Note to Self: Is it really INBOX ZERO if one has snoozed 365 messages? Asking for a friend...
Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: "Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Someone would resurrect Enoch Powell. Just to remind folks what people thought when he was still around: http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers/cover-182. Yep. An unrepentant racist and a constant figure of fun for everyone with a head on their shoulders and anything resembling civic virtue...
Comment of the Day: Once again RJW is the first... and, I fear, perhaps the only... person on the internet to understand me: Robert Waldmann: Fascism: "'weapon-or-strong' should be 'weapon-our-strong'. Also great hyphenated fascism there. But then I read the Scruton quote. Ugh. Please don't do that again...
Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "The problem, as you note, is that, when they are right, MMTers have a whole lot of company.... They may have contributed something... but you provide no evidence that they have...
Legal Eagle: Real Lawyer Reacts to My Cousin Vinny
Wikipedia: Michael Perelman
William Shakespeare: Richard III
Carole Cadwalladr: Facebook's role in Brexit—And the Threat to Democracy: "The UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters -- and linking the same players and tactics to the 2016 US presidential election—Cadwalladr calls out the 'gods of Silicon Valley' for being on the wrong side of history and asks: Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?...
Niall Ferguson says that in order to defend intellectuals and the public sphere we should line up alongside Hungarian proto-dictator Victor Orban and his friend Roger Scruton rather than alongside George Soros, the Central European University, and... the Tory British government? There is something very wrong here. And the smart Daniel Kuehn is not amused. Nor am I. I have been around long enough to learn a thing or two, and one is that people who only find objection to what plutocrats do when they are Jewish individuals (George Soros) or institutions (Goldman Sachs) are never arguing in good faith: Daniel Kuehn: "LOL at intellectuals who have trouble with the idea that there are people out there who are critical of their ideas (possibly lots of people if they consider your ideas bad enough). If this is a stumbling block for you you might be in the wrong line of work: https://twitter.com/nfergus/status/1117233701102821377. I mean I’ll whine if someone disagrees with me just like the rest of you losers do, but demanding Article 5 treatment is awfully melodramatic even for Ferguson...
Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv: The Non-Existence of Representative Agents: "We characterize environments in which there exists a representative agent: an agent who inherits the structure of preferences of the population that she represents. The existence of such a representative agent imposes strong restrictions on individual utility functions—requiring them to be linear in the allocation and additively separable in any parameter that characterizes agents' preferences (e.g., a risk aversion parameter, a discount factor, etc.). Commonly used classes of utility functions (exponentially discounted utility functions, CRRA or CARA utility functions, logarithmic functions, etc.) do not admit a representative agent...
Aja Romano: The Essential Game of Thrones Episodes to Watch Before Season 8: "We divided our must-watch episode guide into two lists: one for the plot and one for the shocks...
This is 100% correct: Narayana Kocherlakota: U.S. Economy: Fed Needs to Start Fighting the Next Recession Now: "Its tools are limited, so the central must compensate by being aggressive: The Fed should be taking steps now to prepare.... Less firepower than in any previous recession.... What, then, can the Fed do? In my view, it needs to be much more aggressive.... If your medicine chest is nearly empty, you want to keep your patient as healthy as possible. That means cutting interest rates now to lower the unemployment rate even further.... A pre-commitment to strong growth could also help. In the last recession and ensuing slow recovery, the Fed treated its low-interest-rate policy largely as an emergency step that would be removed within the next year or two. Instead, the Fed should publicly commit now to maintain maximum stimulus after a recession... as long as the year-over-year core inflation rate remains below 2.5 percent...
Liz Hipple on where the labor market is failing—and on how we have learned about these failures from economic research, and could learn useful things about other market failures if only we spent more Money getting ourselves better data: Liz Hipple: U.S. Economic Policies That Are Pro-Work and Pro-Worker: "The Measuring Real Income Growth Act, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), would allow policymakers to see which income segments, demographic groups, and geographic areas of the country are actually experiencing economic growth by disaggregating the Gross Domestic Product statistics that the federal government produces. This is a key first step to better measuring.... There are clearly ways that policy could be doing a better job.... Unpredictable schedules, the lack of paid leave, and monopsony power are all examples of areas where research shows that breakdowns in the market...
Austan Goolsbee: You Never Know When a Recession Will Sneak Up on You: "The 2001 recession developed when the internet bubble popped.... But... the internet accounted for, at most, about 2 percent of the economy then. If we use the logic we’ve been applying to trade wars and government shutdowns, it would seem that popping the internet bubble shouldn’t have been enough to cause a recession. But it did...
As I have said, until there is a center-right that seriously intends to work to make people's lives better, there is no point to trying to construct a centrist coalition. Until, say, we have Republican policy economists who will not endorse a tax cut unless it will actually boost investment and economic growth, the baton is passed to the left: Simon Wren Lewis: Triangulation or Bipartisanship Does Not Work When One Side Goes Off the Scale: "The lesson of Brexit and Trump is if you fight a culture war and lies with just well researched and targeted policy proposals, you lose. It is better to fight a culture war with an alternative vision and popular policy proposals, and a bit of class war too...
