J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 378

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma���s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...

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...

Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...

Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A��quintet of��notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...

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)...

Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Running Into Irrational Humans: "To many young people, the idea of efficient financial markets���the idea that...

Mary Daly: Raising the Speed Limit on Future Growth: "Why aren���t American workers working?

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

*Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/98... 'Too far'?" It���s the genteel form of white ethnicism...

Martin Wolf: The Chinese economy is rebalancing, at last: "Consumption is at last becoming the most important driver of demand in the Chinese economy...

MOAR Should-Reads:

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg���s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn���t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook���s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte...

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren���t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook���s... core advertising business.

Joe Pompeo: ���Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces���: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times���s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...

Noah Smith: "Everyone in the econ world (or the politics world, really) should read this thread about Kevin Hassett: "@dynarski 'Is now a good time to talk about how Kevin Hassett stole the intellectual property of an untenured Harvard professor & her grad student?'...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America���s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...

Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...

Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...

Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."

Some Fairly-Recent Links:

Gravatar: Globally Recognized Avatars
Jo Marie Scaglia: Caffetteria
raindrop drop top
Martha Stewart: Peel-and-Eat Shrimp
Augie's Montreal Deli: "Served on Metropolis Bakery Deli Rye Bread, with Uncle���s Famous Pickles, and choice of yellow or spicy brown mustard..."
Katie McDonough: Jezebel Regrets Its Decision to Hire Cannibal Witch as Writer-at-Large: "..."
Steve M.: THERE'S NO REASON TO LISTEN TO CONSERVATIVE THINKERS, BUT EDITORS WANT THEM MORE THAN EVER: "The mainstream media has spent so many years insisting that... the extremism of talk radio and Fox, Gingrichian bomb-throwing, the Bush push for the Iraq War, torture, disastrously hands-off financial regulation, and disenfranchisement of non-whites, and then Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the norm-shattering GOP Congress of the Obama years... was fine. Surely it'll be fine again..."
TidBITS: Everything You Need to Know about the TidBITS 2018 Infrastructure
Marion Laboure et al.: The Rise of Silicon China: "Key features of Chinese history and culture have put it in a position to become the global leader in artificial-intelligence technologies, surpassing even the tech giants of Silicon Valley..."
Sara Benincasa: Better Headlines For A WaPo WASP
A Waspy Chick: How Come Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me?
Emma Adler: The Man Without a Brain
Michael Wolff: : "Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion..."
Ian Millhiser: The Supreme Court was itching to strike down a partisan gerrymander today, but has no idea how: "There are almost certainly five votes to strike down Maryland's gerrymander, but there's no clarity about how the Court will do it..."
Orsetta Causa and Mikkel Hermansen: Income redistribution through taxes and transfers: "Taxes and transfers are less effective at reducing inequality today than they were in the mid-1990s. This drop in effectiveness has largely been driven by declining cash transfers, with a smaller, more heterogeneous role for personal income taxes..."
Joseph MacKay and Christopher David LaRoche: Why Is There No Reactionary International Theory?: "A field that ignores reaction as such may be blind to reactionary political practice. This blindness in turn weakens the responses scholars can offer..."
Sushi Japanese Restaurant Kui Shin Bo
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Okonomiyaki (Japanese Cabbage Pancake) Recipe: "The shredded or chopped cabbage in the base is a given, but beyond that, you can add whatever you'd like to the batter. Once you've got a few Japanese staples in your pantry (all of which have a shelf life of forever), making it at home is cheap, quick, easy, and filling..."
Gideon Rachman: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the Lure of the Strongman
Robert Shiller (2017): Narrative Economics: "The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions...

Older Should-Read:

Dan Drezner (2014): What Nick Kristof Doesn't Get About the Ivory Tower: "Three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs���academics, Beltway types and money folks...

Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark: "Denmark... the effects of wealth taxes... on wealth accumulation...

Brent Simmons: Blogging System Rewrite: "I realized that I want my blog to be me on the web. This used to be true, but then along came Twitter, and then my presence got split up between two places...

Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Running Into Irrational Humans: "To many young people, the idea of efficient financial markets���the idea that...

Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...

Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/98... 'Too far'?" It���s the genteel form of white ethnicism...

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg���s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn���t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook���s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte...

Susan Dynarski retweeted: The Harvard Crimson: "The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has filed a formal Title IX complaint against Government Professor Jorge I. Dominguez, according to correspondence obtained by The Crimson...

Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain���s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...

Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A��quintet of��notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...

Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren���t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook���s... core advertising business.

Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...

Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.

Mary Daly: Raising the Speed Limit on Future Growth: "Why aren���t American workers working?

Larry Summers: No, ���Obamasclerosis��� wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal���s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama���s policies... materially slowed economic growth...

Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma���s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Leadership and Membership Announcements: "Tamara Lundgren, president and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc., Portland, OR, has been elected as a class B director...

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)...

Ben Thompson: The End of Windows: "The story of Windows��� decline is relatively straightforward...

Joe Pompeo: ���Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces���: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times���s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Leadership and Membership Announcements: "Tamara Lundgren, president and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc., Portland, OR, has been elected as a class B director...

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...

William Beveridge (1942): Beveridge Report: Social Insurance and Allied Services

Martin Wolf: The Chinese economy is rebalancing, at last: "Consumption is at last becoming the most important driver of demand in the Chinese economy...

Janet Yellen: Statement on the Appointment of John Williams as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: "I strongly support the appointment of John Williams as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York...<

Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...

Charles F. Manski (2011): Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy: "Suppose that nearsightedness derives entirely from the presence of a particular allele of a specific gene...

A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...

David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...

Craig Palsson: Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Incomplete Property Rights and Structural Change in Haiti

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...

Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...

Emily Eisner: Women in Economics at Berkeley: "However in order to turn bold ideas into a reality, the AEA needs to establish institutions and systems that will incentivize the behavior they endorse...

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...

Paul Krugman: Immaculate Inflation Strikes Again: "Oh, dear. We���ve been here before.... Economics is about what people... do...

Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America���s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...

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...

Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...

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...

Nicholas Gruen: The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0: "Simon Heffer���s High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building... ours... liberal democratic world...

Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and Wages Redux: "After Republicans rammed through their big tax cut, there were a rash of stories about corporations using the tax break to give their workers bonuses...

Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm R��pke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that R��pke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...

Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...

A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Can Be Conceived: I give up. Steve Mnuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary that can be conceived���an ontological singularity of sorts a la Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Phenomenally underbriefed and uncurious: Manu Raju: "Told line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional, Mnuchin says: 'Congress can pass a rule that allows them to do it'...

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...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

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...

Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...

Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn���t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it���s an Uber car doesn���t surprise me. They���re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..

Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...

Tolga Aksoy and Paolo Manasse: The hysteresis-resilience trade-off in unemployment: "We focus on... resilience: the impact of output shocks on the unemployment gap (the lower the impact, the higher resilience)...

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...

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...

Ed Luce: Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump: "Whether you are a Muslim, Hispanic, African-American or a globalist, America���s president has made it safe to disparage you...

Martin Wolf: Economics failed us before the global crisis: "Macroeconomics... invented by John Maynard Keynes.... The tests... are whether its adepts understand what might go wrong in the economy and how to put it right...

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...

Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...

Benjamin D. Sommers, Atul A. Gawande, and Katherine Baicker: Health Insurance Coverage and Health���What the Recent Evidence Tells Us: "An analysis of mortality changes after Medicaid expansion suggests that expanding Medicaid saves lives at a societal cost of $327,000 to $867,000 per life saved...

Lant Pritchett: Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth

Caffeine: Better Living Through Chemistry: Nov 1-Jan 14, 2018: no caffeinated coffee drinks... What drink���and how many���should I switch to on April 15?

Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ���we hold all the cards��� compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...

John Scalzi: No, In Fact, You Should Not Write For Free: "I can see where Douglas has gone wrong... some of it boils down to a matter of definition of what constitutes 'free' writing...

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?

Lawrence Summers: ���A strong, fully employed economy���where firms looking for workers is a larger issue than workers looking for firms...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Marcy Wheeler: "'What did the president do, and what the fuck was he thinking when he did it?' are questions not about the cover-up, but about the substantive crime. And that's the question Mueller's Watergate prosecutor has now posed to the president's lawyers..."

David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...

Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump���s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as ���psychographs���...

Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies: "Until now, the most visible neo-goldbug in the administration has been David Malpass... the former chief economist of Bear Stearns...

Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I���m not sure I���ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."

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...

Dan Shaviro: Another new publication!: "'Evaluating the New U.S. Pass-Through Rules'...

Noah Smith: How Universities Make Cities Great: "Abel and Deitz find that university research expenditures have a strong effect on the number of educated people in a region���over four times as strong as the effect of degree production...

Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution: "The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective...

Lane Kenworthy: Soci 109: Analysis of Sociological Data (2015): "This course introduces you to techniques and software for analyzing quantitative social science data...

Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...

Charles Plosser (2008): Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on March 18, 2008

Jason Del Rey: Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase: "Amazon... plans to work with Warren Buffett���s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to create a new health care company...

Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier: : "Gender languages assign many���sometimes all���nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine...

Brad DeLong (2012): Ahem! Niall Ferguson Fire-His-Ass-from-NewsBeast-Now Department: Niall Ferguson writes

Henry Farrell: We���re all going to need safe spaces: "What Putin���s Russia and Xi���s China have discovered is that the best antidote to more speech is bad speech...

Jonathan Chait: Nancy Pelosi Is Good at Her Job and She Should Keep It.: "There is zero sign Pelosi���s age has impeded her work...

Matt Townsend et al.: America���s ���Retail Apocalypse��� Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn���t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...

FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."

Ted Ruger (Dean): Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Dear members of the Penn Law community...

Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...

Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump���s new economic adviser...

Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...

Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn���t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...

Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...

Dylan Matthews: Larry Summers on the Midwest and South: the case for a government bailout of the heartland: "In 2016, only 5 percent of men ages 25 to 54 in Alexandria, Virginia (a rich DC suburb), were not working...

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...

Bill McBride: Larry Kudlow is usually wrong... "...and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote...

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...

Chris Ladd: The article removed from Forbes, ���Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel���: "Modern, white evangelicalism emerged from the interplay between race and religion in the slave states...

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

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...

Drew Conway (2013): The Data Science Venn Diagram: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...

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...

Dahlia K. Remler et al.: Estimating The Effects Of Health Insurance And Other Social Programs On Poverty Under The Affordable Care Act: "The effects of health insurance on poverty have been difficult to ascertain...

Robert Shackleton: Estimating and Projecting Potential Output Using CBO���s Forecasting Growth Model: "CBO��regularly produces estimates and projections of potential output...

Dan Davies: "As I always said, if you think it's annoying listening to me, try being me...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

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?...

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...

Anatole Kaletsky: The Market Dogs That Didn���t Bark: "The bond market���s complacency about US interest rates and inflation may be surprising... [may] turn out to be an expensive mistake... but it is a fact...

Links:

Time for a Linkdump!

It has been much, much, much too long since I did one of these...

A half dozen cream of the crop

Paul Krugman: "I've always said that white nationalism was the essence of Trumpism. According to this survey, it's more specific: white Christian nationalism. To which the only possible response is, oy vey..."

Kevin Drum: It's A Total Mystery Why There's A Lack of Class And Racial Diversity In Journalism: "All you need is one little sifting device-like unpaid internships requiring that people are funded by the Bank of Parental Units-and the entire pool of potential applicants is skewed.... This is just an obvious one that publications actually have control over..."

(2011): : The Government Needs to Lend to Banks Freely But at a Penalty Rate Blogging

David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson: The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States: "Rising Chinese import competition... cause[s] higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages... explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment..."

MIT Tech Review: Tencent is putting a robot research lab in China���s manufacturing heartland: "Tencent, the tech titan behind China's biggest social networking and chat platform, WeChat, is about to bring its AI research to life by opening a robotics lab in China's center of manufacturing, Shenzhen..."

Matthew Yglesias: Republicans are reaping the whirlwind: "They���ve synthesized the worst of Trump and the worst of the GOP establishment..."

All of them:

