J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 360
May 27, 2018
How Is a Functioning Republic Possible?: What James Madison Had to Say...
James Madison: The Federalist Papers No. 9: "It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the... state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy...
...From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty.... It is not to be denied that the portraits they have sketched of republican government were too just copies of the originals.... If it had been found impracticable to have devised models of a more perfect structure, the enlightened friends to liberty would have been obliged to abandon the cause of that species of government as indefensible.
The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided. To this catalogue of circumstances that tend to the amelioration of popular systems of civil government, I shall venture, however novel it may appear to some, to add one more, on a principle which has been made the foundation of an objection to the new Constitution; I mean the ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT within which such systems are to revolve....
Montesquieu... explicitly treats of a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC as the expedient for extending the sphere of popular government, and reconciling the advantages of monarchy with those of republicanism.... "A CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC... by which several smaller STATES agree to become members of a larger ONE.... If a single member should attempt to usurp the supreme authority, he could not be supposed to have an equal authority and credit in all the confederate states. Were he to have too great influence over one, this would alarm the rest. Were he to subdue a part, that which would still remain free might oppose him with forces independent of those which he had usurped.... Should a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states the others are able to quell it.... As this government is composed of small republics, it enjoys the internal happiness of each; and with respect to its external situation, it is possessed, by means of the association, of all the advantages of large monarchies...
James Madision: The Federalist Papers No. 10: "A faction... citizens... united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community...
...As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.... The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.... So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property....
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail....
It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole. The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.... [But] either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.... A pure democracy... can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.... Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
A republic... promises the cure for which we are seeking.... The delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country.... The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views.... The public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.... As each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts.... The greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government.... Take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.... The same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic....
In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists...
Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About: Political Economy
David Glasner: Neo- and Other Liberalisms: "The point of neoliberalism 1.0��was to moderate classical laissez-faire liberal orthodoxy...
Not quite true. It is what the Left New Dealers' consensus was. They had lost power in the U.S. But enough of them made it across the Atlantic to do a lot of good: Daniel Davies: If you like the German social, political and economic model, it's worth remembering that what it really represents is the consensus of American opinion on how to build a stable non-Communist polity if you were starting from scratch, circa 1945..."
To a large extent the power of NIMBYism springs from the right-wing tax revolt of the 1980s: Issi Romem: America's New Metropolitan Landscape: Pockets of Dense Construction in a Dormant Suburban Interior: "City planners tend to favor concentrating residential development in dense hubs because they lend themselves to service by public transit, which helps reduce the impact of new residents on emissions and traffic congestion...
The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzucato. I blush to say that her book is still in THE PILE���I have not read it yet: Martin Wolf: Who creates a nation���s economic value?: "Who creates value? Who extracts value? Who destroys value?...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
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...
Peter Baehr (2001): The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Geha��use Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Geha��use that modern capitalism has created...
Live from the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton: I wonder if he got affinity program points for his stay?: Erik Schatzker: Alwaleed Reveals Secret Deal Struck to Exit Ritz After 83 Days: "So you were not harmed or mistreated in any way?
A. J. Liebling: The Earl of Louisiana: "In the summer of 1959, A. J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events...
Ernest Liu (2016): INDUSTRIAL POLICIES IN PRODUCTION NETWORKS: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors...
Noah Smith: California Affordable Housing Is No Mystery: Just Build More: "Urban California should emulate Tokyo, which ensured the supply of dwellings stayed ahead of population growth.
By Noah Smith...
Evan A. Feigenbaum: A Chinese Puzzle: Why Economic "Reform" in Xi's China Has More Meanings than Market Liberalization: "What is going on that produces such a gaping disconnect between Beijing���s story about reform and the views of so many in the markets?...
Mark Belko: As new apartments are built around Pittsburgh, older stock is feeling the pressure: "Pittsburgh is in the midst of a supply surge, with about 4,600 units being built within the last three years...
Marshall Steinbaum: A tweetstorm on the recent intellectual history of monopsony: "Oh, one last thing: in... 2010... Syverson touched on the Chicago revolution in antitrust...
Gauti Eggertsson, Jacob A. Robbins, and Ella Getz Wold: Kaldor and Piketty���s Facts: The Rise of Monopoly Power in the United States: "The macroeconomic data of the last thirty years has overturned at least two of Kaldor���s famous stylized growth facts: constant interest rates, and a constant labor share...
Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth...
Martin Wolf: Xi���s power grab means China is vulnerable to the whims of one man: "It had long been evident that... Xi Jinping... could not step down... too many enemies, particularly through his anti-corruption campaign...
Zachary Torrey: TPP 2.0: The Deal Without the US: "What���s new about the CPTPP and what do the changes mean?...
Willy Lam: China Paves Way For Xi Jinping To Extend Rule Beyond 2 Terms: "'Xi Jinping has finally achieved his ultimate goal when he first embarked on Chinese politics...
Steven K. Vogel: Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (019069985X): "Modern-day markets do not arise spontaneously or evolve naturally..
Bishnupriya Gupta: Falling Behind and Catching up: India���s Transition from a Colonial Economy: "India fell behind during colonial rule...
John Lukacs: The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler: "The principal force of the twentieth century is nationalism...
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...
Helge Berger, Giovanni Dell���Ariccia, and Maurice Obstfeld: The Euro Area Needs a Fiscal Union: "Without��more tangible elements of a fiscal union, the euro area will remain fundamentally vulnerable to shocks...
Michael Kades: Credit card competition case before U.S. Supreme Court leaves consumers and competition in the balance: "The Supreme Court next week will hear oral arguments in an antitrust case about competition and credit card merchants��� fees...
Paul Krugman: Budgets, Bad Faith and ���Balance���: "my anger is... directed at... enablers, the professional centrists, both-sides pundits, and news organizations that spent years refusing to acknowledge that the modern G.O.P. is what it so clearly is...
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...
Martin Wolf: Brexit has replaced the UK���s stiff upper lip with quivering rage: "In part, the UK is victim of its past successes...
Ezra Klein: Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and how democracies die: "Demagogues and authoritarians do not destroy democracies. It���s established political parties...
Dylan Matthews: In defense of Social Security Disability Insurance: "When Americans get too sick or injured to work, this program helps them survive...
T.S. Eliot (1944): Rejection of Animal Farm
Stan Collender: This Is The Real Reason The GOP Doesn't Want To Do A Budget This Year: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was the first high-level Republican to say��Congress might not even consider let alone adopt a budget resolution this year...
John Holbo (2010): Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership: "Jacob Levy has earnestly maintained in comments that it is unfair to judge libertarianism by the standard of Bryan Caplan���s attempts to turn the Gilded Age into a Golden Age of ladyfreedom...
John Holbo (2010): Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership: "Jacob Levy has earnestly maintained in comments that it is unfair to judge libertarianism by the standard of Bryan Caplan���s attempts to turn the Gilded Age into a Golden Age of ladyfreedom...
Janelle Jones and Ben Zipperer: Unfulfilled promises: Amazon fulfillment centers do not generate broad-based employment growth: "When Amazon opens a new fulfillment center, the host county gains roughly 30 percent more warehousing and storage jobs but no new net jobs overall...
Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles: The Regulatory Subsidy for Extreme Leverage: A Reply to Mike Konczal: "We do not argue���although Konczal suggests we do���that the problem with financial regulation is a dearth of 'economic liberty'...
Peter Hall: Ideas and Interests: "Interests are always interpreted (by ideas), i.e. they do not arise unambiguously from the material world...
Charlie Stross: Dude, you broke the future!: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion...
Simon Wren-Lewis: Does Brexit end not with a bang but a whimper?: "Most media commentary on Brexit makes a huge mistake... focuses on what the UK government may wish to do or should do...
Paul Krugman Notes on Farrell and Quiggin: "I���m not sure how many readers will realize the extent to which anti-Keynesian economic arguments, as opposed to those that Keynesians made, were invented on the fly...
Ian Perry: California is Working: The Effects of California���s Public Policy on Jobs and the Economy Since 2011: "Between 2011 and 2016, California enacted a set of 51 policy measures addressing workers��� rights, environmental issues, safety net programs, taxation, and infrastructure and housing...
Peter Whoriskey: ���I hope I can quit working in a few years���: A preview of the U.S. without pensions: "Tom Coomer, 79... used to work at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Tulsa before it closed in 1994...
Matthew Yglesias: 2018 is the year that will decide if Trumpocracy replaces American democracy: "Loyalty to Donald Trump is the new principle of Republican Party politics...
Paul Krugman: "The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites...
Ezra Klein: ���Trump country��� stories help explain our politics, not the next election: "Michael Kruse���s Politico story revisiting diehard Trump supporters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania...
Peter Leyden: California is the Future-of American Politics: "The 21st-century hit California early, and the innovative state adapted quickly...
Jeffrey Friedman: What's Wrong with Libertarianism: "Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, inadequate...
Laura J Keller, Ben Steverman, and Charles Stein: Inside Wall Street's Towers, Traders Grouse Over Trump Tax Plan: "Many are figuring out greater benefits will go to billionaires. One, sipping a Bloody Mary, vows to quit the Republican party...
