J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 49

Noted: Becker & al.: Refugees & Human Capital

Sascha O. Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtla��nder, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya: Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=11267: 'We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital...

#economicgrowth #humancapital #noted #2020-05-13

Noted: Campos: Trump's Acquittal

In the end, Trump's acquittal may be viewed by future historians much like the Roman Senate's decision to block the Gracchi is regarded by current historians: as the start of a huge downward spiral. That presidential corruption and malfeasance are subject to no checks as long as 34 senators fear their reelection chances would be damanged by removal is not a state I ever thought I would ever see America reach, but it has:

Paul Campos: Another Brow-Furrower http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/02/another-brow-furrower: 'This looks like one of those deals where the president says I���ll stop illegally withholding those federal services I���m withholding from your constituents if you stop investigating those financial crimes I committed. Donald J. Trump: "I���m seeing Governor Cuomo today at The White House. He must understand that National Security far exceeds politics. New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment, start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes. Build relationships, but don���t bring Fredo!" ���Fredo��� btw is Cuomo���s brother, who is a CNN reporter. What���s the over-under on how many impeachable offenses this guy has committed since the Senate ���acquittal��� all those many months weeks days ago?...

#americancollapse #fasciam #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-05-13

Noted: Kaufman; Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion

I have a very strong feeling that the work of the Frankfurt School is very important as we try to understand our current situation. So if only I could understand the Frankfurt School, I might be a happier man!:

Robert Kaufman: Poetry's Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/27669156.pdf: 'The overarching and thoroughgoing inhumanity of the situation of what Adorno calls "damaged life" structured everything around it, so that, in Adorno's formulation, wrong life could not���cannot���be lived rightly, and the very attempt or reflex of trying to act ethically, or of finding oneself seeming to act ethically, is precisely what leads one to feel barbaric, for it makes all the more clear that nothing but unjustifiable luck has been operative: at the moment of a sheerly arbitrary, chance, statistical survival, the projection of an ethical attempt to assist the other comes to feel like an unspeakable mockery or perverse miming of ethics, since the thought and act meant to differentiate themselves from the barbarism of survival-due-to-statistical-probability turn out to be not the necessary fiction, not the generative, as if illusion, of undetermined, ethical behavior, but instead the cruel delusion that the latter still has any operative existence in these circumstances...

#cognition #noted #publicsphere #20230-05-13

Noted: Boushey & Cumming: Coronavirus Recession

Much more attention should be being paid to the class skew in the economic pain being caused by the coronavirus recession: Heather Boushey & Carmen Sanchez Cumming: Coronavirus Recession Deepens U.S. Job Losses in April. Especially Among Low-Wage Workers & Women https://equitablegrowth.org/coronavirus-recession-deepens-u-s-job-losses-in-april-especially-among-low-wage-workers-and-women/: ���many of the workers most affected by the swift economic downturn hold jobs that are not classified as essential and cannot be done from home. This month about 90 percent of job losses happened in sectors where less than one in five workers reported in a survey conducted between 2017 and 2018 that they have the option to telecommute. It is likely that this measure somewhat misrepresents the number of workers who have been able to work from home since the onset of the pandemic. Even so, with 7.7 million jobs lost in the leisure and hospitality industry alone, which makes up nearly half of all the jobs in that sector, jobs where workers previously rarely had the option to telecommute accounted for more than a third of this last month���s economy-wide decline in employment���

#coronavirus #depression #equitablegrowth #inequality #macro #noted #2020-05-13

Noted: Sahm & al.: Household Response to the 2008 Tax Rebate

Claudia R. Sahm & al.: Household Response to the 2008 Tax Rebate http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/papers/w15421.pdf: 'Only about one-fifth of respondents in the Reuters/University of Michigan survey report that the 2008 tax rebates led them to mostly increase spending, while over half said it would lead them to mostly pay off debt. Of those in the mostly-spend category, the response was swift, with over 80 percent reporting increasing their spending within three months of receiving their rebate. Older households, households with higher wealth and higher income, and those expecting future income growth were generally more likely to spend the rebates. A review of other surveys confirms the general pattern of results and suggests that small changes in survey design do not have a major effect on the distribution of responses. The distribution of survey answers corresponds to an aggregate MPC after one year of about one-third. The paper combines this survey-based estimate of the MPC and the survey-based estimate of the timing of spending to show that the rebates help explain the aggregate movements in saving, spending, and debt in 2008. Because the rebate was large and distributed over a short period, it had a non-trivial effect on total spending in the second and third quarters of 2008. Nonetheless, the results imply that the rebates provided only a modest stimulus to spending per dollar of rebate...