Chris Hayes: "My theory about Trump���s approval rating is that about 20% of his voters are Republicans who don���t really like the guy, and wax and wane in their approval, but will all vote for him when the time comes. When he���s had a relatively clear run of not having anyone around him indicted, or not praising white supremacists, those voters drift back towards him..."
Dimiter Kenarov: D"The French-Bulgarian literary critic and semiotician Julia Kristeva has just been revealed as a former collaborator of the Bulgarian State Security, First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence)..."
Tim Bartik: Typical state business incentive policies need reforms to rein in costs and maximize benefits: "The typical incentive package has only modest benefits for local jobs and incomes. Carefully targeted incentives can provide much larger local benefits, but those that draw money from public services such as education can significantly harm local economies..."
Simon Wren-Lewis: Jeremy Corbyn cannot end Brexit: "The only people who can stop Brexit happening will be the handful of Conservative MPs that have in the past voted against May���s wishes. They need to support moves that initiate the circumstances that lead to a popular vote on the final deal..."
Paul Krugman: "I've always said that white nationalism was the essence of Trumpism. According to this survey, it's more specific: white Christian nationalism. To which the only possible response is, oy vey..."
Mark Boleat: Brexit and the financial services industry: The story so far
Alexandra Borchardt: Free Speech in the Filtered Age: "while the German approach isn���t perfect, it is an important first step in tackling a corrosive social problem..."
Kevin Drum: It's A Total Mystery Why There's A Lack of Class And Racial Diversity In Journalism: "All you need is one little sifting device-like unpaid internships requiring that people are funded by the Bank of Parental Units-and the entire pool of potential applicants is skewed.... This is just an obvious one that publications actually have control over..."
Adam Ozimek: Does It Matter That The Fed Has Been Wrong For Years?: "Over the last few years, the Fed (and to be fair, many other economists and pundits) have drastically and consistently underestimated how far we are from full-employment..."
Noah Smith: Stronger Labor Unions Could Do a Lot of Good: "Nothing else has been able to stop the decline in workers' bargaining power..."
Paula Mejia: Why Does Some Food Taste Better as Leftovers?: "soups and stews that had milk or cream experienced a breakdown of lactose into glucose, which tasted sweeter with time. Meanwhile, proteins in the meat converted into individual amino acids that acted as ���flavor enhancers,��� and the starches present in both flour and potatoes broke down into compounds that people reported as more flavorful. Another key to great leftovers may lie in aromatic flavors, such as garlic and ginger, which develop more fully over time..."
David Leonhardt (2011): The Gridlock Where Debts Meet Politics
Zachary Goldfarb (2011): Wall Street���s resurgent prosperity frustrates its claims, and Obama���s
Felix Salmon (2011): Bailouts: Geithner vs Barofsky: "Barofsky is easy to understand, while Geithner is being cryptic and opaque. That might be because Leonhardt didn���t give him enough space to explain himself more fully, or it might be because Geithner simply isn���t a great communicator..."
(2011): : The Government Needs to Lend to Banks Freely But at a Penalty Rate Blogging
David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson: The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States: "Rising Chinese import competition... cause[s] higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages... explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment..."
(2016): Comment at the URPE-AEA Session: Causes of the Great Recession and the Prospects for Recovery: "in Geithner���s view, the bankers and the corporate executives have us all by the plums. All we can do is try to make them as happy and confident as possible. If we do not, then we face what earlier generations of URPE���s ancestors would have called a capital strike..."
James Ferguson: Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt: Ulf Hannerz: "James Ferguson has once more made an important contribution to the reconstruction of anthropology. His own vivid ethnography of urban lives in the late twentieth century offers new understandings of culture and cosmopolitanism, while his sense of the wider picture helps us see Africa..."
Neil Parsons (1998): King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain: "In 1895 three African chiefs, dressed in the finest British clothing available, began a tour of the British Isles. That tour foiled Cecil Rhodes' grand plan for Africa and culminated in the Chamberlain Settlement, the document that indirectly led to the independence of present-day Botswana..."
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...
Chris Hayes: "My theory about Trump���s approval rating is that about 20% of his voters are Republicans who don���t really like the guy, and wax and wane in their approval, but will all vote for him when the time comes. When he���s had a relatively clear run of not having anyone around him indicted, or not praising white supremacists, those voters drift back towards him..."
Dimiter Kenarov: D"The French-Bulgarian literary critic and semiotician Julia Kristeva has just been revealed as a former collaborator of the Bulgarian State Security, First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence)..."
Tim Bartik: Typical state business incentive policies need reforms to rein in costs and maximize benefits: "The typical incentive package has only modest benefits for local jobs and incomes. Carefully targeted incentives can provide much larger local benefits, but those that draw money from public services such as education can significantly harm local economies..."
Simon Wren-Lewis: Jeremy Corbyn cannot end Brexit: "The only people who can stop Brexit happening will be the handful of Conservative MPs that have in the past voted against May���s wishes. They need to support moves that initiate the circumstances that lead to a popular vote on the final deal..."
Paul Krugman: "I've always said that white nationalism was the essence of Trumpism. According to this survey, it's more specific: white Christian nationalism. To which the only possible response is, oy vey..."
Mark Boleat: Brexit and the financial services industry: The story so far
Alexandra Borchardt: Free Speech in the Filtered Age: "while the German approach isn���t perfect, it is an important first step in tackling a corrosive social problem..."
Kevin Drum: It's A Total Mystery Why There's A Lack of Class And Racial Diversity In Journalism: "All you need is one little sifting device-like unpaid internships requiring that people are funded by the Bank of Parental Units-and the entire pool of potential applicants is skewed.... This is just an obvious one that publications actually have control over..."
Adam Ozimek: Does It Matter That The Fed Has Been Wrong For Years?: "Over the last few years, the Fed (and to be fair, many other economists and pundits) have drastically and consistently underestimated how far we are from full-employment..."
Noah Smith: Stronger Labor Unions Could Do a Lot of Good: "Nothing else has been able to stop the decline in workers' bargaining power..."
Paula Mejia: Why Does Some Food Taste Better as Leftovers?: "soups and stews that had milk or cream experienced a breakdown of lactose into glucose, which tasted sweeter with time. Meanwhile, proteins in the meat converted into individual amino acids that acted as ���flavor enhancers,��� and the starches present in both flour and potatoes broke down into compounds that people reported as more flavorful. Another key to great leftovers may lie in aromatic flavors, such as garlic and ginger, which develop more fully over time..."
David Leonhardt (2011): The Gridlock Where Debts Meet Politics
Zachary Goldfarb (2011): Wall Street���s resurgent prosperity frustrates its claims, and Obama���s
Felix Salmon (2011): Bailouts: Geithner vs Barofsky: "Barofsky is easy to understand, while Geithner is being cryptic and opaque. That might be because Leonhardt didn���t give him enough space to explain himself more fully, or it might be because Geithner simply isn���t a great communicator..."
(2011): : The Government Needs to Lend to Banks Freely But at a Penalty Rate Blogging
David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson: The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States: "Rising Chinese import competition... cause[s] higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages... explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment..."
(2016): Comment at the URPE-AEA Session: Causes of the Great Recession and the Prospects for Recovery: "in Geithner���s view, the bankers and the corporate executives have us all by the plums. All we can do is try to make them as happy and confident as possible. If we do not, then we face what earlier generations of URPE���s ancestors would have called a capital strike..."
James Ferguson: Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt: Ulf Hannerz: "James Ferguson has once more made an important contribution to the reconstruction of anthropology. His own vivid ethnography of urban lives in the late twentieth century offers new understandings of culture and cosmopolitanism, while his sense of the wider picture helps us see Africa..."
