J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 76

Very interesting work on gender peer effects in American ...

Very interesting work on gender peer effects in American graduate education: Valerie K. Bostwick and Bruce A. Weinberg: Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs: "We study the effects of peer gender composition, a proxy for female-friendliness of environment, in STEM doctoral programs on persistence and degree completion. Leveraging unique new data and quasi-random variation in gender composition across cohorts within programs, we show that women entering cohorts with no female peers are 11.9pp less likely to graduate within 6 years than their male counterparts. A 1 sd increase in the percentage of female students differentially increases the probability of on-time graduation for women by 4.6pp. These gender peer effects function primarily through changes in the probability of dropping out in the first year of a Ph.D. program and are largest in programs that are typically male-dominated...

#noted #2020-01-03

Noah Smith: 'The University of Chicago surveyed top econo...

Noah Smith: 'The University of Chicago surveyed top economists as to whether the Trump tax cuts would increase growth https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1209508842901557248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw: They found exactly ONE who said it would. https://t.co/S2baePomWa?amp=1. People keep tweeting to me saying that most economists or tons of economists or plenty of economists support tax cuts. If you think this is true, NAME NAMES...

#noted #2920-01-03

Andy Matuschak: "In a recent chat with @michaelnielsen an...

Andy Matuschak: "In a recent chat with @michaelnielsen and me about quantum.country https://t.co/lnd5Z3zN1g_ https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1201584298656174082, @delong suggested that the mnemonic medium is a new kind of catechism. We laughed, but��� that's a pretty interesting lens! A typical example of a catechism: "Q1: What is the chief end of man? A1: Man���s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." At the surface, catechisms are about memorizing doctrine. But they also effect a change in identity through repeated exposure. Likewise, spaced-repetition helps people remember concrete material, but it also triggers re-engagement across time. Great: maybe readers will spot new connections when they return after a few weeks. But maybe that repetition also fosters a change in identity! With spaced repetition, you���re not just 'a person who read that essay that one time': the repeated engagement may make you feel you're a 'student of that topic', in some more continuous sense. The tail might wag the dog. I'll confess that my own experiences here are mixed. Some questions I'll see for the 20th time and answer by rote, with no emotional connection at all to the original source. Other times I���ll find myself wondering new questions about the topic, feeling gradually more 'in contact with' that topic over time. That���s all indirect: changing identity by memorizing details associated with that identity. But maybe you can use these systems to alter your identity more directly. Sticking with quantum for the moment, one example might be: 'At this instant, what unsolved question do I instinctively find most fascinating in quantum computing?' (nothing on the back). If you saw that regularly over months, would you identify with that space more deeply? You can imagine creating cards about new habits ('Think of a new concrete situation in which I���ll have trouble leaving space for others to speak.') or values ('What���s an unusual recent situation in which you thought on the century scale?'). These are all narrow examples of spaced repetition as more general 'programmable attention'. More exotic systems can be used to schedule arbitrary fine-grained tasks associated with some new identity, like iteratively reaching out to interesting people in a new field...

#noted #2020-01-03

Barry Eichengreen: Will China Confront a Revolution of Ri...

Barry Eichengreen: Will China Confront a Revolution of Rising Expectations? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-revolution-of-rising-expectations-by-barry-eichengreen-2019-11: 'In France, the Yellow Vests have been protesting most immediately against higher fuel prices but more broadly against a perceived lack of economic opportunity. In Ecuador, anti-austerity protests reflect, more fundamentally, opposition to President Len��n Moreno���s government, which students, unions, and indigenous people criticize as out of touch with the public. Protests in Chile were triggered by an increase in metro fares but have also focused on inequality, the education system, and pension problems. Closest to home, of course, is Hong Kong, where political meddling by mainland China fueled protests that now target the city���s prohibitively high housing costs. These movements are revolutions of rising expectations. They are protests not so much over a deteriorating quality of life as over government���s failure to deliver everything that was promised. Such protests are spontaneous, sparked by small matters, like a hike in fuel prices or metro fares. But, because those small matters are indicative of the government���s disregard and even ignorance of popular concerns, they morph into larger movements. These movements are leaderless, relying as they do on social media, which makes them hard to behead, but also causes them to evolve in unpredictable, even violent, ways. Mainland Chinese are following developments in Hong Kong closely, at least insofar as state media and Internet censorship permit. While some see events there as an affront to their national pride, others appear to be drawing different conclusions. One recent study shows that those exposed to events in Hong Kong as a result of having visited during demonstrations are more likely to engage in online discussions of politically contentious issues...

