J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 84

Note to Self: WTF!?!?, Richard Muller????: Richard Muller...

Note to Self: WTF!?!?, Richard Muller????: Richard Muller (2013): A Pause, Not an End, to Warming https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/opinion/a-pause-not-an-end-to-warming.html: ���In an essay published online then at MIT Technology Review, I worried that the famous ���hockey stick��� graph plotted by three American climatologists in the late 1990s portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity���

Here is the hockey stick:

The yellow indicates uncertainty. "Too much certainty", Richard?!?! And the temperature proxies have plenty of signal before 1900. "Inappropriate simplicity", Richard?!?! I do wonder how long it had been since he had read Michael E. Mann &al.: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Thousand Years: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations https://web.archive.org/web/20040311175934/http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/millennium-camera.pdf: 'Building on recent studies, we attempt hemispheric temperature reconstructions with proxy data net- works for the past millennium. We focus not just on the reconstructions, but the uncertainties therein, and important caveats. Though expanded uncertainties prevent decisive conclusions for the period prior to AD 1400, our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence. The 20th century warming counters a millennial-scale cooling trend which is consistent with long-term astronomical forcing...

#globalwarming #notetoself #2019-12-13

William J. Connell: New Light on Machiavelli���s Letter t...

William J. Connell: New Light on Machiavelli���s Letter to Vettori, 10 December 1513 https://www.storiadifirenze.org/pdf_ex_eprints/143-connell.pdf: 'What makes the subscription to the Borromeo letter so especially interesting are three factors: (1) The letter���s recipient was Machiavelli���s friend and patron, Francesco Vettori. (2) The letter was produced in the very chancery office that Machiavelli had directed for 14 years. (3) The date, 12 November 1513, was only two days after the completion of Machiavelli���s relegatio. Perhaps���just perhaps���the subscription altered to ��N. Mach(e)l.�� represented a way for one of Machiavelli���s chancery friends to confirm to Vettori in Rome that the confinement had ended uneventfully. Machiavelli was in official good standing and able to leave the dominion from 10 November. We know that Vettori received the letter from the Ten with its curious subscription on 18 November89. On 23 November Vettori, who had been out of touch with Machiavelli since August, at last sent his friend a long, warm letter, inviting him to visit him in Rome. And, on 10 December 1513, Machiavelli replied with his famous letter. That letter���s opening words, ��Tarde non furon mai grazie divine�� [Divine favors were never late], are a comment not so much on the completion of the relegatio (which occurred one month earlier), but on the arrival of Vettori���s let- ter and invitation after more than three months of silence...

#noted #2019-12-13

Worthy Reads from December 13, 2018: Hoisted from the Archives

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

If you missed Anne Case and Angus Deaton on "deaths of despair" when it came out at the start of this year, you need to go back and read it: Iris Marechal: The Opioid Crisis: A Consequence of U.S. Economic Decline?: "The opioid epidemic continues to devastate families and communities across the United States, causing serious health and socioeconomic crises. The high prescription rate for opioids and the subsequent misuse of this medication by millions of Americans accelerated addiction and has led to a four-fold increase in the rate of overdoses since 1999.... Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton University attribute the sharp increase in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2015 to 'deaths of despair' rather than to the increased ease of obtaining opioids: That is, their research suggests that higher drug suicides are attributable to social and economic factors such as a prolonged economic decline in many parts of the United States. They show that white Americans are more affected by the opioid epidemic, yet less affected by economic downturns than other racial and ethnic groups in the country...

Our Raksha Kopparam makes a very nice catch, and sends us to the enter for Financial Services Innovation's ���U.S. Financial Health Pulse: 2018 Baseline Survey���: Raksha Kopparam: New Financial Health Survey Shows That Traditional Metrics of Economic Growth Don���t Apply to Most U.S. Households��� Incomes and Savings: "Single aggregate data points do not capture how economic growth is experienced by different people in very different ways.... Underscoring the importance of knowing who specifically benefits from a strong economy is a new survey by the Center for Financial Services Innovation...