Neil Parsons (1998): King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain: "In 1895 three African chiefs, dressed in the finest British clothing available, began a tour of the British Isles. That tour foiled Cecil Rhodes' grand plan for Africa and culminated in the Chamberlain Settlement, the document that indirectly led to the independence of present-day Botswana..."
James Ferguson: Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order: "'Africa' is spoken of in terms of crisis: as a place of failure and seemingly insurmountable problems, as a moral challenge to the international community.... What should be the response of those scholars who have sought to understand not the 'Africa' portrayed in broad strokes in journalistic accounts and policy papers but rather specific places and social realities within Africa?..."
Emilia Simeonova _et al.: ongestion Pricing, Air Pollution and Children���s Health: "Congestion tax... Stockholm... reduced ambient air pollution by 5 to 15 percen... a significant decrease in the rate of acute asthma attacks among young children...."
Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein: Facebook Struggles to Respond to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal: "To Facebook, before the stories went live, the scandal appeared bad but manageable. The worst deeds had been done outside of Facebook and long ago..."
Wikipedia: Walter Mondale
Charles Gaba: Trump tried sabotaging market by cutting off CSR, but didn���t understand how CSR connects to tax credits. Carriers/regulators/exchanges did, &came up w/a clever workaround which not only cancelled out most of the sabotage but REVERSED it..."
Lili Loofbourow: The Male Glance: "This is not an essay about beauty, it���s an essay about story, but we perpetuate a critical (rather than cosmetic) version of the double standard Sontag describes here when we encounter female-driven texts..."
Richard G. Frank, Keith Humphreys, and Harold A. Pollack: Does Naloxone Availability Increase Opioid Abuse? The Case For Skepticism: "We are concerned that the results obtained reflect a combination of measurement limitations in the key variables, serious potential biases from confounding factors, and a failure to capture what has been driving naloxone use..."
MIT Tech Review: Tencent is putting a robot research lab in China���s manufacturing heartland: "Tencent, the tech titan behind China's biggest social networking and chat platform, WeChat, is about to bring its AI research to life by opening a robotics lab in China's center of manufacturing, Shenzhen..."
Laura Kusisto: The Next Housing Crisis: A Historic Shortage of New Homes: "Fewer new houses are being built in America than at almost any time before; ���It���s a good time to be here in Grand Rapids, if you can get a house..."
Shawn Donnan: Why Trump tariff debacle has only just begun: "Ted Alden of the US Council on Foreign Relations��argues��that by doing so Mr Trump has effectively killed the WTO by setting up a lose-lose scenario for judges..."
Kevin Drum: still plenty of great blogs around: "ACA Signups (Charles Gaba) Alicublog (Roy Edroso) Andrew Gelman Atrios Balloon Juice (John Cole and gang)...
Federal Reserve: Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on March 18, 2008
Susan Athey: The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics: "New types of questions... 'prediction policy problems,��� as well as considerations of fairness and manipulability... the emerging econometric literature combining machine learning and causal inference..."
Erik Loomis: Breaking! Sexist and Racist Asshole Shown to Be Sexist and Racist Asshole: "Ferguson is claiming to apologize while practically begging people to boycott his next all-white, all-male conference so he can be crucified on the cross of political correctness and get some more wingnut welfare!... 'There are many talented female historians.... I reproach myself.... If any good has come of all this negative publicity, perhaps I shall now get to know them. Or perhaps the result will instead be a boycott of future events I organize. We shall see'..."
Jupyter: NBviewer
Tim O'Reilly (2016): What will AI make possible that's impossible today?: "If we let machines put us out of work, it will be because of a failure of imagination and a lack of will to make a better future..."
O'Reilly: Jupyter
The Angry Staff Officer: The Iraq War, 15 Years On: "While I���m still unsure about whether the invasion was the right thing to do at the time, I am damn sure that we should not attempt something like it again. To live in the post-Iraq war world is to live in a world where the surge to make war should never overtake all available options if facing a non-existential threat..."
Noah Smith (2016): The Connection Between Work and Dignity: "Policy makers and economists promoted market efficiency at the expense of jobs that provide a sense of self-worth..."
Plutarch: Lives
Erich S. Gruen (1974): The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
Lily Ross Taylor (1949): Party Politics in the Age of Caesar
**Friedrich von Hayek: Prices and Production
Matthew Klein: The euro area���s fiscal position makes no sense: "Germany���s needless austerity is regrettable, but the bigger problem is that the governments in the rest of the euro area are either unwilling or unable to borrow more..."
Francis Bator (1958): The Anatomy of Market Failure
Gorem Gorenberg: The Strange Sympathy of the Far Left for Putin: "Jill Stein and Jeremy Corbyn have been among the apologists for Russia's crimes in Syria���alongside Donald Trump..."
Wikipedia: Suffolk Bank
Robert J. Bunker: Research Guide: Plutocratic Insurgency-The Gilded Age Redux
Matthew Yglesias: Republicans are reaping the whirlwind: "They���ve synthesized the worst of Trump and the worst of the GOP establishment..."
The war on NIMBYism continues: David Roberts: A sweeping new bill targets California���s housing crisis: "SB 827... would require that all areas within a half-mile of a high-frequency transit stop, or within a quarter-mile of a bus or transit corridor allow heights of at least 45 or 85 feet..."
Jared Bernstein: The Importance of Strong Labor Demand: "By conventional measures, the U.S. job market has suffered some degree of slack (i.e. insufficient demand for labor) for about 70 percent of the time since 1980. The absence of persistent, strong labor market demand has a significant negative impact on wages and incomes... fall[ing] disproportionately on the least advantaged..."
Trump's Tariffs on Steel, Aluminum Will Do More Harm Than Good: "The harm from shielding steel and aluminum makers from exports will outweigh any benefits..."
Stephen Mihm: Steel History Shows How America Lost Ground to Europe: "Spoiler alert: Unfair trade practices of foreign nations had nothing to do with it..."
Belle Waring: Young Man Has Crisis While Europe Stumbles Into War: "I read Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, and it is really the best thing ever. You should all read it, and unlike all the other books I���m thinking of, it���s not eleventy billion pages long..."
Sophia Besch: The End of Little Germany?: "Germany has long enjoyed the luxury of pretending to be something it is not: a small country. Now that a new government has finally been formed, Germany must start thinking of itself as the major economic player it is, and behave accordingly���preferably before new ministers settle into old routines..."
Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race
Brian Faler: 'This is not normal': Glitches mar new tax law: "Rep. Richard Neal.... 'We���re not going to willy nilly into this with, all of a sudden, a technical corrections bill that has not been sufficiently aired', he said. 'There needs to be an acknowledgment that this was done in haste and that there were many mistakes'..."
Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones: Working harder or finding it harder to work?: "Demographic trends in annual work hours show an increasingly fractured workforce..."
Greg Leiserson: Presentation: U.S. Inequality and Recent Tax Changes: "the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will likely increase disparities in economic well-being, after-tax income, and pre-tax income..."
Ann Marie Marciarille: The Smoking Gun That Is a Swiss Flag: "Collusion... between Michigan's Allegiance Health and Hillsdale Community Health Center... to derail acute care facility competition in treating cancer, heart,and orthopedic patients.... Svvy colluding parties signaled their territorial allocation by the exchange of a Swiss flag. As the Swiss flag traditionally stands for freedom, honor, and fidelity, I'm thinking they may have gotten their signals crossed..."
Hugh Son and Jennifer Surane: Dimon Says He'll Fight for Tax Breaks Amazon Gets for HQ2: "He���ll call the governor of whichever state Amazon.com Inc. picks for its second headquarters and try to get the same benefits. 'I���m not kidding', Dimon said. 'You gotta fight for your company, folks, just keep that in mind. If you don���t, no one else does'..."
Rana Foroohar: Three questions for Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell: "The Senate should ask about wage compression, power concentration and share buybacks..."

