DeLong: Long Form

The Melting-Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy

This has been available in full exclusively at the magnificent and well worth subscribing-to Talking Points Memo.

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But now let me let it out into the wild here--and promise to imminently (well, maybe in a month...) write about the whole symposium of which it is a part:

The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy: Hotshot French economist Thomas Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, looked at the major democracies with North Atlantic coastlines over the past couple of centuries. He saw five striking facts:

A Few Scattered Notes, Observations, and Examples of Graphs and Diagrams in Teaching and Doing Economics/The Honest Broker for the Week of February 9, 2016

Perhaps starting a broader conversation...

Paul Krugman: In Defense of Funny Diagrams: "Brad DeLong asks a question about which of the various funny diagrams economists love...

...should be taught in Econ 101. I say production possibilities yes, Edgeworth box no--which, strange to say, is how we deal with this issue in Krugman/Wells. But students who go on to major in economics should be exposed to the box--and those who go on to grad school really, really need to have seen it, and in general need more simple general-equilibrium analysis than, as far as I can tell, many of them get these days. There was, clearly, a time when economics had too many pictures. But now, I suspect, it doesn’t have enough....

Robber Barons: Hoisted from 1998/ The Honest Broker for the Week of February 2, 2016

J. Bradford DeLong (1998): Robber Barons:

First draft October 13, 1997; second draft January 1, 1998.

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I. Introduction

'Robber Barons': that was what U.S. political and economic commentator Matthew Josephson (1934) called the economic princes of his own day. Today we call them 'billionaires.' Our capitalist economy--any capitalist economy--throws up such enormous concentrations of wealth: those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, driven and smart enough to see particular economic opportunities and seize them, foresighted enough to have gathered a large share of the equity of a highly-profitable enterprise into their hands, and well-connected enough to fend off political attempts to curb their wealth (or well-connected enough to make political favors the foundation of their wealth).