Our Kate Bahn responds to Redwood Girl in Chico's puzzlement about why she is not seeing opportunity in the low-unemployment economy: @RedwoodGirl: On Twitter: "Does the U6 number also include self-employed folks like myself who need more work to afford to live?..." @LipstickEcon: "It does not, since it only includes unemployed workers plus workers who aren't looking for a job but say they would take one if offered plus workers who are part-time wage and salary workers but would rather be full-time. Under-employed self-employed workers aren't counted here. This is part of why economists like Blanchflower and Bell think U.S. statistics do not capture under-employment accurately, since it doesn't include people who wish they worked more (or fewer) hours but can't find a job that is the right fit of hours https://www.nber.org/papers/w24927...

Do apply for Equitable Growth grants: Equitable Growth: Apply for a Grant: "We are now accepting applications in response to our 2019 Request for Proposals. Letters of inquiry for academic grants are due by 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 31, 2019. Proposals for doctoral/postdoctoral grants and applications to the Dissertation Scholars Program are due by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sunday, March 10, 2019...

Rhonda Sharpe is praising us herre at Equitable Growth for trying to diversify the economics profession: Rhonda V. Sharpe: On Twitter: "L @LipstickEcon E @ @equitablegrowth T @ @TrevonDLogan ' S @SandyDarity D @drlisadcook I @itsafronomics V @ValerieRWilson E @Em_Gorman R @rbalakra S @SadieCollective I @IAFFE F @femme_economics Y @YanaRodgers T @TrevonDLogan H @HBoushey E @eliselgould...

 

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

It is very important to try to make the future world a more ���American������that is: free, Democratic, market���than a ���Chinese������that is: controlled, authoritarian, hierarchical���world. But the sharp Ed Luce's criticisms of Pompeo and Trump will have no purchase on the Republican senators who currently empower Trump, for they are frying different fish. What arguments would have purchase on them?: Ed Luce: The Double Life of Trumpian Nationalism: ���Mr Pompeo did the world a favour... crystallised the dissonance that runs through the Trump administration. Mr Trump���s aim is to contain China���s global rise. He also wants to remove the tools with which to blunt China���s rise. He offers with one hand what he removes with the other. Mr Pompeo called for a new global liberal order of 'noble nations'. In the same breath, he called on them to pursue their go-it-alone destinies. Nowhere in his speech did the words 'west' or 'western' occur. Countries that abandon mutual endeavours do not naturally see eye to eye...

This is a brilliant and very important fact. I know that I had not previously recognized the degree to which those who invest in stocks but who do not diversify their portfolios simply go bankrupt. The very strong and striking outperformance of diversified stock portfolios thus appears more rationalizable if marginal investors in stocks are paying this non-diversification tax: Terry Smith: Busting the myths of investment: Do equities outperform bonds?: ���The degree of concentration of returns is still startling. Just five companies out of the universe of 25,967 in the study account for 10 per cent of the total wealth creation over the 90 years, and just over 4 per cent of the companies account for all of the wealth created.... The study also looks at returns decade by decade and reaches more or less the same conclusion...

All the people who say that it is really not that important to get inflation up leave me flummoxed. I try to determine what they think will happen when the next recession comes. I fail: Joseph E. Gagnon (PIIE) and Takeshi Tashiro: Abenomics Is Working, Don���t Stop Now: ���Japan is on track for its longest postwar economic expansion, with female labor force participation and corporate profits at record highs and unemployment at a 25-year low.... [Is] the goal of raising inflation to 2 percent is really necessary?...

To what extent is geographic divergence the result of rent-seeking land-use planning run amok?: Simon Wren-Lewis: Helping the Left Behind: Its (Economic) Geography, Stupid: "Martin Sandbu points us to a report from the Brookings Institution.... 'For much of the 20th century, market forces had reduced job, wage, investment, and business formation disparities between more- and less-developed regions. By closing the divides between regions, the economy ensured a welcome convergence among the nation���s communities.' But from the 1980s onwards, they argue that digital technologies increased the reward to talent-laden clusters of skills and firms...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the best road forward for the American worker on trade is to (a) join the TPP and (b) keep NAFTA: Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott: Under the Hood, the USMCA Is a Downgrade for North America: "Trump... called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the worst trade deal ever made. Trade negotiators have branded its intended replacement... a 'modernized' improvement.The upgrades draw heavily from the Trump-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership.... The deal also includes costly new regulations and requirements that discourage investment, especially in the auto sector... higher prices for cars at a time when auto sales are flagging. Ford and GM are already laying off workers.... The USMCA limits trade more than promoting it...

