J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 385

Weekend Reading: Some Underrepresented Minority Perspectives on U.C. Berkeley Graduate Econ

Weekend Reading: Trevon D Logan: On Twitter: "Great advice here. (I admit I���m biased though...)"

@DaniaFrancis: Another example of the excellence coming out of Berkeley Econ. I kick myself again.

@TrevonDLogan: I remember your visit. Andrea and I were so hoping you���d come. In the end, there are not good or bad choices but just paths. I knew you���d reach your destination no matter what!

@DaniaFrancis: Thank you! I wasn���t so sure myself, but I���m glad I did!

@KimberlyNFoster: Does anyone love their PhD program? Why is it that we only hear struggle stories from PhD students?

@nomadj1s: Had a great time at @berkeleyecon. Faculty generally cared about advising & classmates were collaborative, as opposed to competitive. Good weather & food didn���t hurt. PhD was still a struggle at times, but worth it. YMMV

@TrevonDLogan: I too am a @berkeleyecon alum. It was a great experience overall. Very broad approach to Econ and intellectual curiosity was nurtured. My only regret is that I left the program too quickly. (But I was tired of trying to survive in that expensive housing market!)

So fitting that I���m teaching @MarthaOlney ���Avoiding Default��� (QJE, 1999) today. She put a reprint in my hand in 1999 when I visited @berkeleyecon and told her I was interested in consumer finance. She also gave me a reprint of ���When your Word is Not Enough��� (JEH, 1998) about racial differences in credit in the 1918/19 consumer expenditure survey. She told me ���you can do that here!��� And that was the first time I had anyone affiliated with a program ask what I wanted to do and showed me an example of what it was. That is so important and it sticks with me to this day. I don���t do ANYTHING related to that today and I never have! BUT I have used the 1918/19 consumer expenditure data and I found a department that let me follow my own path. @berkeleyecon is not a cookie cutter program, and that���s one of its key strengths.

@femme_economics: Ditto. @berkeleyecon was a wonderful place to get a PhD. Standout, considerate faculty paired with smart, fun, intellectually curious classmates. + Food +SF/Oakland +Tahoe +Napa +Santa Cruz

@DaniaFrancis: These endorsements of @berkeleyecon inspire me to make a PSA to students of color recently admitted to Econ Ph.D. programs who are trying to decide where to go. In 2001, I was faced with choosing between Berkeley Econ and two other programs. I chose wrong. Instead of benefiting from the supportive environment that @drlisadcook, @nomadj1s, and @femme_economics among others have touted at Berkeley, I wound up in a program where I felt very isolated for multiple reasons. I also found most of my fellow students to be more competitive with each other than cooperative. Adding to the ���outsider��� feeling, about 1/3 of my cohort had been undergrads in the same program. They knew each other, knew the professors, and were somewhat insular. I eventually left that program and found a home at @DukeSanford under the mentorship and support of @SandyDarity, which means my story does have a positive outcome.

But every time I hear someone (especially a person of color) y���all about how awesome Berkeley Econ was, I kick myself and wonder what could have been. Berkeley Econ has become one of those programs with a reputation for supporting and encouraging scholars of color of this generation much like MIT Econ did in the 1970s (see @SandyDarity and cohort). I say all of this to say: if you are a scholar of color making this choice right now, econ grad school is hard enough w/o a supportive environment. Factor that into your decision. It matters. Ask current and former students about their experiences. Don���t just choose the shiny, fancy name department, without knowing about support structures because that shiny, fancy name will mean nothing to you if you don���t have the support to actually finish. Finally, I have to add that at @UMassEcon we support the heck out of grad students. That is all.

@odiakosionu I shall send this on to my nephew who is graduating from Harvard this May, and considering Econ grad programs!...

@hotchocolatefox: I would recommend a HBCU

Should-Read: Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the C...

Should-Read: 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...

...Yet it concludes by identifying a key slippage between the rhetoric of race and economics in R��pke���s texts. As conservatives, whose racism was often open and unadorned in personal correspondence, sought a publicly acceptable way to oppose decolonization movements in the global South, R��pke offered a solution. In his defense of South Africa, R��pke redefi ned ���the West��� not as a racial or civilizational space but one identified by a stable economy, market-friendly social behavior, and a welcoming investment climate. Like Adam Smith before him, R��pke would end by finding interest rates as the most reliable index for an area���s level of civilization.

At a time when the budding civil rights movement was challenging the racial hierarchy in the U.S., the conservative attack on the ���New Deal for the world��� was, I argue, a means of holding the line against what one of R��pke and Buckley���s collaborators called ���the unholy combination of the African Negro question with U.S. Negroes.��� If the demands of non-white populations were becoming harder to
suppress at home, perhaps they could at least be curbed in the larger world before bringing about what R��pke called the ���suicide��� of ���the free world��� that would result in the event of a world government where ���non-Europeans would hold an overwhelming majority.��� Looking at the transatlantic alliances of German-speaking neoliberalism and conservatism makes it clear that world economic issues at the middle of the twentieth century were always also about race...

Should-Read: Surreptitiously gathering data that users ha...

Should-Read: Surreptitiously gathering data that users have not authorized you to gather in order to sell it to people who want to manipulate you is not a sustainable business model, Facebook: 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...

...Scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered... Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone... names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.... This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well... by us���my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained... two years of call data, from the period I used my Blackphone as my primary phone.... In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts."...

If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook's installation on Android... before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)���that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default...

I do wonder why Google has not responded...

Should-Read: A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Ca...

Should-Read: 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'...

...Told Congress would have to pass a constitutional amendment, Mnuchin says on Fox: 'We don���t need to get into a debate... There are different ways of doing this...'

Should-Read: Financing a free-to-users social network by ...

Should-Read: Financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies who want to sell you things that you will be happy you bought is a sustainable business model. But Facebook apparently never got the memo. It never realized that financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies who want to sell you things that you be unhappy you bought is not sustainable. Nor is financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies and others who wish you ill. Facebook was unable to distinguish between those three categories to whom it sold your eyeballs. And so I suspect that, in the long run, it is going down: 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...

...The proliferation of fake news and targeted political adverts on the platform. He initially dismissed the idea that content on the site influenced the election as a ���pretty crazy idea��� before backtracking. He now faces a more fundamental challenge: to restore trust.... Cambridge Analytica... obtained Facebook data harvested from 50m people and allegedly used to target voters in the US have triggered questions about the protection of privacy... regulation that could potentially hamper the group���s business model.... He admitted that the company had made mistakes.... The opening exploited by Cambridge Analytica can be linked directly to the choices Mr Zuckerberg made... his lack of attention to privacy, his rush to open up to developers, his pursuit of a business model based on targeted advertising. He, and others at Facebook, ignored warnings from employees and activists that they were going down the wrong path...

Ask the Internet: Was the phrase "The Queen of Air and Da...

Ask the Internet: Was the phrase "The Queen of Air and Darkness" really coined by A.E. Houseman in 1922? I can find no earlier references...

Should-Read: Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn���t Be In th...

Should-Read: 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...

...cheap optics, lousy safety drivers, pushing to drive at night before the software is ready, etc. A corporate culture that���s built to expand their taxi service no matter who gets hurt or who complains might build a good taxi service, but it���s the worst possible culture for mission-critical software.... Uber famously has a corporate culture built around being a bull in a china shop.... This kind of culture might be OK for, say, Facebook, which doesn���t kill people if there are glitches in its apps. But if you���re launching a satellite into space or putting a driverless car on the road, there���s a whole different development and testing ethos involved. Uber just doesn���t have that. I���d barely trust them to develop software for a driverless golf cart, let alone a driverless car...

Globalization: What Did Paul Krugman Miss?

Comment of the Day: Dennis Drew: Globalization: What Did Paul Krugman Miss?: "I'm always the first to say that if today's 10 dollars an hour jobs paid 20 dollars an hour...

...(Walgreen's, Target, fast food less w/much high labor costs) that would solve most social problems caused by loss of manufacturing (to out sourcing or automation). The money's there. Bottom 40% income take about 10% of overall income. "Mid" take about 67.5%. Top 1%, 22.5%. The instrument of moving 10% more from "mid" to the bottom is higher consumer prices arriving with the sudden reappearance of nationwide, high union density (see below for the easy application). The instrument of retrieving the "mid's" lost 10% is Eisenhower level confiscatory taxes for the top 1%.

Jack Kennedy lowered max income tax rate from 92% to 70% to improve incentives (other cuts followed). But with the top 1% wages now 20X (!) what they were in the 60s while per capita only doubled since, there will be all the incentive in the world left over while we relieve them of the burden of stultifying wealth. :-)

The new blue Congress (if it manages to get itself elected by standing for nothing -- I wouldn't bet on it if Trump takes a fall and Pence reapplies intelligence to Republican chicanery) has merely to mandate union certification and re-certification elections at every private workplace; one, three or five year cycle, plurality rules on the latter. Not my idea:

Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule? Andrew Strom ��� November 1st, 2017 https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/

Should-Read: Can someone with a larger tolerance for read...

Should-Read: Can someone with a larger tolerance for reading b---s--- than I tell me how Robert J. Barro trimmed his estimate of the effects of the Trumpublican tax cut bill from "smaller than 8.4%.... not by much... I made a rough downward adjustment of the long-run level effect from 8.4% to 7%..." to 0.4%?: Robert Barro and Jason Furman: The macroeconomic effects of the 2017 tax reform: "The result is that GDP would rise by 0.4 percent in the law-as-written case...

...and by 1.2 percent in the provisions-permanent case. These results imply that the annual GDP growth rate over the 10-year horizon rises by 0.04 percentage point in the law-as-written case and 0.13 percentage point in the provisions-permanent case...

Should-Read: Just when you think the mainstream media cou...

Should-Read: 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...

...Jessica Valenti: Hey remember when @TheAtlantic���s new political writer [Kevin Williamson] said women who have abortions should be executed by hanging? I SURE DO...

Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR): @Green_Footballs Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.

Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR): I have hanging more in mind. @LeveyIsLaw @charlescwcooke