paul Krugman says that the McClatchy team is much too bashful in drawing the implications that should follow from the fact that every other ainstreamWashington journalist (save Walter Pincus alone) took a dive on Iraq...
Ken Schultz: "I���m not an IPE expert, but it seems like ...
Ken Schultz: "I���m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren���t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."
#shouldread
Yes, Stanford Has a Serious Intellectual Quality Problem Here: Why Do You Ask?
Yes, Stanford has a very serious quality control problem with its Hoover Institution: Brian Contreras, Ada Statler, and Courtney Douglas: Leaked emails show Hoover academic conspiring with College Republicans to conduct ���opposition research��� on student: "Emails between the Hoover Institution���s Niall Ferguson and well-known Republican student activists John Rice-Cameron ���20 and Max Minshull ���20 reveal coordination on 'opposition research' against progressive activist Michael Ocon ���20...
...Ferguson resigned from his leadership role in the Cardinal Conversations program on April 16, after Provost Persis Drell became aware of the email chain. ���I very much regret the publication of these emails. I also regret having written them,��� Ferguson wrote in a statement to The Daily. Drell said that Ferguson ���offered to resign,��� and that she accepted the resignation. ���The emails... were contrary to the spirit and intent of Cardinal Conversations,��� Drell said....
The emails use harsh and at times war-like language to describe liberals and ���social justice warriors��� (SJWs). ���Slowly, we will continue to crush the Left���s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure,��� Rice-Cameron wrote. ���[The original Cardinal Conversations steering committee] should all be allies against O. Whatever your past differences, bury them. Unite against the SJWs. [Christos] Makridis [a fellow at Vox Clara, a Christian student publication] is especially good and will intimidate them,��� Ferguson wrote. ���Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,��� Ferguson wrote.
The previous messages were interspersed with greater discussion of the Cardinal Conversations committee and planning process, as well as a discussion appearing to be about student government. In the email chain, Ferguson wrote, ���Some opposition research on Mr. O might also be worthwhile,��� referring to Ocon. Minshull wrote in response that he would ���get on the opposition research for Mr. O.���...
When I look at the CC speaker invite list, I see: Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Francis Fukuyama, Charles Murray, Anne Applebaum, Ted Koppel, Jessica Lessin, Christina Sommers, Andrew Sullivan, Danielle Brown, Claude M. Steele and John Etchemendy. Assume that a university should get the best speakers it can who are intelligent, well-informed, have interesting things to say, and are committed to engagement and raising the level of the debate rather than propaganda and driving their audience like cattle to a pre-chosen conclusion. Brown I do not know at all. Fukuyama, Applebaum, Lessin, Steele, and Etchemendy clear all three bars and would belong on the Cardinal Conversations podium. The rest do not���although you could argue for Hoffman and Thiel as development cases.
#academicfreedom
#publicsphere
#shouldread
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