Having destroyed the economy of Greece, it looks like the European Union is now moving on to Italy. Truly years that the locust hath eaten: having destroyed if economy of Greece, it looks like the European Union is now moving on to Beverly. Truly years that the locusts have eaten in: Adam Tooze: Italy: How Does the E.U. Think This Is Going to End?: "Over the past 10 years, Italy���s gross domestic product per capita has fallen... unique among large advanced economies.... More than 32 percent of Italy���s young people are unemployed. The gloom, disappointment and frustration are undeniable. For the commission to declare that this is a time for austerity flies in the face of a reality that for many Italians is closer to a personal and national emergency...

We really should not shape our macroeconomic policy under the dominant influence of that truly exceptional decade that was the 1970s: J. Bradford DeLong (2000): America���s Historical Experience with Low Inflation: Hoisted from 1999: "The inflation of the 1970's was a marked deviation from America's typical peacetime historical pattern as a hard-money country. We should expect America to continue to be a hard-money--low inflation--country in the future, at least in peacetime. The low rate of future inflation that we thus forecast changes the balance of macroeconomic risks and opportunities. The risk of debt-deflation-mediated recessions is somewhat higher because a low trend rate of goods-and-services price index inflation somewhat increases the chances of deflation. But it does not raise such risks as much as one might think...

I think this is wrong. I think the lower level of the neutral rate of interest and the fact that the Fed has not pursued its 2% per year inflation target symmetrically have consequences. Those are that medium-term risks are overwhelmingly asymmetric on the downside. What does Rich Clarida think he is going to do to stem the next recession when it comes?: Rich Clarida: Data Dependence and U.S. Monetary Policy: ���As the economy has moved to a neighborhood consistent with the Fed���s dual-mandate objectives, risks have become more symmetric and less skewed to the downside than when the current rate cycle began three years ago. Raising rates too quickly could unnecessarily shorten the economic expansion, while moving too slowly could result in rising inflation and inflation expectations down the road that could be costly to reverse, as well as potentially pose financial stability risks. Although the real federal funds rate today is just below the range of longer-run estimates presented in the September SEP, it is much closer to the vicinity of r-star than it was when the FOMC started to remove accommodation in December 2015. How close is a matter of judgment, and there is a range of views on the FOMC...

Much too optimistic from the Economist. The new policy options are not that powerful: Economist: What to do if the usual weapons fail: "If the usual weapons fail, there are plenty of new policy responses for governments to turn to. From the robots that help care for an ageing population to holographic pop stars, the future always arrives early in Japan. Economic policy is no exception. When the massive Japanese financial bubble of the 1980s imploded, the Bank of Japan (BOJ)... tested many of the policies, such as QE, that would enter the toolkit of other central banks during the financial crisis. Yet Japan was seen as an example of central-bank incompetence, until smug Western central banks discovered after 2008 that getting an economy to perk up when interest rates were near zero was harder than it looked...

What ought to be the conventional wisdom about the importance of the American union movement: Noah Smith: Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class: "Politically and economically, unions are sort of an odd duck. They aren���t part of the apparatus of the state, yet they depend crucially on state protections in order to wield their power. They���re stakeholders in corporations, but often have adversarial relationships with management. Historically, unions are a big reason that the working class won many of the protections and rights it now enjoys...

#noted #weblogs #2018-12-13

Jacobo Timmerman (1990): A Summer in the Revolution https...

Jacobo Timmerman (1990): A Summer in the Revolution https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/11/i-cannot-find-jacopo-timmermann-on-gabriel-garcia-marquez-on-fidel-castro.html: 'When I read one of Gabriel Carcia Marquez's essays on the [Cuban] Commandante [Fidel Castro], I was remind of paeans to Stalin���of the whole state of mind described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon. Garcia Marquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep after a day's hard work���the same six hours that were often presented as proof of Josef Stalin's vitality, extolled in writings that also described his Kremlin window lit until the small hours of the night���and praises the wisdom of the Commandante in stating that "learning to rest is as important as learning to work". If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro's workday as it is describe by Garcia Marquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy���someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence:

His rarest virtue is the ability to foresee the evolution of an event to its farthest-reaching consequence...

and: "He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news from the entire world..." (a long breakfast, surely), and: "He has to read fifty-odd documents [daily]..." And the list goes on: "No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast.... A physician friend of his, out of courtesy, sent him his newly-published orthopedic treatise, without expecting him, of course, to read it, but one week later he received a letter from Castro with a long list of observations.... There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affection almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer.... He has created a foreign policy of world-power dimensions..." Fidel Castro, then, has a secret method, unknown to the rest of mankind, for reading quickly, and he knows a lot about orthopedics, and yet thirty years after the Revolution he has not managed to organize a system for baking bread and distributing beer...

