## Making it real that we live in the "second gilded age"...

I am hearing from a number of people that columns like this one and its ilk by Paul Krugman and our other compadres are bloodless, and ineffective. They do not convey any sense of what is happening.

So let me make it more concrete:

The top 0.01% of American workers—now some 15000—this year have incomes, including capital gains, of about 500 times the average. Typical incomes in America today, including capital gains and benefits, are perhaps 300 a working day. The gulf between them and average income is large: average income is about 800. Thus 15000 workers in the top 0.01% of income this year receive an average of 400,000 dollars a day.

How could one go about spending that? Suppose you decided this morning that you wanted to rent the 2000 square-foot Ritz-Carlton suite at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco hotel for the week of next Memorial Day, and did so. That would set you back 6000 for seven nights. You would still have to spend 394,000 more today to avoid getting richer: to avoid getting richer you would have to spend 16,667 an hour, awake and asleep, day in and day out.

One way to think about the spending of these 15000 superrich is that they are, collectively, through their spending employing 7,500,000 who are dedicated to making them happier and advancing their purposes, whatever they may be. And a large proportion of them are bosses, partially constrained by their obligation to advance the purposes of the organizations they work for, but free to shape and interpret those purposes as they wish. Guess average is effectively the unconstrained boss of only 3 more: that makes 20,000,000 of us who are paid to directly and indirectly and who are thus are focused on advancing the top 0.01%'s particular and idiosyncratic purposes. Is that likely to be a healthy society?

And then there are the rest of the top 0.1%—not 15,000 but 135,000 each on average one-ninth as well-off—who must spend and reinvest not 400,000 but 45,000 a day, but who are collectively of the same economic weight as the top 0.01%, and thus have another 20,000,000 of us working for them: paid to directly and indirectly and thus focused on advancing the top 0.1%'s particular and idiosyncratic purposes as well:

Paul Krugman: Notes on Excessive Wealth Disorder: "How not to repeat the mistakes of 2011.... What’s really at issue here is the role of the 0.1 percent, or maybe the 0.01 percent—the truly wealthy, not the '400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff' memorably ridiculed in the movie Wall Street. This is a really tiny group of people, but one that exerts huge influence over policy.... Raw corruption.... Soft corruption.... Campaign contributions.... Defining the agenda... [which] I want to focus on... a particular example that for me and others was a kind of radicalizing moment, a demonstration that extreme wealth really has degraded the ability of our political system to deal with real problems... the extraordinary shift in conventional wisdom and policy priorities that took place in 2010-2011, away from placing priority on reducing the huge suffering still taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and toward action to avert the supposed risk of a debt crisis...

Continue reading "Making it real that we live in the "second gilded age"..." »

## U.S. as Doofus Country, China, and Grand Strategy

No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate: In the New York Review of Books, Adam Tooze recently wrote that: "across the American political spectrum, if there is agreement on anything, it is on the need for a firmer line against China". He is correct: On this, the bombs-and-bullets people, the geopolitics people, and the blame-somebody-else people are all agreed. The U.S. needs to do something to strengthen its relative position, and that means it needs to start doing something to China.

But that would be going about it the wrong way. Thinking that the right way to do something is to do something to China is a very bad way to think.

Continue reading "U.S. as Doofus Country, China, and Grand Strategy" »

## Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate

No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate: Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime: "Will the imminent “rise of the robots” threaten all future human employment? The most thoughtful discussion of that question can be found in MIT economist David H. Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?”, which considers the problem in the context of Polanyi’s Paradox. Given that “we can know more than we can tell,” the twentieth-century philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, we shouldn’t assume that technology can replicate the function of human knowledge itself. Just because a computer can know everything there is to know about a car doesn’t mean it can drive it. This distinction between tacit knowledge and information bears directly on the question of what humans will be doing to produce economic value in the future... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

## June 21, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update

Outlook Slides: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0iqGf9C1E8-9mHJVeQdy1U7YQ

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways.

About the only news in the past week or so is that the Federal Reserve has—behind the curve—become convinced that it raised interest rates too much in 2018. To the extent they attribute their change of view to news, the news is that President Trump is a chaos monkey with respect to international trade—but that was well known back in 2015.

Worth noting is that the ten-year CPI inflation breakeven is now 1.6%. If investors were risk neutral with respect to bearing this particular inflation risk, this breakeven ought to be 2.5% if investors expected the Federal Resrve to meet its 2.0% PCE inflation target over the next decade:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: June 21, 2019: "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.4% for 2019:Q2 and 1.3% for 2019:Q3. News from this week's data releases left the nowcast for 2019:Q2 largely unchanged and decreased the nowcast for 2019:Q3 by 0.4 percentage point. For 2019:Q3, negative surprises from regional survey data drove most of the decrease...

Continue reading "June 21, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 19, 2019)

1. Fareed Zakaria: The Self-Destruction of American Power: "One is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century...

2. Christina Romer (1994): The End of Economic History?: "Perhaps more than any particular finding or direct implication, the fact that the debate about stabilization and the new data collection efforts are being carried out by a mixture of economic historians and macroeconomists is the most desirable development of all. As with all of the other recent developments in economic history that have been discussed here, the bringing together of researchers with different perspectives has not only stimulated exciting research, it has also meant that the lessons of history have been incorporated into other fields. In this way, the end of economic history has really been just the beginning of better and richer economics...

3. AlphaChat: Jay Shambaugh on Tools to Fight the Next Recession: "The economist and Brookings Institution senior fellow talks to FT contributor Megan Greene about the fiscal policies that lawmakers could arrange now that would automatically kick in when some of the early signs of a slowdown start to appear...

4. Ed Nawotka: Daunt Relishes Challenge of Leading B&N: "Daunt said his priority with B&N is not to cut costs, but to find a way to arrest the decline in sales and return the company to growth, much as he did at Waterstones. The key, he said, will be investment.... Above all, Daunt expressed calm about the transition, and advocated for patience...

5. Charles Petzold (2008): The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (Indianapolis: John Wiley: 9780470229057) #books

6. Joanna Ossinger: JPMorgan Shows Where Huge Risks From Fed, G-20 Are Underpriced: "Stocks may correct if Fed isn’t dovish enough: Panigirtzoglou. Cross-asset measures show little volatility risk premium...

7. Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, and Kris James Mitchener: Public Debt Through the Ages: "Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes resulted in debt-management problems resolved through debasements and restructurings. Less widely appreciated are successful debt consolidation episodes.... We analyze the economic and political circumstances that made these successful debt consolidation episodes possible...

8. Josefin Meyer, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch: Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo: "220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering 91 countries.... Returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ex-post returns averaged 7% annually across two centuries, including default episodes, major wars, and global crises... an excess return of around 4% above US or UK government bonds... are hard to reconcile with canonical theoretical models and with the degree of credit risk.... Full repudiation is rare; the median haircut is below 50%...