#noted #2020-01-03

Carolin Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane, and Adi Sunderam: Fin...

Carolin Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane, and Adi Sunderam: Financial Market Risk Perceptions and the Macroeconomy https://www.nber.org/papers/w26290: "We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVSt), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVSt is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and option prices is low. When perceived risk is high according to our measure, safe asset prices are high, risky asset prices are low, the cost of capital for risky firms is high, and real investment is forecast to decline. Perceived risk as measured by PVSt falls after positive macroeconomic news. These declines are predictably followed by upward revisions in investor risk perceptions. Our results suggest that risk perceptions embedded in stock prices are an important driver of the business cycle and are not fully rational... Pflueger.pdf

#noted #2020-01-03

Scheduled for Squawk Box: January 2, 2020 6:50 AM EST: Talking Points

From: xxxx@nbcuni.com

Subject: Your Squawk Box segment this Thursday, January 2: Please get to the studio at UC Berkley by 6:40am est

Body: The anchors will be Joe and Becky. You���ll share the segment with Shermichael Singleton, political consultant, contributor at The Hill. The discussion will be about "running against the Trump economy". Trump has had the best 3 year performance out of every president since Reagan, since being elected. How does one run against this? Who has the potential to compete? Can Trump keep it up, how? Please send thoughts and talking points.

Jump in the S&P over the past eight years from 1300 to 2600

A 1.5x in the valuation ratio
A 1.16x due to inflation
A 1.15x due to an increase in the fundamental earning power underpinning each share of stock

All of that is due to buybacks. None of that is due to greater business earning power
Thus the optimism with respect to the valuation ratio���even given limited opportunities to earn money elsewhere���somewhat puzzles me
Plus there is the joker in the deck: will the wage share remain depressed indefinitely?
Usually I'm a "150% of your net worth in stocks" guy
Now we are moving money out, and I'm a "50% of your net worth in stocks" guy

The talk I hear about the "strong Trump economy" makes no allowance for the difficulty of the dive he has faced relative to that that other presidents face...

Trump was handed very good cards
Taking account of the difficulty of the dive, I think you have to say that:

The Clinton economy turned out much better than expected (due to good policy)
The Obama economy turned out better than expected (due to good but inadequate policy)
The Trump economy has turned out as expected���but with extra damage done by the trade war, which has on net hurt manufacturing and agriculture, and with no investment boom
The Reagan economy turned out somewhat worse than expected���policy incoherence between the tax cutter, the defense spenders, and Paul Volcker really stomped the entire economy over 1981-3 and the Midwest over 1981-1987.
The George H.W. Bush economy turned out worse than expected���they took their eye off the ball on the S&L crisis
The George W. Bush administration really _ _ the pooch...

It looks like we have dodged a recession...

We have had a manufacturing recession, but domestic manufacturing is no longer an important enough sector for a manufacturing recession to bring down the economy as a whole...
The Trump economy is very weak in productivity growth and the wage share, and those are very worrisome for long-term trends.

The most striking aspect of the political situation is the strong divergence between Trump's good unemployment and inflation numbers and his lousy approval numbers

Yet perhaps what should surprise me the most is that his approval numbers are so high
Policy incoherence while you insult people on Twitter would not have seemed to me to be a governing strategy that many Americans would approve of...
It's not just not doing your job...
It's undignified
Yet he has his fans���and very few of them are beneficiaries of his tax cut, and there are no beneficiaries of his trade war or his foreign-born sliming...