Should-Read: From four years ago. Interesting that in Dan...

Should-Read: From four years ago. Interesting that in Dan's view Beltway types have neither the speed of analysis of the money people nor the depth of knowledge of the academics, and in fact have no strengths at all���unless you want to claim that its major additional weakness, groupthink, is also a strength. The major weaknesses of the other two are nicely phrased: money types tending to oversimplify, and academics to overcomplicate: Dan Drezner (2014): What Nick Kristof Doesn't Get About the Ivory Tower: "Three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs���academics, Beltway types and money folks...

...Whenever a new issue crops up on the radar, it���s usually the likes of Goldman Sachs or the McKinsey Global Institute that often puts out the first substantive analysis.... Data also gets at the heart of the other comparative advantage of the money folk: they can deploy it the most effectively to make their case. Management consultants figured out the power of graphs and charts long before Ezra Klein or Business Insider appeared on the scene.... Market folk excel... in finding the one number, metric or chart that will capture the attention of the audience, the ���takeaway��� stat.

The biggest strength of academics who take an interest in policy is their deep background and substantive knowledge of the subject at hand... [and so] can avoid the really God-awful choices, because they���re burdened with the knowledge of all the things that can go wrong. It���s not a coincidence that a much larger fraction of academics opposed Operation Iraq Freedom than D.C.-based policy wonks. Academics are the best at playing Whac-a-Mole with the unending analogies.... Beltway and market folk like to disdain theories as abstract and unrealistic. Of course, these tribes then go on to articulate their own implicit theories... ���analogies��� or ���rules of thumb��� or ���granular analysis��� or ���projections.��� Academics... are more capable of recognizing when those theories will be falsified���and when we need to cast about for new models....

It is in their weaknesses that each tribe really becomes distinctive:

Market analysts, for example, are prone to ���chartism��� in their forecasts. Chartists look for regular patterns in their data to develop short-term predictions... over-interpret random movements... [and], because they are convinced that they have found a True Predictor, they will evangelize its value far beyond its real worth.... Market participants are usually pretty adept at identifying the economic pressures.... It is predicting those how politicians will react to those pressures where the consultants and traders fall down... constantly surprised at the bargaining failures that kept recurring. Politicians have different incentives than market participants���a fact that sometimes escapes them when they think about the world....

One of the Beltway tribe���s greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses: groupthink. As I noted before, a Beltway consensus actually counts for something in the world of international policymaking. That does not mean that this consensus emerges from any solid analysis, however. For example, a hidden cause of the enthusiasm for austerity in Washington that crested in 2010 was the consensus among foreign policy pundits that U.S. debt was spiraling out of control, rendering Washington vulnerable to foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries. This groupthink formed at the same time that the budget deficit as a percentage of output was shrinking at the fastest rate in American history. By the time the consensus had emerged, however, the change in the facts didn���t matter. Since the principal activity of Beltway folk is to talk to each other, the result is a feedback loop of confirmation bias that eventually leads to epistemic closure....

The biggest academic weakness is... [that] what is... useful is telling policymakers facts that seem obvious to academics. It���s the settled wisdom in the academy, the ���blinding glimpse of the obvious,��� that often needs to be disseminated to policymakers.... [But] academics...are often unaware that what seems obvious to them is not obvious [to] all...

Should-Read: Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and...

Should-Read: Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark: "Denmark... the effects of wealth taxes... on wealth accumulation...

...Denmark used to impose one of the world���s highest marginal tax ates on wealth, but this tax was drastically reduced and ultimately abolished between 1989 and 1997. Due to the specific design of the wealth tax, these changes provide a compelling quasi-experiment for understanding behavioral responses among the wealthiest segments of
the population.

We find clear reduced-form effects of wealth taxes in the short and medium run, with larger effects on the very wealthy than on the moderately wealthy. We develop a simple lifecycle model with utility of residual wealth (bequests) allowing us to interpret the evidence in terms of structural primitives. We calibrate the model to the quasi-experimental moments and simulate the model forward to estimate the long-run effect of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. Our simulations show that the long-run elasticity of wealth with respect to the net-of-tax return is sizeable at the top of distribution. Our paper provides the type of evidence needed to assess optimal capital taxation...

Should-Read: Brent Simmons: Blogging System Rewrite: "I r...

Should-Read: Brent Simmons: Blogging System Rewrite: "I realized that I want my blog to be me on the web. This used to be true, but then along came Twitter, and then my presence got split up between two places...

...To make this work, I needed two things that my old system from 2009 didn���t provide:

Title-less posts, and
The ability to run the site generator on my server, not just on my Mac.

In other words, I needed to be able to write tweet-like posts with no title���while on the go, on my iPhone or iPad.

I���ve done #1 and part of #2���now it���s just a matter of figuring out how to deploy the system to my server (which is a shared host on Dreamhost, but where I can run CGI scripts).

The code���s up on GitHub. I don���t really expect other people to use it, but you can, if you want to. I apologize in advance for not having time to write extensive documentation or provide support.

The system���s pretty fast: it rebuilds this almost 20-year-old blog in about three seconds on a five-year-old iMac. The code is, I hope, understandable and hackable, and I welcome you to fork it if it interests you...

Should-Read: Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Ru...

Should-Read: Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Running Into Irrational Humans: "To many young people, the idea of efficient financial markets���the idea that...

...in the words of economist Eugene Fama, ���At any point in time, the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value������probably seems like a joke. The financial crisis of 2008, the bursting of the housing bubble, and gyrations in markets from gold to Bitcoin to Chinese stocks have put paid, at least for now, to the idea that prices are guided by the steady hand of rationality. The theory won Fama an economics Nobel Prize in 2013, but he shared it with Robert Shiller, whose research poked significant holes in the idea decades ago. But believe it or not, there was a time when efficient markets theory occupied a place of honor in the worldview of economists and financial professionals alike....

In ���ETF Arbitrage and Return Predictability,��� economists David Brown, Shaun Davies and Matthew Ringgenberg take advantage of the way exchange-traded funds are structured. An ETF typically has a designated set of traders called ���authorized participants��� (APs) who are able to carry out arbitrage between the fund and its underlying assets, whether stocks, bonds or commodities. When the price changes, APs respond by buying and selling the underlying assets, and by either creating or redeeming shares of the ETF, until the two values come back into line. They are, by design, rational arbitrageurs. Generally, an ETF���s APs do a good job of keeping the fund���s value close to the value of the assets it owns. Many studies confirm this. But Brown et al. find that APs��� arbitrage coincides with a deviation of asset values from their fundamentals. When traders other than the APs push around the price, the changes in the prices of the assets tend to reverse themselves over the subsequent months. Anyone watching the APs��� arbitrage trades���which are public record, since they involve the creation and destruction of ETF shares���can then bet that the recent rise or fall in the price of the assets underlying the ETF will be reversed. And make a lot of money. Under efficient markets theory, that���s not supposed to happen....

Efficient markets theory never really fits the facts, but it never quite dies, either.

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual R...

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...

