Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

From the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma's Economists' View continues to be the single best link aggregator in economic policy and theoretical economics: read him, and the things he links to, and in addition read:

If you do not make the Economic Policy Institute one of your trusted information intermediaries, you are doing it wrong. Badly wrong.

I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What���s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...

I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is being done in academic economics���even in macro. I agree with the Economist that academic economists are more-or-less neutralized at best in the public sphere, with bad actors, bad methodology, and bad ideologues drowning out information. I agree that economics should do a much better job of policing its own internal community and standing within it via what my colleague Alan Auerbach calls "obloquy". I agree that economics should do a much better job of managing its discursive modes, in both empirical and theoretical work. But I do wish the Economist would turn its microscope on what purports to be economic journalism more: Noah Smith: OK, so The Economist has an ongoing series of articles about the shortcomings of the economics profession: "https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740403-first-series-columns-professions-shortcomings-economists...

The awesomely smart and industrious Chye-Ching Huang of the CBPP praises Greg Leiserson's must-read guide to understanding last December's tax bill. There was space for a growth-promoting corporate tax cut that did not widen income inequality that much. That space was occupied, instead, by something that manages to increase inequality sharply while reducing projected national income���three steps backward for equitable growth.

The excellent John Schmitt used to work at WCEG: Josh Bivens, Lawrence Mishel, and John Schmitt: It���s not just monopoly and monopsony: How market power has affected American wages: "Concentration adversely affect[s] wages at a point in time... [has] grown over time... [but cannot] by itself explain a significant portion of the change in wage trends in recent decades.... Market concentration is not the only source of power���particularly employer power.... Even unchanged employer power... can play a role in growing wage suppression and inequality if it is accompanied by a collapse of workers��� market power..."

Nick Bunker provides an excellent tweetstorm on the issues involved in thinking about slack, wage growth, unemployment, and employment. He also mourns for the pre-twitter bite web: "remember blogposts? Those were cool!" It is certainly the case that Twitter has devoted zero���nay, less than zero���effort to building tools for curating tweet call-and-response episodes into anything that Plato would recognize as a dialogue...

The extremely thoughtful Miles Kimball highlights my very brief talk about who the market works for from last fall's INET conference in Edinburgh...

Increasingly it looks to me like a career-interruption and child-raising penalty, as if institutions designed to figure out which men are committed to the job and are thus worth paying to keep are misapplied to women. Alan Greenspan a generation and a half ago saw a market opportunity for his forecasting firm to get more productive workers for the salary dollar. But it looks as though he was and is a substantial exception: Sarah Jane Glynn: Gender wage inequality: What we know and how we can fix it: "Women are still severely limited by gender pay inequality.... Close to half of all currently employed workers (46.7 percent), yet... average earnings of... full time, year round is 80.5 percent of men..."

Ralph Atkins and David Crow: Top Novartis lawyer quits after payments to Trump aide: "Felix Ehrat to ���take personal responsibility��� for agreement with Michael Cohen.... Mr Jimenez said. 'We should have considered the reputational risk over the financial risk, and we should have just ended the contract right then, pretty much no matter what it was going to cost us. But we didn���t do that'..."

Remember?:

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

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...

Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."

Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

Some Fairly-Recent Links:

Thomas Philippon: Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive?
Sean Illing: Did Trump���s lawyer obstruct justice by floating pardons? 11 experts weigh in. - Vox: "Trump���s lawyer secretly floated pardons for Manafort and Flynn. He might have crossed a line..."
Gerard Roland: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF YINGYI QIAN AND CHENGGANG XU TO ECONOMIC SCIENCE
Yingyi Qian
Ariel Kalil: Child development and parental engagement in rich and poor households
Paul Krugman: Putting the Ex-Con in Conservatism: "Massey Energy... Don Blankenship... sent to prison for conspiring to violate mine safety standards... appears to have a real chance at becoming the Republican candidate for senator from West Virginia.... G.O.P. politicians tend disproportionately to be con men (and in some cases, con women).... And the party���s base consists disproportionately of the easily conned..."
Anki
Ben A. Barres: Does gender matter?: "The suggestion that women are not advancing in science because of innate inability is being taken seriously by some high-profile academics. Ben A. Barres explains what is wrong with the hypothesis..."
Information Is Beautiful: Rhetological Fallacies���A list of Logical Fallacies & Rhetorical Devices with examples
Val Dusek: SOCIOBIOLOGY SANITIZED: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND GENIC SELECTIONISM DEBATES: "Hereditarians suffered the embarrassment of the exposure of the later twin studies of Sir Cyril Burt as likely frauds.... Thomas Bouchard and colleagues... accounts of his research in all major news magazines and papers in the US... introduced a segment on telepathy among twins for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.... Evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker (who contrast themselves with humanists by touting their own devotion to lawful
Wikipedia: Zhao Ziyang
Library Guides at UC Berkeley:

Jim Church: Introduction - GPP 115: Global Poverty: "Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium: Introduction..."
Jim Church: Philanthrocapitalism - GPP 115: Global Poverty - Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium - Library Guides at UC Berkeley: "Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium: Philanthrocapitalism..."

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Punishing America First: "Trump to Iowa: You���ll have to suffer while I force Xi Jinping to give in: Donald Trump and his advisers spent much of Friday telling everyone that the U.S. is not in a trade war with China, but investors weren���t buying it..."
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: Interest Rate Rule Utility

Wikipedia: Taylor rule
Jared Bernstein (2016): Important new findings on inflation and unemployment from the new ERP
John Williams: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco | Three Questions on R-star: "Low r-star is a global phenomenon, is likely to be very persistent, and is not confined only to safe assets..."

Ken White: The Search of Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen's Office: What We Can Infer Immediately
Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine
Rowan Langford: Stats Models vs SKLearn for Linear Regression
Statsmodels Examples
Allen Downey: Probably Overthinking It

Think Stats
Think Bayes
Think Python
Think Complexity

Manton Reece: Micro.blog
Gravatar: Globally Recognized Avatars
Jo Marie Scaglia: Caffetteria
raindrop drop top
Martha Stewart: Peel-and-Eat Shrimp
Augie's Montreal Deli: "Served on Metropolis Bakery Deli Rye Bread, with Uncle���s Famous Pickles, and choice of yellow or spicy brown mustard..."
Katie McDonough: Jezebel Regrets Its Decision to Hire Cannibal Witch as Writer-at-Large: "..."
Steve M.: THERE'S NO REASON TO LISTEN TO CONSERVATIVE THINKERS, BUT EDITORS WANT THEM MORE THAN EVER: "The mainstream media has spent so many years insisting that... the extremism of talk radio and Fox, Gingrichian bomb-throwing, the Bush push for the Iraq War, torture, disastrously hands-off financial regulation, and disenfranchisement of non-whites, and then Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the norm-shattering GOP Congress of the Obama years... was fine. Surely it'll be fine again..."
TidBITS: Everything You Need to Know about the TidBITS 2018 Infrastructure
Marion Laboure et al.: The Rise of Silicon China: "Key features of Chinese history and culture have put it in a position to become the global leader in artificial-intelligence technologies, surpassing even the tech giants of Silicon Valley..."
Sara Benincasa: Better Headlines For A WaPo WASP
A Waspy Chick: How Come Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me?
Emma Adler: The Man Without a Brain
Michael Wolff: : "Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion..."
Ian Millhiser: The Supreme Court was itching to strike down a partisan gerrymander today, but has no idea how: "There are almost certainly five votes to strike down Maryland's gerrymander, but there's no clarity about how the Court will do it..."
Orsetta Causa and Mikkel Hermansen: Income redistribution through taxes and transfers: "Taxes and transfers are less effective at reducing inequality today than they were in the mid-1990s. This drop in effectiveness has largely been driven by declining cash transfers, with a smaller, more heterogeneous role for personal income taxes..."
Joseph MacKay and Christopher David LaRoche: Why Is There No Reactionary International Theory?: "A field that ignores reaction as such may be blind to reactionary political practice. This blindness in turn weakens the responses scholars can offer..."
Sushi Japanese Restaurant Kui Shin Bo
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Okonomiyaki (Japanese Cabbage Pancake) Recipe: "The shredded or chopped cabbage in the base is a given, but beyond that, you can add whatever you'd like to the batter. Once you've got a few Japanese staples in your pantry (all of which have a shelf life of forever), making it at home is cheap, quick, easy, and filling..."
Gideon Rachman: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the Lure of the Strongman
Robert Shiller (2017): Narrative Economics: "The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions...