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

Jerome H. Powell: Monetary Policy in a Changing Economy: "Analysts talk about... u* (pronounced "u star") is the natural rate of unemployment, r* ("r star") is the neutral real rate of interest, and ��* ("pi star") is the inflation objective. According to the conventional thinking, policymakers should navigate by these stars...

Josh Marshall: Whelan Nutbar Twitter Thread Preserved for Posterity: "We still have more questions than answers about Ed Whelan���s bizarre twitter thread that accused another Kavanaugh classmate of attacking Prof. Blasey Ford and roiled the already embattled nomination. So for those who didn���t see or would like to read through it again for clues to what happened, here���s the whole thing...

Michael R. Strain: The Economics and Emotions Behind Slow Wage Growth: "why does wage growth continue to be so tepid? As unemployment falls and the number of open jobs increases, businesses should have to increase pay in order to attract increasingly scarce available workers as well as retain the employees they have...

GDP has its place in our national public-sphere conversation because a new number is released roughly once a month���each quarter of the year has its own GDP number, and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis releases "advance", "second", and "third" estimates for each quarter, and then there are benchmarking revisions. To attain an equal place in public-sphere consciousness, the distributional national accounts component would have to appear also once a month. And it is not clear to me how to do that: Equitable Growth: Measuring U.S. economic growth: "The measurement of GDP has fostered a national fixation on 'growing the pie' that ignores how growth is distributed...

Binyamin Applebaum: Economics as a Professional Vocation: "I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can���t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy...

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Wage Growth Should Be Much Stronger by Now Given Low Jobless Rates: "There's a simple way to tell the US job market is not as strong as it appears.... 'The definition of full employment is low- and moderate-wage workers actually get raises," said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. 'We are not at full employment yet'...

Sara Boboltz and Emily Peck: Yale Students To Prof Who Denies Coaching Kavanaugh Clerks: You're Lying: "Yale Law School professor Amy Chua strongly denied that she told students that Brett Kavanaugh, now a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court,��liked his female law clerks to have a certain feminine appearance, in a statement emailed to the Yale Law community on Saturday...

Wigner has many friends, and they can disagree: Lidia del Rio: Journal club: Frauchiger-Renner no-go theorem for single-world interpretations of quantum theory: "In this talk I will go over the recent paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, "Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent" (arXiv:1604.07422)...

Rob Johnson and George Soros: A Better Bailout Was Possible: "A critical opportunity was missed when the burden of post-crisis adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors.... When President Barack Obama���s administration arrived, one of us (Soros) repeatedly appealed to Summers... [for] equity injection into fragile financial institutions and... writ[ing] down mortgages to a realistic market value.... Summers objected that ... such a policy reeked of socialism and America is not a socialist country...

Duncan Black: Who Talks Like This: "I have some opinions about elite law-and The Law as a "scholarly" endeavor-which I might share sometime after a few lines of coke (joke), but something which drives me nuts is how they all talk about each other in terms of 'giant intellects' and 'intellectual prowess' and 'my friend, the jurist, has always impressed me with his deep intellect'...

Paul Krugman: The Careerism and De Facto Soft Corruption of the Center_: "given Kavanaugh's record (sexual assault aside) and the Whelan stunt it's now clear that the right-wing judicial establishment is full of charlatans and cranks.... What's different is how respectfully the judicial crazies have been treated by the non-right-wing legal establishment...

Women of Yale: Open Letter from Women of Yale in Support of Deborah Ramirez: "We stand behind Deborah Ramirez, Yale ���87, and with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. These two women have come forward with grave allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale graduate...

Statement from James Roche: "I was Brett Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale University in the Fall of 1983. We shared a two-bedroom unit in the basement of Lawrence Hall on the Old Campus. Despite conditions, Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year. We talked at night as freshman roommates do and I would see him as he returned from nights out friends. It is from this experience that I concluded that although Brett was normally reserved, he was a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time...

Brett Kavanaugh: A Multiple Train Wreck in Many Dimensions: Monday Smackdown

Monday Smackdown: Things from His Georgetown Prep Yearbook Brett Kavanaugh Should Be Asked About This Week...

Yale Students To Prof Who Denies Coaching Kavanaugh Clerks: You're Lying | HuffPost

Why Would Anybody Sane Ever, Ever Choose Brett Kavanaugh Over Amy Barrett?

Some Fairly-Recent Links:

Peter Norvig: A Concrete Introduction to Probability (using Python)
James Gorman: Parrots Think They���re So Smart. Now They���re Bartering Tokens for Food
Paul Moses: Tackling the Wrong Problem : "Pope Benedict XVI���s Removal of Bishop William Morris...
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes on the "Euthanasia of the Rentier"
Rachel Feintzig: Tax Change Helps Executives Afford Pricier Planes : "The recent changes to the tax code are giving business executives a new perk: the opportunity to deduct the entirety of a corporate-jet purchase.... The price of a new or used airplane purchased by a company can be a 100% write-off against its earnings. That is a major change...
Robert Farley: The Queen Elizabeth Class Battleships Were Among the Best Ever Built. What If They Never Happened?
Erik Bergl��f: The Evolution of Globalization : "Around the turn of the century, critics of trade and capital-market liberalization had good reason to worry that emerging and developing economies would fall further behind the developing world. But the opposite happened, and now the world must worry about the trajectory of advanced economies and the fraying of multilateral arrangements...
Adair Turner: Japan���s Successful Economic Model by Adair Turner : "Japan���s GDP growth lags most other developed economies, and will likely continue to do so as the population slowly declines. But what matters for human welfare is GDP per capita, and on this front, the country excels...
Very, very, very, very smart: Brad Setser: Three Sudden Stops and a Surge : "Fundamentally, the crisis was a crisis of confidence in the health of the balance sheets of the great financial houses of the United States and Europe.... The line between banks and shadow banks was thin, it turned out...
Martin Sandbu: Salzburg Changes Nothing : "[May] far from giving up on Chequers, will be prepared to make further concessions on the specifics to gain agreement from the EU27 on the plan���s basic principle.... Britain... will have to sign up to a permanent customs union with the EU in all but name, and accept the full force of European jurisdiction in everything to do with production and trade.... It would be a good deal for the EU for its regulatory authority to be accepted by such a big third country...
Tim Duy: Fed Interest-Rate Debate Misses the Bigger Picture : "It���s better to let economic conditions dictate when to pause the monetary tightening process...
Olla Cocina : "Downtown San Jose Mexican Restaurant in the historic San Pedro Square...
Benjamin Wittes: Brett Kavanaugh Bears the Burden of Proof : "The question isn���t whether he can win confirmation���it���s whether he can defend against the charge he faces in a manner that is both persuasive and honorable...

Wall of Shame:

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...

WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...

Shame on the Editors of Vanity Fair!: Highlighted/Hoisted from Two Years Ago