Nicholas Crafts: The Postwar British Productivity Failure: "British productivity growth disappointed during the early postwar period...
Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles: The Conservative Inequality Paradox: "Conservatives have two intellectual commitments that are increasingly incompatible...
Nathan Jensen: Exit options in firm-government negotiations: An evaluation of the Texas chapter 313 program: "A unique economic development incentive program in the state of Texas that holds almost all elements of bargaining constant...
Yingyi Qian: How Reform Worked in China: The Transition from Plan to Market: "A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important...
Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles: The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality: "For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality...
Enrico Moretti: Fires Aren���t the Only Threat to the California Dream: "The fires that ravaged Northern California in October claimed lives, weakened communities and scarred one of the West���s most distinctive landscapes...
Nathan Jensen: Learning public policy from Amazon: "Second, many of these state and local incentive programs are designed to provide very weak tests for providing incentives...
Andrew B. Hall and Daniel M. Thompson: Who Punishes Extremist Nominees?: Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in U.S. Elections: "The behavioral literature in American politics suggests that voters are not informed enough, and are too partisan, to be swing voters...
Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: May 26, 2008
...GOP strategists mull McCain ���blowout���: [M]any top GOP strategists believe [McCain] can defeat Barack Obama... by a margin exceeding President Bush���s Electoral College victory in 2004.... [T]hose same GOP strategists are reticent to publicly tout the prospect of a sizable McCain victory for fear of looking foolish.... [T]he thinking is that he could win by as many 50 electoral votes.��By post-war election standards, that margin is unusually small. Yet it���s considerably larger than either Bush���s 2004 victory or his five-electoral-vote win in 2000...
I think we can stop there: a "margin [that] is unusually small" is not a "blowout." Duncan Black asks the natural question: "Is There Any Limit? I mean, is there any dictation that Politico won't take down from Republicans? Is nothing too absurd for them to pass it on?" The answer is that there is not.
David Glasner: Neo- and Other Liberalisms: "The point of ...
David Glasner: Neo- and Other Liberalisms: "The point of neoliberalism 1.0��was to moderate classical laissez-faire liberal orthodoxy...
...Neoliberalism 2.0 aimed to counter the knee-jerk interventionism of New Deal liberalism that favored highly progressive income taxation to redistribute income from rich to poor and price ceilings and controls to protect the poor from exploitation by ruthless capitalists and greedy landlords and��as an��anti-inflation policy.... Although the neoliberalism 2.0 enjoyed considerable short-term success, eventually providing the template for the 1986 Reagan tax reform, and establishing Bradley and Gephardt as major figures in the Democratic Party, neoliberalism 2.0��was never embraced by the Democratic grassroots. Gephardt himself abandoned the neo-liberal banner in 1988.... Bradley himself abandoned the approach in 2000.... The notion that 'neoliberalism' has any definite meaning is as misguided as the notion that 'liberalism' has any definite meaning. 'Neoliberalism'... serves primarily as a term of abuse for leftists... in exactly the same way that right-wingers use 'liberal' as a term of abuse...
#shouldread
May 25, 2018
Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Economic Inequality
Alex Bell et al.: Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation: "Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records...
More and more it looks as though minimum wage laws���and unions���are positive second-best interventions that raise societal wellbeing by blunting the impact of employer monopsony: Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis: The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: "States and localities are increasingly experimenting with higher minimum wages in response to rising income inequality and stagnant economic mobility...
If you did not read this over at Equitable Growth Value Added a year and a half ago when it came out, you should go read it now: Emmanuel Saez (2016): Taxing the rich more���evidence from the 2013 federal tax increase: "In 2013, a surtax on high earners was levied to help pay for the Affordable Care Act at the same time as the 2001 tax cuts for high-income earners that were signed into law by President George W. Bush expired...
Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark: "Denmark... the effects of wealth taxes... on wealth accumulation...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
Noah Smith: Why Money Managers Are Paid So Much Is a Mystery: "Mutual-fund managers are paid less for beating the market than for marketing���i.e., the ability to collect assets...
Michael Kremer (1993): The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development: "This paper proposes a production function describing processes subject to mistakes in any of several tasks...
Daniel Drezner: Saving Speaker Ryan?: "Now is normally the time when the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts would bolster a counterintuitive defense of Ryan���s speakership...
David E. Broockman et al.: The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs: "American politics overrepresents the wealthy. But what policies do the wealthy support?...
Thomas Piketty (2015): Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century: "until 1914, the French elite often justified its strong opposition to the creation of a progressive income tax by referring to the principles of the French Revolution...
Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���Gluts, booms, and crashes��� edition: "Michael Gee looks at troubling data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
Greg Leiserson: U.S. Inequality and Recent Tax Changes: "Distribution tables provide a first-order approximation to the change in welfare...
Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth...
Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���diminishing demand��� edition: "The Family and Medical Leave Act... notes former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin...
Adrien Auclert and Matthew Rognlie: Inequality and aggregate demand: "We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Inequality is not inevitable���but the US 'experiment' is a recipe for divergence: "Income inequality has increased in nearly every country around the world since 1980���but at very different speeds...
Hans and Ola Rosling: Author: Ignorance: "The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand...
Dylan Matthews: In defense of Social Security Disability Insurance: "When Americans get too sick or injured to work, this program helps them survive...
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...
Mike Males: The Truth About Teen Suicide: "Trend[s] in suicide rates among teens... track... trend among... adults...
Jeffrey Frankel: Does Trade Fuel Inequality?
Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer: The effect of minimum wages on the total number of jobs: Evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator: "Comparing the excess number of jobs just above the new minimum wage following an increase to the reduction in the number of jobs below the minimum...
Peter Whoriskey: ���I hope I can quit working in a few years���: A preview of the U.S. without pensions: "Tom Coomer, 79... used to work at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Tulsa before it closed in 1994...
Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: Minimum Wages, Monopsony and Towns: "Empirical work clearly shows plenty of examples where imposing or increasing minimum wages did not reduce employment...
May 24, 2018
Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: May 24, 2008
From Miles Kimball's Intermediate Macroeconomics
Miles Kimball: Link to Basic Resources for Intermediate Macro:
Reminders About Logarithms
The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates
The Shape of Production: Charles Cobb's and Paul Douglas's Boon to Economics
Cobb-Douglas with Constant Returns to Scale Exercise
Returns to Scale Exercise
%��Q = elasticity %��P; %�� (PQ) = %��P %��Q
Supply and Demand: Elasticities and Comparative Statics
Rule of 70 Exercise
Anyone who wants to be a B student, an A student or learn even more than that should read the book Make It Stick. I can summarize the main point this way. If you want to get knowledge into long-term memory, reading and rereading won't do the trick. Your brain only puts something into long-term memory if you prove to your brain that it is worth remembering that thing by trying to remember it. So the activity of trying to remember things is the key to learning something not just for the exam tomorrow but learning it for good.
Besides telling my students what I just said in the last paragraph, the way I use this principle in my class is by treating exams primarily as learning opportunities and only secondarily as evaluation devices. Exams cause students to try to remember things. Before each of the three exams, I ask students to do over the weekend the exam from the previous year as a practice exam���under time pressure. Then I go over that practice exam carefully in the class right before the exam. After the exam, I consider the class where I go over the answers one of the most important class periods for learning.
When I write each exam, I am thinking about what I most want students to remember down the road, since I know they will remember what ended up on the exams much more than any other specific things from the class. The answers to the exam questions represent the bulk of the key ideas and some of the key skills I want the students to take away from the class...
Peter C. Brown et al. (2014): Make It Stick: "Drawing on cognitive psychology and other fields, Make It Stick offers techniques for becoming more productive learners, and cautions against study habits and practice routines that turn out to be counterproductive. The book speaks to students, teachers, trainers, athletes, and all those interested in lifelong learning and self-improvement..."
This File: http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/miles-kimball-intermediate-macro.html
Edit This File: http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883401b8d2c935d5970c/page/6a00e551f0800388340224df3527d6200b/edit?saved_added=n
Teaching Economics: http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/contents.html
An enormous amount that I think is right here. And I bunc...
An enormous amount that I think is right here. And I bunch I think is wrong. And now I have laid down a marker that I have to write down what I think is wrong here, which I will... someday... in my copious spare time But what is right: Miles Kimball: On Teaching and Learning Macroeconomics: "Many... important ideas are missing from most macroeconomic textbooks.... Here are some... I consider so important that I teach them in class:
Increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition as a foundation for macroeconomics....
Why low capital requirements are like having thin, easy-to-topple dominoes and high capital requirements are like having fat, hard-to-topple dominoes.
How the big costs of inflation come from inflation confusing people....
The three wedges between social marginal benefit and social marginal cost of higher employment: price above marginal cost, positive marginal tax rates and labor market distortions....
How tax distortions work....
Anyone who wants to be a B student, an A student or learn even more than that should read the book Make It Stick. I can summarize the main point this way. If you want to get knowledge into long-term memory, reading and rereading won't do the trick. Your brain only puts something into long-term memory if you prove to your brain that it is worth remembering that thing by trying to remember it. So the activity of trying to remember things is the key to learning something not just for the exam tomorrow but learning it for good...
#shouldread
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