The extremely sharp Jeremy Stein is correct here: we should be talking about positive portfolio balance effects rather than negative reaching for risk effects, unless you have concrete evidence that the people reaching for risks are assuming positions they are unqualified to evaluate: Olivier Blanchard: “Have low interest rates led to excessive risk taking?”... Jeremy Stein: “It seems pretty clear that the low interest rates (plus QE) of the last several years have led to significant downward pressure on a variety of risk premiums. Of course, all of this is to be expected, and was explicitly intended to be part of the transmission mechanism for low rates--the so-called 'portfolio balance' channel, which is a nicer and more politically correct euphemism than the 'risk-taking' or 'reaching for yield' channel...
Jonathan Portes sends us to choice quotes from a friend of Hungarian wannabe dictator Victor Urban: Roger Scruton. This is the guy whom Niall Ferguson lines up with, against George Soros and the Central European University; the rest of us rootless cosmopolites who believe in liberal virtues, the open society, and promoting and rewarding the talented whether they come with a white skin or not; and Britain's Tory government. Lots of times these days authoritarians claim to be the real liberals in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, rather than we-are-a-bundle-of-sticks-tied-with-thongs-and-thus-a-brutal-weapon-our-strong-leader-can-use-to-beat-his-enemies people. But sometimes the mask drops: Roger Scruton: (2010): The Roger Scruton Reader: "The Cumaean Sybil... is foreseeing the troubles that come from immigration.... The immigrant... travels... at the head of a determined retinue, carrying his household gods and a divine right of residence. His intention to settle is not to be brooked.... Modern immigrants don't, on the whole, behave so badly. They don't need to. They come as the heads of families, and even if the family might comprise four wives and twenty children, it arrives to a red carpet of legal privileges, eagerly unrolled by publicly funded lawyers, and to a welcome trough of welfare benefits that few indigenous citizens can claim, however much they have contributed to the common fund.... Our immigrants come... with an unbrookable intention to make a home for themselves. And if their gods dislike the indigenous rivals, they will soon make this fact known. Such predictions as [Enoch] Powell made in his speech, concerning the tipping of the demographic balance, the ghettoization of our industrial cities, and the growth of resentment among the indigenous working class have been fulfilled...
Lori Hinnant: Shock, Sadness, But No Panic: Minutes that Saved Notre Dame: "The first alarm sounded at 6:20 p.m.... For twenty-three minutes, it seemed like a false alarm. Then at 6:43 p.m. a second smoke detector went off and the fire showed its face, flickering in the wooden timbers and visible to anyone who happened to look north from Paris’ Left Bank.... At 7:49 p.m., the 19th-century spire that was the architectural masterpiece of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and his post-Revolutionary restoration broke apart and fell through the nave. The bronze weathercock tumbled, taking with it three relics sealed inside in 1935. It had been 66 minutes since the first flames were spotted. The sky above the cathedral flamed orange, and the fire lurched toward Notre Dame’s iconic towers, then slipped inside. As darkness fell, 20 firefighters climbed inside the two towers 'at great risk to their lives, to attack the fire from the inside and save the building', said Laurent Nunez, deputy interior minister.... The 20 firefighters struggled on in the towers. Red-hot embers floated down from the glowing hole where the spire once stood, settling on the blackened marble floor and the pile of debris that was all that was left of the spire.... At 11:23 p.m., the fire chief said the rest of the structure, including the cathedral’s twin bell towers, had been saved. It had been within 30 minutes of collapse...
TED Talks: "'My question to you is, "Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism?"' Watch as @carolecadwalla calls out the 'gods of Silicon Valley' for being on the wrong side of history: http://t.ted.com/OuxHYs3...
Arthur Goldhammer: Grieving for Notre Dame: "The survival of the towers, the facade, the windows, the walls, the buttresses—all this is more than I hoped for in those first moments of grief. It was as though France herself had emerged from the smoke and gloom, a survivor—hurting, naked, and vulnerable, but still France. Of course, Notre Dame herself has been through this before. When Paris was liberated in 1944, de Gaulle went to the cathedral for a Te Deum mass. The moment was captured on film by Henri Cartier-Bresson. On the night of the fire, almost 75 years later, President Macron also went to Notre Dame and announced that the damage would be repaired. In 1944 Notre Dame stood witness to the rebirth of France. In 2019 the French president stood witness to the survival of Notre Dame. One good turn deserves another...
horsesatemymoney: "Abbreviated version of prospectus: We don't make money. We probably will never make money. Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along. We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either. We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too. We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators. We don't pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities. We don't employ anyone (or we say we don't) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals. We don't actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars. We have an app but other cab companies also have apps. Current investors want to get out and so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us. Also we need more money to fund the businesses that don't make money. We are expanding into more business lines that don't make money and we need more money to fund those. We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don't worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor...
Amy Finkelstein: Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference: A Suggested Interpretation of Hendren: "In a pair of interconnected, important and impenetrable papers, Nathan Hendren has provided a framework for translating estimates of the causal effects of policies into welfare analyses of these policies. In this brief note, I describe the framework-which Hendren has named 'The Marginal Value of Public Funds' (MVPF)-and how it can be used for empirical public finance welfare analysis. I also discuss how the MVPF relates to 'traditional' public finance welfare analysis tools such as the marginal excess burden (MEB) and marginal cost of public funds (MCPF). Finally, I describe several recent empirical applications as a way of further illustrating and clarifying the approach...
David Glasner: Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur Burns Should Have Read — but Didn’t | Uneasy Money: "These mistakes all stemmed from a failure by Burns to understand the rationale of an incomes policy. Burns was not alone in that failure, which was actually widespread at the time. But the rationale for such a policy and the key to its implementation had already been spelled out cogently by Ralph Hawtrey in his 1967 diagnosis of the persistent failures of British monetary policy and macroeconomic performance in the post World War II period, failures that had also been deeply tied up in the misunderstanding of the rationale for–and the implementation of—an incomes policy...
David Glasner: Arthur Burns and How Things Fell Apart in the 1970s: "Believing the Fed incapable of controlling inflation through monetary policy, restrictive monetary policy affecting output and employment rather than wages and prices, Burns concluded that inflation could controlled only by limiting the wage increases negotiated between employers and unions. Control over wages, Burns argued, would cause inflation expectations to moderate, thereby allowing monetary policy to reduce aggregate spending without reducing output and employment. This, at any rate, was the lesson that Burns drew from the short and relatively mild recession of 1970 after he assumed the Fed chairmanship in which unemployment rose to 6 percent from less than 4 percent, with only a marginal reduction in inflation...
It looks as though declining rates of marriage and increasing rates of cohabitation among the American working class are not—whatever hordes of American Enterprise Institute funders are eager to pay people to say—in any sense "sociological breakdown", but rather economic precarity: Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett, and Matthew Stimpson: Job Quality and the Educational Gradient in Entry into Marriage and Cohabitation: "Men’s and women’s economic resources are important determinants of marriage timing.... Declining job quality and rising precarity in employment and suggests that this transformation may matter for the life course.... The 1980-1984 U.S. birth cohort from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.... Men and women in less precarious jobs–jobs with standard work schedules and jobs that provide fringe benefits–are more likely to marry. Further, differences in job quality explain a significant portion of the educational gradient in entry into first marriage. However, these dimensions of job quality are not predictive of cohabitation...
There are many, many ways of generating adverse selection effects that confound statistical studies, and very very few good instruments. Thus I have found myself always very suspicious of the whole "assessing charter schools" literature—not suspicious particularly against any one side, but just suspicious: Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, Greg Phelan, and Steven G. Rivkin (April 2018): The Evolution of Charter School Quality: "Quality dynamics among Texas charter schools from 2001-2011.... Exits, improvement of existing charter schools, and higher quality of new entrants increased charter effectiveness relative to traditional public schools.... Reduced student mobility and an increased share of charters adhering to "No Excuses"-style curricula contribute to these improvements. Although student selection into charter schools becomes more favorable over time in terms of prior achievement and behavior, such compositional improvements appear to contribute little to the charter sector gains. Moreover, accounting for student composition in terms of prior achievement and behavior has only a small effect on estimates of the higher average quality of "No Excuses" schools...
I am still recovering from my joint appearance at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club with Steve Moore, and my having to listen to an extraordinary number of things from his mouth that simply were not true. It is draining to find oneself thinking over and over again: "But this is different than you said last year" and "but that prediction will be so obviously wrong in six months". Menzie China has a similar reaction: Menzie Chinn: Why Isn’t Stephen Moore Still Bragging about Coal As #1?: "Recall from July 2017, when Stephen Moore wrote an article entitled 'When It Comes To Electric Power, Coal Is No. 1'? No more. Now, lying has never been an impediment to Mr. Moore claiming something that was untrue (see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] )—but in this case perhaps it’s just so clearly untrue, he was chastened. So much for “winning” (coal edition). Not that I’m complaining: http://econbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/powergenshares-1.png
The empirical evidence so far seems to be telling us that policies prohibiting employers from knowing early about applicants' criminal records may be leading to employers not looking at all at young Black men. If this holds up, it would be very distressing and suggest strongly that such policies are truly counterproductive: Jennifer L. Doleac: Empirical Evidence on the Effects of "Ban the Box": "I have prepared this written testimony to review existing empirical evidence on policies that prohibit employers from asking job applicants about their criminal records until late in the hiring process...
I confess that this is not a change: this is what we had before Trump: Dani Rodrik: Peaceful Coexistence 2.0: "China has little patience for arguments that its exports have been responsible for significant whiplash in US labor markets or that some of its firms are stealing technological secrets. It would like the US to remain open to Chinese exports and investment. Yet China’s own opening to world trade was carefully managed and sequenced, to avoid adverse impacts on employment and technological progress.... Peaceful coexistence would require that... China... have a free hand to conduct its industrial policies and financial regulations, in order to build a market economy with distinctive Chinese characteristics. The US would be free to protect its labor markets from social dumping and to exercise greater oversight over Chinese investments that threaten technological or national security objectives...
#noted #weblogs
This post first appeared on Bradford-delong.com: Grasping Reality With The Invisible Hand..., please read the originial post: here