#noted #2019-12-12

Eric Hobsbawm (1998): The Communist Manifesto in Perspect...

Eric Hobsbawm (1998): The Communist Manifesto in Perspective https://www.transform-network.net/en/publications/yearbook/overview/article/journal-112012/the-communist-manifesto-in-perspective/: 'It is, of course, a document written for a particular moment in history. Some of it became obsolete almost immediately.... More of it became obsolete as the time separating the readers from the date of writing lengthened. Guizot and Metternich have long retired.... The Tsar (though not the Pope) no longer exists. As for the discussion of ���Socialist and Communist Literature���, Marx and Engels themselves admitted in 1872 that even then it was out of date.... Though Marx and Engels reminded readers that the Manifesto was a historical document, out of date in many respects, they promoted and assisted the publication of the 1848 text.... Unlike Marxian economics, the ���materialist conception of history��� which underlay this analysis had already found its mature formulation in the mid-1840s. and remained substantially unchanged in later years. In this respect the Manifesto was already a defining document of Marxism. It embodied the historical vision, though its general outline remained to be filled in by fuller analysis...

...How will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it for the first time in 1998? The new reader can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as though in a single creative burst, in lapidary sentences almost naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which have become known far beyond the world of political debate: from the opening ���A spectre is haunting Europe���the spectre of Communism��� to the final ���The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win���. Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in short, apodictic paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines���in only five cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or more lines. Whatever else it is, The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature....

What will undoubtedly also strike the contemporary reader is the Manifesto���s remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character and impact of ���bourgeois society���. The point is not simply that Marx recognised and proclaimed the extraordinary achievements and dynamism of a society he detested, to the surprise of more than one later defender of capitalism against the red menace. It is that the world transformed by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world in which we live 150 years later....

Two things give the Manifesto its force. The first is its vision, even at the outset of the triumphal march of capitalism, that this mode of production was not permanent, stable, ���the end of history���, but a temporary phase.... The second is its recognition of the... bourgeoisie... [and its] miracles ascribed to it in the Manifesto.... In 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel (almost 70 per cent of it in Britain) and had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads (two-thirds of these in Britain and the USA). Historians have had no difficulty in showing that even in Britain the Industrial Revolution (a term specifically used by Engels from 1844 on) had hardly created an industrial or even a predominantly urban country before the 1850s. Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.

We now live in a world in which this transformation has largely taken place, even though readers of the Manifesto in the third millennium of the Western calendar will no doubt observe that it has advanced even further since 1998...

#noted #2019-12-10

Civil Liberties: I have always tended to be an advocate o...

Civil Liberties: I have always tended to be an advocate of "playing your position". But there are times when one's position involves looking far afield. These days, on what surveillance and information-collection mechanism are doing to our society. Here we have Marcy Wheeler saying "I told you so" about how the FBI's use of FISA for searches has long been unreasonable, and hence���if the fourth amendment has any meaning���unconstitutional:

Marcy Wheeler: How Twelve Years of Warning and Six Years of Plodding Reform Finally Forced FBI to Do Minimal FISA Oversight https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/10/12/how-twelve-years-of-warning-and-six-years-of-plodding-reform-finally-forced-fbi-to-do-minimal-fisa-oversight/: "A condemnation of how the government has been using 702 (and its predecessor PAA) for 12 years. A (partial���but thus far by far the most significant one) success of the new oversight mechanisms put in place post-Snowden. An opportunity to reform FISA���and FBI���more systematically.... 12 years after this system was first moved under FISA... we���re only now going to start getting real information.... We will learn (even more than we already learned from the two reported queries that this pertained to vetting informants) the degree to which back door searches serve not to find people who are implicated in national security crimes, but instead, people who might be coerced to help the FBI find people who are involved in national security crimes. We will learn that the oversight has been inadequate. We will finally be able to measure disproportionate impact on Chinese-American, Arab, Iranian, South Asian, and Muslim communities. DOJ will be forced to give far more defendants 702 notice. Irrespective of whether back door searches are themselves a Fourth Amendment violation (which we will only now obtain the data to discuss), the other thing this opinion shows is that for twelve years, FISA boosters have been dismissing the concerns those of us who follow closely have raised (and there are multiple other topics not addressed here). And now, after more than a decade, after a big fight from FBI, we���re finally beginning to put the measures in place to show that those concerns were merited all along...

#noted #2019-12-10

A bunch of Obama's governing not as a left-populist but a...

A bunch of Obama's governing not as a left-populist but as "Third Way" was, IMHO, bait-and-switch. And a bunch was his own incoherence: he alternated between presenting himself as a left-populist who would get things deon and as a purple-America unifier. But a bunch was the realities for power and process. This is very smart from; Henry Kraemer: "Obama ran as a populist https://twitter.com/HenryKraemer/status/1195012774633648128, & governed as something closer to Third Way. At least one big reason is that the realities of governing in a republic tend to moderate policy. Running as Third Way more or less guarantees governing as a conservative: Adam Jentleson: 'This. The Deval/Pete recasting of candidate Obama as a Third Way, unity candidate is revisionist history. He ran as an outsider attacking a broken and corrupt system...

#noted #2019-12-10

The point of the Senate majority's and of the current pol...

The point of the Senate majority's and of the current political appointees at HHS's actions here is not to create flexibility, but to make it legal to provide not-insurance: Sarah Gantz: A Philly Woman���s Broken Back and 36,000 Bill Shows How Some Health Insurance Brokers Trick Consumers into Skimpy Plans https://www.inquirer.com/health/consumer/limited-benefit-skimpy-health-plans-sales-pitch-20191114.html?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar: 'She was left with 36,000 in hospital bills that she���s still paying off. ���What the hell did I do? How did I get into this mess?��� said Martin, 54, of Horsham, recalling the panic she felt after the December 2017 fall. ���I have a broken wrist, a broken back, and I don���t have real health insurance.���... Access to these plans was limited under the Affordable Care Act, but the websites selling such plans have gotten bolder in their marketing as President Trump and free-market Republicans chip away at ACA rules, saying people need more affordable alternatives. But shopping savvy isn���t necessarily enough to protect consumers. The insurance brokers who rely on such websites for leads use scripts carefully worded to instill trust and push consumers to act quickly...

#noted #2019-12-11

Walter Womacka's Socialist "Realist" Stained Glass...

Walter Womacka Stained-Glass Restoration https://www.moz.de/kultur/artikelansicht/dg/0/1/1043774/ in the former State Council building on Berlin's Schlossplatz, now the home of the European School of Management and Technology: How the East German Government wanted to pretend it had been, was, and would be:

The German Revolution of 1919

Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg: "In Spite of All!"

Communists Resisting Nazis, and the Reichstag Fire

Russian Soldiers Rescue Germany from the Nazis

Post-WWII Reconstruction

Workers by Hand and Brain United: Farmer, Factory Worker, Architect

Young Girls Dancing

Doves of Peace

Workers of the DDR

Technologies of Full Communism

The Family Under Full Communism

#noted

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-11:Wikipedia: Gendarmenmark...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-11:

Wikipedia: Gendarmenmarkt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmenmarkt...

Nir Jaimovich &al.: A Tale of Two Workers: The Macroeconomics of Automation http://events.berkeley.edu/documents/user_uploads/Paper01122019.pdf...

Groningen Growth and Development Center: PWT 9.1 https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/...

Nick Rowe: Increased Price Flexibility is Destabilising in New Keynesian Models. (And a Price-Level Path Target is Stabilising) https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2019/12/increased-price-flexibility-is-destabilising-in-new-keynesian-models-and-a-price-level-path-target-i.html: 'It's more complicated than this, of course. Because I have over-simplified the model by assuming that the central bank has a lag of "one period", and that the only real interest rate that matters is that same "one period" real interest rate. But you get the gist...

Chartwell: Carl Benedikt Frey https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/carl-benedikt-frey/...

Wikipedia: Ahmose I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmose_I...

Financial Times: Business School Rankings 2019 http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/european-business-school-rankings-2019...

Clickspring: Reconstructing The Antikythera Mechanism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXI9KLImC4...

David Teece &al.: New Enlightenment Conference https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIg3ObdikHUdFtLCqMBfNLQ/playlists: ', Edinburgh, 2019...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-12-11