Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

1. This may well be the most important paper we publish this year: 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...

2. Kate Bahn puts her finger on something that has long, long bothered me about the labor market literature on inequality. "Good jobs" are jobs that are well-paid. "Respected occupations" are occupations that lead to good jobs. And the "intrinsic" characteristics of the work have very little to do with whether a Job is well-paid or not, and thus little to do with whether it is a "good job" or not: Kate Bahn: @lipstickecon: "This FRB report concludes that declining prime-age LFP is due to the decline in "traditional blue-collar jobs" without deconstructing what made these 'traditional' jobs good-unions...

3. Equitable Growth alumnus John Schmitt sends us to Lawrence Mishel: Further Evidence That the Tax Cuts Have Not Led to Widespread Bonuses, Wage or Compensation Growth: "Following the bill’s passage, a number of corporations made conveniently-timed announcements that their workers would be getting raises or bonuses.... Newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data allow us to examine nonproduction bonuses in the first two quarters of 2018...

4. Arindrajit Dube and friends have a pick-up discussion on how to characterize the impact of employer monopsony power: Arindrajit Dube: @arindube: "I think growing evidence suggets "laissez faire" equilibrium is monopsonistic. So shocks like de-unionization, outsourcing and eroding wage norms can push down pay in ways hard to understand with competitive lab mkts. But the shock may not be increased concentration itself...

5. 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...

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

1. Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Universal Basic Income or Universal Living Wage?: "The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they pay enough to provide a decent standard of living.... A universal basic income (UBI) would be both regressive and prohibitively expensive. Yet the idea continues to attract a motley crew...

2. 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...

3. 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...

4. I highlighted this two years ago. I am highlighting it again, as I think it has not received the attention it deserves. Ernest Liu: Industrial Policies in Production Networks: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of interventions?...

5. Paul Krugman: What Do We Actually Know About the Economy?: "Among macroeconomists, the self-criticism seems to me to be mainly too narrow: people berate themselves for, say, not giving financial markets a bigger role in their models, but few have done what they should, which is to question the whole direction macroeconomics has gone these past four decades or so...

6. Josh Marshall: @joshtpm: "Even before this came up, Brett Kavanaugh seems to lie a lot. The stuff with the Manny Miranda hacking scandal is what really stood out to me. Aside from denying the central accusations, he’s even more obviously lying about the ‘Renate alumni’ stuff...

7. Beatrice Cherrier: @Undercoverhist: "The second part of this article is totally accurate, but omitting key information in the first part seriously weakens the overall message (any resemblance to other Duke historians…) The CHOPE received money from conservative Pope and Earhart, which funded, among others, Van Horn’s anti-Hayekian research (https://t.co/v43aoW6L3N). Then got a large grant from progressive INET (https://t.co/mhYbtnkLPO) which funded, among other, Austrian research...

8. David Warsh: Situations Wanted: "The mood at Duke has been gloomy since its economics department failed to make a place last year for Steven Medema, of the University of Colorado at Denver, in a quarrel over resources.  Both sides became the loser. Medema, an expert on the law and economics movement and a stalwart of the discipline, was expected to join professors Bruce Caldwell and Kevin Hoover in the core faculty of the Center for the History of Political Economy...

9. Dan Drezner: The world is laughing at President Trump: "That is bad news for America.... Trump claimed that he intended to inspire the laughter, but that dog won’t hunt...

10. Silvia Merler: Economy of Intangibles: "Over the past 20 years, there has been a steady rise in the importance of intangible investments.... Intangibles share four economic features: scalability, sunkenness, spillovers, and synergies. Haskel and Westlake argue that–taken together–these measurements and economic properties might help us understand secular stagnation...