...While there are many conservative economists with appointments at top universities, publications in top journals, and so on, they have no influence on conservative policymaking. What the right wants are charlatans and cranks, in (conservative) Greg Mankiw���s famous phrase. If they use actual economists, they use them the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. The appointment of Larry Kudlow to head the National Economic Council epitomizes the phenomenon.... Kudlow... is basically a TV personality, whose shtick is preaching the magic of tax cuts, and nothing���not the Kansas debacle, not the Clinton boom, not the strong job creation that followed Obama���s 2013 tax hike���will change his mind. And it���s not just that he���s incurious and inflexible: selling snake oil is his business model, and he can���t change without losing everything. And that���s the kind of guy Republicans want.... If you get a conservative economist who isn���t a charlatan and crank, you are more or less by definition getting someone with no influence on policymakers. But that���s not the only problem....

Conservative economic thought is... [also] in an advanced state of both intellectual and moral decadence.... I���ve written a lot about the intellectual decadence.... Anti-Keynesians refused to reconsider their views when their own models failed the reality test while Keynesian models, with some modification, performed pretty well. By the time the Great Recession struck, the right-leaning side of the profession had entered a Dark Age, having retrogressed to the point where famous economists trotted out 30s-era fallacies as deep insights....

There has been a moral collapse���a willingness to put political loyalty over professional standards. We saw that most recently in the way leading conservative economists raced to endorse ludicrous claims for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts, then tried to climb down without admitting what they had done. We saw it in the false claims that Obama had presided over a massive expansion of government programs and refusal to admit that he hadn���t, the warnings that Fed policy would cause huge inflation followed by refusal to admit having been wrong, and on and on.... I suspect... it���s... a desperate attempt to retain some influence on a party that prefers the likes of Kudlow or Stephen Moore. People like John Taylor just keep hoping that if they toe the party line enough, they can still get on the inside. But so far this keeps not happening.... And no, you don���t see the same thing on the other side....

Am I saying that there are no conservative economists who have maintained their principles? Not at all. But they have no influence, zero, on GOP thinking. So in economics, a news organization trying to represent conservative thought either has to publish people with no constituency or go with the charlatans who actually matter. And I think that���s true across the board. The left has genuine public intellectuals with actual ideas and at least some real influence; the right does not. News organizations don���t seem to have figured out how to deal with this reality, except by pretending that it doesn���t exist. And that���s why we keep having these Williamson-like debacles.

On Twitter: Doctrine Man: "Looking for a secret lair with...

On Twitter: Doctrine Man: "Looking for a secret lair with 94 acres of lakeside property? Fort Montgomery is up for sale... for a cool $3 million:

��

@quantian1: Fortifications built on major trade routes are the only true inflation hedge, to paraphrase @delong, so this is a steal at $3mm...

@Gangst_A_dOGe: you're gunna have to man the battlements tho, when the peasants start rioting ur gunna need some guys to throw rocks and oil to repel them...

Should-Read: Ah: the genteel white ethnicism of the Atlan...

Should-Read: Ah: the genteel white ethnicism of the Atlantic Monthly. Under Jeffrey Goldberg and company, if you write for the Atlantic Monthly, there is now a very, very, very high bar you have to surmount to be taken seriously in polite intellectual society: Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/98... 'Too far'?"

It���s the genteel form of white ethnicism...

@moorehn: So true! Perceptive point. ���Oh, we���d LOVE to consider racial minorities to be equal humans, but we can���t lose elections!���

@duylinhtu: I can���t even...

@moorehn: If any scientists reading this are working on a time machine, I volunteer to be sent to a future that���s more enlightened

@crayoh: I think they're trying to be controversial to get clicks.

@JohnFairbanks1: Yeah. What the everlasting f__k?

@RadFemme74:I would love to know the thought processes that go through a white man's mind that cause him to end up going "Yeah, this is totally a worthwhile take"

@thomopolis: Follow up article, ��� did republicans go too far in freeing the slaves?���, and ���Did ���America��� go too far with their ���revolution?���..."

"White Ethnicists" and Boston in the 1980s: Note to Self:

Note to Self: "White Ethnicists" and Boston in the 1980s: Whenever I look at pictures of America���s ���white ethnicists��� (one thing they certainly ain���t is American nationalists) on parade, from the openly neo-Nazi to the more "genteel" Atlantic Monthly ���the Democrats triggered this by pushing civil rights too far��� and all the flavors in between, I am, quite frankly, gobsmacked:

They ain���t the sons of Aryas���new not a Persian or an Indian claiming fictitious descent from the cattle owning immigrants of the third millennium BC among them.

They ain���t those whom Adolf Hitler would call ���Aryans��� either���neither Goth nor Viking nor Saxon Saxon nor Anglo-Saxon faces are a particularly strong current among them.

Rather, they remind me of Boston in the 1980s. Boston in the 1980s was a weird place, and a divided place, with no sense whatever of a single non-African-American non-Hispanic white American ethnos.

Recall that it was a place where the local FBI allies with Whitey Bulger because the Irish Mafia ���keeps the drugs out of Southie���, while the Italian mafia are not quite Americans and really bad guys. Recall that it was a place where, when an Italian Catholic married an Irish Catholic, it was called a ���mixed marriage���...