Links and Such for the Week of October 1, 2017

Must-Reads:

Ben Thompson: Defining Aggregators: "Value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones... https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
Josh Barro: Trump, GOP tax plan is looming political disaster: "President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, hours before the announcement of the latest Republican tax proposal, that... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-plan-political-disaster-2017-9
Kieran Healy (2015): America's Ur-Choropleths: "Choropleth maps... showing various distributions geographically... make it easy to present a geographical distribution to insinuate an explanation... https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/

Should-Reads:

Adam Jentleson: The Myth of Mitch McConnell, Political Super-Genius: Cynicism is the lifeblood of McConnell���s career... http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/28/myth-mitch-mcconnell-genius-master-senate-215656
Henry Farrell: Chelsea Manning and Harvard : "Elmendorf describes... [what] I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about [fellowships]... http://crookedtimber.org/2017/09/18/chelsea-manning-and-harvard/
Ricardo Hausmann: Making the Future Work for Us: "To pessimists, the introduction of... general-purpose technologies ��� including 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things ��� threatens the demand for labor... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/technology-future-of-work-by-ricardo-hausmann-2017-09
Maximillian Kasy: Quantitative Methods in Economics: "Part I: 1. Linear predictors and least squares fit..." https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/kasy/files/1126syllabuskasyfall2017.pdf
Anton Howes: Why study Economic History?: "What is Economic History? It is about asking some of the biggest and most interesting questions imaginable... https://medium.com/@antonhowes/why-study-economic-history-ef747767be25
Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���Triennial data release��� edition : "The rise in U.S. income inequality is well known by now... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/weekend-reading-triennial-data-release-edition/
Nick Bunker: An update on the state of wealth inequality in the United States: "The Federal Reserve yesterday released the 2016 version of its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/an-update-on-the-state-of-wealth-inequality-in-the-united-states/
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: "Off the Record": "I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016593.html#4335396
Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Emil Verner: How do Credit Supply Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Evidence from the United States in the 1980s: "Does an expansion in credit supply affect the economy by increasing productive capacity, or by boosting demand?... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23802
Jake VanderPlas: Reproducible Data Analysis in Jupyter: "Jupyter notebooks provide a useful environment for interactive exploration of data... http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2017/03/03/reproducible-data-analysis-in-jupyter/
Carol Christ: Chancellor's Letter to the Berkeley Campus Community on Free Speech: "Dear campus community, The past several weeks have been trying ones for Berkeley...
William Faulkner (1948): Intruder in the Dust http://amzn.to/2wZt4Ms: "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
Christopher Jeffery: Fed���s [John] Williams floats co-ordinated shift from 2% targets: "Williams... believes 2% inflation targets adopted by most of the developed world���s central banks will prove to be suboptimal over the next 10��years... https://www.centralbanking.com/central-banks/monetary-policy/operating-framework/3301501/feds-williams-floats-co-ordinated-shift-from-2-targets
MEMORANDUM FROM: Steven Law. DATE: .September 26, 2017 SUBJECT: Alabama and the New Republican Primary Battlefield: "Although special elections are notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult to extrapolate from... http://delong.typepad.com/rlc.pdf
Danny Yagan: : Employment hysteresis from the great recession: "This paper uses U.S. local areas as a laboratory to test whether the Great Recession depressed 2015 employment... http://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/employment-hysteresis-great-recession/
Jessica Fulton: Income inequality and economic mobility remain defined largely by race and ethnicity in the United States/span>: "The Congressional Black Caucus held its Annual Legislative Conference... http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/value-added/income-inequality-and-economic-mobility-remain-defined-largely-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-united-states/
Michael Jordan: On Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science: "The rapid growth in the size and scope of datasets in science and technology has created a need for novel foundational perspectives on data analysis that blend the inferential and computational sciences... https://bids.berkeley.edu/resources/videos/computational-thinking-inferential-thinking-and-data-science
CBPP: Tax Reform Briefs: "Congress is expected to consider legislation to make major changes to the tax code this year. Here is a series of two-page explanations of key issues in tax reform... https://www.cbpp.org/tax-reform-briefs
Robert C. Feenstra and Akira Sasaharab: The ���China Shock���, Exports and U.S. Employment: A Global Input-Output Analysis: "We quantify the impact on U.S. employment from imports and exports during 1995-2011, using the World Input-Output Database... http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/Papers/Feenstra_Sasahara.pdf
Rachel Gillett and Anaele Pelisson: 12 jobs robots are already taking over: "Talk to any futurist, and they'll tell you that robots are coming for our jobs... http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/jobs-replaced-by-robots-2017-9/
Noah Smith: The Racism of the Rust Belt: "Wow. This article about the Rust Belt is amazing... https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/911318880500408320
Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart: The Fear Factor in Today���s Interest Rates: "The theory of ���rare disaster risk��� has progressed considerably in recent years, owing to the work of the Harvard economist Robert Barro... https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/north-korea-fear-drives-low-interest-rates-by-carmen-reinhart-and-vincent-reinhart-2017-09
Alan Beattie: As they unwind QE, central banks must come clean about inflation: "The Fed has tightened policy and the BoE is now prefiguring a rise. Neither can point at serious signs of inflationary pressure... https://www.ft.com/content/a5dbddfa-9ebe-11e7-9a86-4d5a475ba4c5
Blakeley B. McShane et al.: Abandon Statistical Significance: "The status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold... http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/abandon.pdf

Links:

Matthew Yglesias: Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump coming real: "A real crisis comes and Trump can���t handle it.... Trump���s instinct so far is to turn the island���s devastation into another front in culture war politics..." https://www.vox.com/2017/10/1/16390006/puerto-rico-trump
Hallie Jo Gist:
EXAMINING THE 'GOLDIN' RATIO: REPRESENTATION BY GENDER AND RACE OF UC BERKELEY ECON UNDERGRADUATES http://calwomenofecon.weebly.com/news_blog
Jay Shambaugh et al.: Thirteen Facts about Wage Growth: "The U.S. economy has experienced long-term real wage stagnation and a persistent lack of
economic progress for many workers..." http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/thirteen_facts_wage_growth.pdf
Jared Bernstein: Tax roundup: Lies, lies, and more lies: "A rough typology of the lies upon which the sales job for the Republicans��� wasteful, regressive tax cut is based..." http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/tax-roundup-lies-lies-and-more-lies/
Jared Bernstein: Real GDP's still growing at ~2% on trend http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/real-gdps-still-growing-at-2-on-trend/
Nicola Twilley: A Field Farmed Only by Drones: "The Hands Free Hectare team envisions... farmers... programming their vehicles from a central mission control and using the time saved to focus on areas that need extra attention. ���The actual driving of a tractor���I didn���t miss that at all', Abell said. 'And, by not spending all your time going in a straight line on auto-steer, it gives you more time to learn about your crop and hopefully manage it better.'..." https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-field-farmed-only-by-drones
Adam Tooze: Blitzkrieg manque�� or a new kind of war? Interpreting the Allied Victory in the Normandy campaign https://www.adamtooze.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Tooze-D-Day-A-New-Kind-of-War-1-2.pdf
Bloomberg: The New Republican Tax Plan Still Isn't a Plan: "The so-called 'framework' for tax reform has more gaps than substance.... President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have once again succeeded in avoiding an actual plan. At best, it's the start of a process that might conceivably lead somewhere..." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-27/the-new-republican-tax-plan-still-isn-t-a-plan
Noah Smith: Economists Have No Use for Republican Tax Cuts: "They don't boost growth; they just add to deficits..." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-28/economists-have-no-use-for-republican-tax-cuts
David Anderson: CHIP reauthorization https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/09/27/chip-reauthorization/
Matthew Yglesias: Trump's plan to sell tax cuts for the rich is to pretend they're not happening https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/27/16368612/trump-tax-cut-principles
Christopher Jeffery: Eichengreen supports calls for FOMC to hold more press conferences: "Governance expert says Fed is one of the most transparent central banks in the world but improved consistency of format around FOMC meetings 'makes sense'..." https://www.centralbanking.com/central-banks/monetary-policy/operating-framework/3300346/eichengreen-supports-calls-for-fomc-to-hold-more-press-conferences
Sean Illing: A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes: "'Not giving a shit takes the wind out of an asshole's sails,' [says] Robert Sutton... author of... _The Asshole Survival Guide+..." https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/9/26/16345476/stanford-psychologist-art-of-avoiding-assholes
Heidi N. Moore: The secret cost of pivoting to video: "A pivot to video is really a 'pivot to declining pageviews', as Digiday noted..." https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pivot-to-video.php
Addy Baird: Graham and Cassidy were asked why they���re defunding Planned Parenthood. Their answers were ridiculous: "Sen. Graham invoked fake Planned Parenthood sting videos during the CNN town hall debate..." https://thinkprogress.org/graham-cassidy-planned-parenthood-d93045a84462/
Saqib Shah: Twitter workarounds give anyone 280 characters to play with https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/27/twitter-workarounds-280-characters-tweet/
Josh Barro: Trump tax plan: 'Doubled standard deduction' is misleading http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-plan-doubled-standard-deduction-2017-9
Tim Duy: "This policy stance looks inconsistent with the downward revisions to projections
of inflation and the neutral rate: under the Fed���s
earlier reaction function, the combination of the two
would drive down rate projections..." https://blogs.uoregon.edu/econforum/files/2017/09/FedWatch092517-28l02hi.pdf
Carola Conces Binder: Federal Reserve Communication and the Media https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2835574
Cathy O'Neil: My TED talk is live! https://mathbabe.org/2017/08/22/my-ted-talk-is-live/
Dylan Scott: Graham-Cassidy now guts Obamacare even more: "Senate Republicans are desperately hunting for votes for repeal..." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/25/16360550/graham-cassidy-revised-explained
Charlie Warzel: Mark Zuckerberg Can���t Stop You From Reading This Because The Algorithms Have Already Won: "And the machines are running the asylum..." https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/mark-zuckerberg-cant-stop-you-from-reading-this-because-the
��scar Jord��, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor et al.: JORD��-SCHULARICK-TAYLOR MACROHISTORY DATABASE http://www.macrohistory.net/data/#DownloadData | http://www.macrohistory.net/JST/JSTdocumentationR2.pdf | http://delong.typepad.com/data-table-1-1.csv | http://delong.typepad.com/variable-description-table-1.csv | http://delong.typepad.com/creative-commons-license-table-1.csv
Economist: Psychology beats business training when it comes to entrepreneurship: "Among small-business owners in Togo, at least..." https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729454-among-small-business-owners-togo-least-psychology-beats-business-training-when-it-comes
Andrew Gelman: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science http://andrewgelman.com/