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

Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "The rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work, a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from ���rms... #labormarket #equitablegrowth

Is there any intellectual and moral crime against journalism a New York Times employee can commit that will get him bounced? It appears not: Tom Friedman: Saudi Arabia���s Arab Spring, at Last: "The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia... its own Arab Spring... led from the top down by the country���s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.... If it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success���but only a fool would not root for it... #journamalism

Wikipedia: Aztec Myth: "Ometeotl gave birth to four children, the four Tezcatlipocas, who each preside over one of the four cardinal directions.[citation needed] Over the West presides the White Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, the god of light, mercy and wind. Over the South presides the Blue Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. Over the East presides the Red Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec, the god of gold, farming and Spring time. And over the North presides the Black Tezcatlipoca, also called simply Tezcatlipoca, the god of judgment, night, deceit, sorcery and the Earth... #security

Lisa D. Cook is worried that the quantity of Big Data cannot compensate for its low quality. Statistics gives us lots of power with representative random samples. Nothing can give us power without the tools to do what representativeness does: Lisa D. Cook: @drlisadcook: "'Without taking data quality into account, population inferences with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox... #statistics #riseoftherobots

Suresh Naidu, Eric A. Posner, and E. Glen Weyl: Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power: "Labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation... #monopoly

Vijay Govindarajan, Shivaram Rajgopal, and Anup Srivastava: Why We Need to Update Financial Reporting for the Digital Era: "The market caps of just four companies, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, now exceed $3 trillion... #finance

Scott Jaschik: Author discusses his new book on anti-intellectualism and fascism: "A country that is not fascist may still experience fascist politics... efforts to divide society and demonize groups.... How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley... #books #neofascism

Matt O'Brien: Inequality is worse than we know. The super-rich really do avoid a lot of taxes: "On the legal end of the spectrum... companies shift their profits to show up in low-tax jurisdictions.... According to Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and his co-researchers... as much as 40 percent of all multinational profits and 50 percent of U.S. ones... #inequality #equitablegrowth

A search model that (a) produces the right cyclical elasticity of wages but (b) does not produce the right cyclical volatility of employment has the wrong microfoundations. It is producing the right cyclical elasticity of wages because it is producing the wrong cyclical volatility of employment. Thus I think this approach is pretty much tapped out: Christopher A Pissarides: The Unemployment Volatility Puzzle: Is Wage Stickiness the Answer?: "An equilibrium search model... focus on the model���s failure to match the observed cyclical volatility of unemployment... #labormarket #monetaryeconomics

Martin Wolf: How To Avoid the Next Financial Crisis: "The proximate explanations for the huge shortfalls in output were collapses in investment.... This weak investment must also help explain low rates of innovation, which is particularly visible in directly-hit countries. New technology is often embodied in new equipment... #greatrecession #finance

I endorse Steve Teles here���except that I have a hard time calling any book that I learned as much as I learned from MacLean's Democracy in Chains "very poor". MacLean should engage Teles and Farrell on the merits. And she can: When Farrell and Teles rule out-of-order James Buchanan's memos on the grounds that "correspondence with... donors... is inherently problematic... as a guide to underlying intent..." they are guilty of strongly motivated reasoning. Perhaps your claims to donors that you are in the business of trying to create an ideological, extremist, and partisan movement to roll back the New Deal and destroy the "Labor Monopoly Movement" are "problematic". Perhaps your claims to liberal scholars that you are in the business of honest intellectual inquiry are "problematic". MacLean ignores the second. Teles and Farrell ignore the first. IMHO, MacLean is closer to right on this point. But MacLean's unwillingness to engage the substance here and elsewhere is, I think, characterized as simply stupid at best: Steve Teles: A Response to Nancy MacLean: "Wearing my scholar���s hat, I came to the same impression as Professors Berman, Farrell and Burns���that Prof. MacLean had written a very poor piece of scholarship... #publicchoice

Economic agents as harried triage nurses grabbing for an immediate diagnosis from the salient features of the case in front of them; Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: Diagnostic Expectations: "Diagnostic expectations are represented by a linear combination of the rational expectations of ��������+1 held at ���� and at ���� ��� 1.... It is not that decision-makers compute rational expectations and combine them.... Rather, oversampling representative future states yields the linear combination in (4). This formula reflects a ���kernel of truth��� logic: diagnostic expectations differ from rational expectations by a shift in the direction of the information received at ����, given by [��������(��������+1) ��� �����������1(��������+1)]... #expectations #economicsgoneright

It is not going to happen. The throne is not going to be kept warm. The American century-and-a-half of potential and century of actual global diplomatic preeminence is over. The question is whether there will be no hegemony, a Chinese hegemony, or an inner alliance of western Europe plus Canada, Japan, and Australia that set the pace: Dan Froomkin: Daalder and Lindsay Say: U.S. Allies Should Keep The Global Leadership 'Throne' Warm For Trump's Successor: "Ivo H. Daalder, who served as Barack Obama���s ambassador to NATO, and James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, are out with a new book:��The Empty Throne: America���s Abdication of Global Leadership. They outline their plan for an interregnum in a companion piece entitled��The Committee to Save the World Order��published by Foreign Affairs... #security

Marshall Berman: All That's Solid Melts into Air https://delong.typepad.com/files/berman_marshall_all_that_is_solid_melts_into_air_the_experience_of_modernity.pdf
Karen S. Freeman: How to View Web Pages on Apple Watch in Watchos 5 : "Yes, you can access web pages on your Apple Watch now...
Wikipedia: Darien scheme
Caroline M. Yoachim: Carnival Nine : #sciencefiction
James Nicoll: The Company of Strangers : "The Ginger��Star���Leigh��Brackett, Skaith, book��1... #sciencefiction
Steven Pulvirent: A Week On The Wrist: Apple Watch Series 4 : "The future of the Apple Watch is coming into focus���and I like what I'm starting to see...
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0307763781 #books
Merrill M. Flood: Experimental Games
Paul Romer (1989): Endogenous Technological Change : "Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good...
Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth : "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...
William D. Nordhaus (1996): Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not : "During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago...
William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change : "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...
Nick Stern et al.: The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change .

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