#fiscalpolicy #macro #noted #2020-05-13

Noted: Card & al.: Gender Neutrality in Economics

Economics's woman-underrepresentation problem appears due to a drip, drip, drip, drip of small factors everywhere along the pipeline. Here Nagore Triberri and coauthors find that there is a substantial slice of papers of high enough "quality" (as measured by future citations) to get published that do not get published because they are written by women. Yet referees assess papers written by men and women similarly. And editors do not seem biased in their use of referees:

David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri: Gender Neutrality in Economics: The Role of Editors and Referees https://voxeu.org/article/gender-neutrality-economics-role-editors-and-referees: 'Women economists are under-represented across the discipline, from university departments to academic conferences and publishing houses. This column focuses on the editorial process and asks whether the referees and editors of four leading economics journals made gender-neutral publishing decisions between 2003 and 2013. The findings suggest that the gender of the referee does not affect the valuation of a paper and that editors are gender-neutral in valuing advice from referees. However, papers written by women appear to face a higher bar in the quest to be published...

#discrimination #economics #gender #noted #universities #2020-05-13

Noted: Steve M.: Better to Reign in Randian Hell

Steve M.: Better to Reign in Randian Hell https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/05/better-to-reign-in-randian-hell.html: ���Danes kept their jobs. The trauma of massive numbers of people losing jobs and health insurance, of long lines at food banks���that is the American experience, but it���s not what���s happening in Denmark.... Our response to the pandemic has been worse than Sweden's or Denmark's, and one consequence is that our economy will be in the toilet for years to come. I understand that we're reopening much of America prematurely because our corporate overlords have contempt for their employees and their customers and just want revenue to start flowing again as quickly as possible. But why are they unable to grasp the obvious point that their customers are afraid to come back, and that they'll be even more afraid when, inevitably, the premature reopenings cause a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths? In other words, why aren't the CEOs who have Donald Trump's ear telling him that, for his benefit and theirs (they really don't care about ours), he should be working harder to bend the curve and increase testing and tracing, because that's what it will take to give Americans the confidence to go out and consume?... I've come to the conclusion that many American capitalists aren't seekers of pure profit. They often prefer control.... They don't like being ordered to shut down by the government. They want to forcibly reverse the shutdown���even though it's likely to mean more death and less business, and even though letting the lockdown run its course would make them more money in the long run...

#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-05-13

Noted: WHO: An Historical Document: Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT���1 21 JANUARY 2020

WHO: Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT���1 21 JANUARY 2020 https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4: ���Event highlights from 31 December 2019 to 20 January 2020: ��� On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. From 31 December 2019 through 3 January 2020, a total of 44 case-patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology were reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. During this reported period, the causal agent was not identified. ��� On 11 and 12 January 2020, WHO received further detailed information from the National Health Commission China that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan City. ��� The Chinese authorities identified a new type of coronavirus, which was isolated on 7 January 2020. ��� On 12 January 2020, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for countries to use in developing specific diagnostic kits. ��� On 13 January 2020, the Ministry of Public Health, Thailand reported the first imported case of lab-confirmed novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Situation update: ��� As of 20 January 2020, 282 confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV have been reported from four countries including China (278 cases), Thailand (2 cases), Japan (1 case) and the Republic of Korea (1 case); ��� Cases in Thailand, Japan and Republic of Korea were exported from Wuhan City, China; ��� Among the 278 cases confirmed in China, 258 cases were reported from Hubei Province, 14 from Guangdong Province, five from Beijing Municipality and one from Shanghai Municipality; On 15 January 2020, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan (MHLW) reported an
imported case of laboratory-confirmed 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from Wuhan,
Hubei Province, China. On 20 January 2020, National IHR Focal Point (NFP) for Republic of Korea reported the first case of novel coronavirus in the Republic of Korea���

#coronavirus #noted #publichealth #2020-05-13

Noted: Boushey: The Path to Recovery

It really is not too late to turn the coronavirus recession into a sharp V-shaped recession. But I would say that the odds that we are going to do so are less than 10%. Only a very small number of people with any access to the levers of power or the megaphones understand that the keys to rapid recovery lie in boosting aggregate demand quickly by enough and in ensuring that businesses are not sent miss leading "bankruptcy shut down��� signals. Heather Boushey understands this. Only a small proportion of other people of status and influence in Washington DC understand this:

Heather Boushey: It���s Not too Late to Put the American Economy on a Path to Recovery https://medium.com/@heatherboushey/its-not-too-late-to-put-the-american-economy-on-a-path-to-recovery-809fa1259fdc: ���We know what we need to do in a recession...

...Unemployment Insurance, aid to the states, enhanced nutrition support, direct payments���and infrastructure and job programs���are the tried-and-true programs that stabilize the macroeconomy while supporting America���s families. Decades of evidence show these programs work. Now, in this package, Congress should ensure that the supports we put in place stay in place by crafting them so that they trigger off when the labor market recovers, and not before��� #coronavirus #macro #noted #2020-05-12

Noted: Yes: Time Feels Weird Right Now

Emily VanDerWerff: Why Quarantine Has Made Time Feel so Weird, Explained https://www.vox.com/2020/5/7/21248259/why-time-feels-so-weird-right-now-quarantine-coronavirus-pandemic: ���March felt longer to people because you could look back to the first half of March, before we were in quarantine, and say, ���Oh, all of this stuff happened.��� And in the second half of March, people were forced out of their routines, their flow. But April has been the same thing over and over, and retroactively, it feels much shorter... #coronavirus #noted #2020-05-12