DeLong: Long Form

America's Historical Experience with Low Inflation: Hoisted from 1999

J. Bradford DeLong (2000): America's Historical Experience with Low Inflation, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 32:4, Part 2: (November), pp. 979-993 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2601154

Abstract: The inflation of the 1970's was a marked deviation from America's typical peacetime historical pattern as a hard-money country. We should expect America to continue to be a hard-money--low inflation--country in the future, at least in peacetime.

Is the Semi-Permanent "Gunpowder Empire" Historical Scenario Plausible? Perhaps Not...

Riffing off of yesterday's: : "'Gunpowder Empire': Should We Generalize Mark Elvin's High-Level Equilibrium Trap?"...

A generation ago Michael Kremer wrote a superb paper: Michael Kremer (1993): "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990", Quarterly Journal of Economics 108:3 (August), pp. 681-716 http://tinyurl.com/dl20160727a.

Kremer saw human populations as growing at an increasing rate over time. Population reached approximately 4 million by 10000 BC, 50 million by 1000 BC, and 170 million by the year 1. Population then reached 265 million by the year 1000, 425 million by 1500, and 720 million by 1750 before the subsequent explosion of the British Industrial Revolution and the subsequent spread of Modern Economic Growth.

The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation--Hoisted from the Milken Review of Nine Months Ago

Live from Cyberspace: Welcome praise for J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation - Milken Institute Review: Hiccup ... or Endgame? Let me put a copy of the whole thing below the fold...

Paul Krugman: "Good Review by Brad DeLong: There are still real policy issues out there! 'The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation'" https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT

A Plea for Some Sympathy for Repentant Left Neoliberals...

As always, when the extremely sharp Dani Rodrick stuffs a book-length argument into an 800-word op-ed column, phrases acti as gestures toward what are properly chapter-long arguments. So there is lots to talk about.

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: "This backlash was predictable...

...Hyper-globalization in trade and finance, intended to create seamlessly integrated world markets, tore domestic societies apart. The bigger surprise is the decidedly right-wing tilt the political reaction has taken. In Europe, it is predominantly nationalists and nativist populists that have risen to prominence, with the left advancing only in a few places such as Greece and Spain.... As an emerging new establishment consensus grudgingly concedes, globalization accentuates class divisions between those who have the skills and resources to take advantage of global markets and those who don’t. Income and class cleavages, in contrast to identity cleavages based on race, ethnicity, or religion, have traditionally strengthened the political left. So why has the left been unable to mount a significant political challenge to globalization?

I think that this paragraph above is largely wrong.

The Supreme Court's RomneyCare Decision and the Future of Health Care Reform: Hoisted from Four Years Ago

J. Bradford DeLong: The Supreme Court's RomneyCare Decision and the Future of Health Care Reform: 07/02/2012: As delivered at the U.C. Berkeley SCOTUS ACA Forum, July 2, 2012:

With respect to last Thursday: One piece of background is all-important in assessing the decision: ObamaCare is RomneyCare.

The health-care reform plan that Mitt Romney proposed when he was Governor of Massachusetts is the health-care reform plan that Barack Obama proposed. RomneyCare made it through the Massachusetts legislature with only two dissenting votes. No office-holding Republican complained that RomneyCare was bad policy, or would destroy the economy, or would be unconstitutional, or whatnot--for it was the signature policy initiative of a Republican governor. The mandate that was at its core? That was the conservative Personal Responsibility principle. And remember the centerpiece of the Bush administration's Social Security privatization proposals: it was an individual mandate to regulate 'inactivity': to require that people who had not established their own private individual retirement accounts do so.

Had the issue of 'inactivity' reached the justices in the form of a challenge to a Republican mandate to purchase retirement accounts rather than a Democratic mandate to purchase health insurance, the Republican justices would have voted the other way.