Perhaps all his fans think they will benefit from his tax cut?
Recall John Steinbeck: "We didn���t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist..."
A new paper out by Alberto Alesina and Stephanie Stantcheva on how Americans think there is much more and Europeans think there is substantially less upward mobility than in fact there is���and how in real life there is more in Europe than in America






#economics #forecasting #highlighted #politicaleconomy #politics #talkingpoints #2020-01-01

Our fearless leader over at Equitable Growth Heather Bous...

Our fearless leader over at Equitable Growth Heather Boushey interviews the great Gabriel Zucman. The most important point is that the increase in inequality in America has been largely a choice���a choice of those elected, even if the one elected was done so by a margin of 5-4 Supreme Court justices, or collected 3 million fewer popular votes: Gabriel Zucman: _In Conversation: "There is this widespread view that rising inequality is a mechanical consequence of globalization and technical change, spurred in large part by competition with China and the substitutions between workers and machines. But, you know, France has computers too, and also trades with China���and generally trades more than the United States. So, it does not seem possible to explain the stagnation of U.S. working-class income by globalization and technical change. It���s more likely that this stagnation of income for the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution comes from policy changes. Things such as the collapse of the federal minimum wage, the declining power of unions, changes to taxation, to access to higher education, etc...

#noted #2020-01-01

Nilso: Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Dow https://www....

Nilso: Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Dow https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/john-scalzi-2010-_tax-frenzies-and-how-to-hose-them-down_-i-really-dont-know-what-you-do-about-the-taxes-are.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4fd42e6200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4fd42e6200b: 'I live in Jackson County, Oregon, home to Ashland (and Phoenix, Talent and Medford). We have taxes. Nearby Josephine County (home of Cave Junction) has not, until recently, voted for a property tax increase in so many years, that their policing had to be taken over by Oregon State Police. Needless to say, the result was meth-heads having car-chase shootouts in broad daylight, etc. Finally they realized this was a disaster and voted for enough of a property tax to get a sherriff back on the payroll. This has been an instructive case in point...

#commentoftheday #2020-01-01

CNN (January 22, 2017): Conway: Trump White House Offered...

CNN (January 22, 2017): Conway: Trump White House Offered 'Alternative Facts' on Crowd Size https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/politics/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts/index.html: 'Washington (CNN): White House press secretary Sean Spicer's false claims about the size of the crowd at President Donald Trump's inauguration were "alternative facts," a top Trump aide said Sunday. In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," host Chuck Todd pressed Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about why the White House on Saturday had sent Spicer to the briefing podium for the first time to claim that "this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period." "You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving���Sean Spicer, our press secretary���gave alternative facts," she said. Todd responded: "Alternative facts aren't facts, they are falsehoods." Conway then tried to pivot to policy points. But later in the interview, Todd pressed Conway again on why the White House sent Spicer out to make false claims about crowd size, asking: "What was the motive to have this ridiculous litigation of crowd size?" "Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That's not your job," Conway said. Todd followed up: "Can you please answer the question? Why did he do this? You have not answered it���it's only one question." Conway said: "I'll answer it this way: Think about what you just said to your viewers. That's why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there"...

#noted #2020-01-01

Jay Rosen: The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd ht...

Jay Rosen: The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd http://pressthink.org/2019/12/the-christmas-eve-confessions-of-chuck-todd/: 'That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it.... Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of ���alternative facts��� on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists���even when you know it���s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in���and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news. Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press.... [Todd and] the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway���s threatening phrase, ���alternative facts��� was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous. In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as Garry Kasparov observes for us, ���The point of modern propaganda isn���t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.��� This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it. That���s malpractice. Chuck Todd called it naivet�� in order to minimize the error. This we cannot allow...

#noted #2020-01-01