9. Olivier Blanchard and Takeshi Tashiro: Fiscal Policy Options for Japan

10. DS100: Principles and Techniques of Data Science #book

11. Barry Ritholtz: Buy Yourself a F--king Latte: "A Latte a Day Isn’t Going to Ruin Your Retirement. If spending $5 a day on fancy coffee puts your retirement at risk, you’ve got bigger problem... Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 19, 2019)" » ## Hoisted from Six Years Ago: To Steal a Line from Leon Trotsky: "Every Man Has a Right to Be Stupid, but John Cochrane Abuses the Privilege..." Hoisted from the Archives: Stupidity Is a Willed Choice Files: John Cochrane: Reading Paul Krugman calls to mind that I never reacted to John Cochrane's July 2012 failure to mark his beliefs to market and, instead, doubling down on his claim that the biggest risk the U.S. economy faces is that of becoming "Argentina" "quickly". I must say that if I had been opining stridently about issues of public policy without doing my homework five years ago, and if between then and now events had developed in directions strongly contrary to my expectations, I would not double down on what I had thought then--I would rather try hard to do my homework and to mark my beliefs to market. And if I were going to criticize people for not citing my work, I would not claim that a sentence they wrote which comes immediately after a four-paragraph quote from me as an example, and I would have read their explanation of why they think expansionary fiscal policy right now does not raise the risks of "fiscal dominance" rather than remain in ignorance of it. But to each his own! Continue reading "Hoisted from Six Years Ago: To Steal a Line from Leon Trotsky: "Every Man Has a Right to Be Stupid, but John Cochrane Abuses the Privilege..."" » ## Hoisted from the Archives: John Cochrane's Claim in Late 2008 That a Recession Would Be a Good Thing Deserves Some Kind of Award... Hoisted from the Archives: The fact is that by the end of 2007 the construction sector had rebalanced: there was no excess of people pounding nails in Nevada—even if you did believe the false theory that recessions have recessions do the "necessary work of rebalancing", there was no rebalancing work to be done after 2007. Even a quarter-competent Schumpeterian who kept even half an eye on the data should have been able to recognize that... To: @johnmlippert: If I may beg a small slice of your attention... I am tracking down John Cochrane's claims that (i) in your December 23, 2008 article you were "only... on a hunt for embarrassing quotes", (ii) he had "spent about 10 hours patiently trying to explain some basics" to you, and (iii) you took him out of proper context when you wrote: "'We should have a recession', Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room.... 'People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do'." Do you by chance remember the larger context of Cochrane's "pounding nails" comment, and do you have any idea why he now claims that you took him out of context? Or what he thinks the proper context would have been? I would be grateful for any light you can shed on this. Yours, Brad DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com John M. Lippert: "Hi Professor DeLong. Thanks for your note. Professor Cochrane’s complaint is something of which I became aware several months after we published our story in 2008.... The bottom line is that Bloomberg did not respond to Cochrane’s comments. He never sent them to us, despite my request that he do so. When we became aware of his complaint, we saw no reason to make a correction. Cochrane made the ‘pounding nails’ comment at a Chicago Booth forum at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago in November 2008. It was part of an ongoing lecture series, as I recall. It was kind of a big event, with a couple hundred people. So they may have a recording that you can access. Good luck with your inquiries. Tks, John Lippert Continue reading "Hoisted from the Archives: John Cochrane's Claim in Late 2008 That a Recession Would Be a Good Thing Deserves Some Kind of Award..." » ## Federal Reserve Talking Points for Bloomberg: June 19, 2019 For ten years now, the Federal Reserve has: • overestimated how fast the economy will grow without exceptional support. • underestimated how many people the US can put to work at "full employment"—the point beyond which inflationary pressures start to build. • overestimated how fast an inflationary spiral could take hold. • underestimated the dangers of renewed recession. And the result has been the worst economic recovery in American history. For example: • The unwillingness of the Federal Reserve to change its 2%-going-forward inflation target deprived the economy of the usual faster-than-trend bounce-back from the depths of a depression. • The Federal Reserve's decision to treat 2%-going-forward as a ceiling rather than a target left banks with little incentive to lend out the massive reserves that quantitative easing had led them to hold. • The Federal Reserve's mid-2010s decision to announce that the time of extraordinary support would soon end nearly brought on a recession. • The Federal Reserve's end-of-2016 decision to initiate a tightening cycle has left it in it current situation, with the 10-year inflation breakeven for the PCE at 1.3%/year—0.75-points below the Federal Reserve's formal target, in which it dearly wishes the interest rates it controls were lower than they are but does not quite dare take steps to reduce them yet. More generally: • The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut has been a complete failure at boosting the American economy through increased investment in America. • But it has been a success in making the rich richer and thus America more unequal. • And it delivered a short-term demand-side Keynesian fiscal stimulus to growth that has now ebbed. • The past month has seen an 0.8%-point decrease in our estimate in what seasonally adjusted annual-rate production growth was comparing April-June to January March. • This is in part an impact of Trump's attempt to fight a trade war with China • Plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix. • But this is mostly due to what Larry Summers calls "secular stagnation": • Financial markets are failing to mobilize the risk-bearing capacity of American society. • Thus even very low safe government-debt interest rates have not made capital affordable enough to induce the investment boom we would like to see. Continue reading "Federal Reserve Talking Points for Bloomberg: June 19, 2019" » ## More than Two Decades of Macroeconomic History Through the Lens of Four Key Components of Aggregate Demand It is remarkable the extent to which you can tell the story of the U.S. macroeconomy over the past twenty-five years through the reactions of four components of aggregate demand to policies and shocks: 1. The dot-com boom unleashed by the Clinton deficit-reduction program and high-tech innovation. 2. The dot-com bust. 3. The housing boom. 4. The successful rebalancing of aggregate demand—housing sits down, while exports and business investment stand up as money flows are successfully redirected. 5. The Fed well behind the financial-stability curve: the financial crisis and the collapse. 6. Inadequate recovery: The Geithner Treasury and the Obama White House's failure to do anything to promote a recovery of residential construction. 7. Inadequate recovery: Republican (and Obama) fiscal austerity. 8. Inadequate recovery: Bernanke's highly premature taper tantrum. 9. The Trump rebound. ### Dot-Com Boom: Continue reading "More than Two Decades of Macroeconomic History Through the Lens of Four Key Components of Aggregate Demand" » ## June 14, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. About the only news is that over the past month we have seen an 0.8%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, largely driven by reductions in durable goods orders, capacity utilization, net exports, and this morning employment. This might be an impact of Trump's attempt to fight a trade war with China, plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix. Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Jun 14, 2019: Nowcast: "1.4% for 2019:Q2 and 1.7% for 2019:Q3. News from this week's data releases increased the nowcast for both 2019:Q2 and 2019:Q3 by 0.4 percentage point. Positive surprises from retail sales, capacity utilization, and industrial production... Continue reading "June 14, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update" » ## The Intergenerational Burden of the Debt: Nick Rowe Tempts Fate Weblogging: Hoisted from the Archives Until secular stagnation ends—until the yield on U.S. government debt exceeds the growth rate of the economy—worry about reducing of even stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio of a country like the U.S. that has assume running room via financial repression to stabilize demand for its debt is premature. Thus the takeaway is this: It would be much more productive right now to worry about how do we maintain normal levels of net investment in a high government debt post-interest rate normalization environment than to propose sending the economy back into recession in order to reduce government debt accumulation. Recession and high unemployment in the short- and medium-run are problems. Low investment in the medium- and long-run are problems. Government debt is a tool to avoid the first and a source of risk of the second. But it is better to keep your mind focused on the things that are real problems: Hoisted from the Archives: The Intergenerational Burden of the Debt: Nick Rowe Tempts Fate Weblogging...: Nick Rowe: Continue reading "The Intergenerational Burden of the Debt: Nick Rowe Tempts Fate Weblogging: Hoisted from the Archives" » ## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 12, 2019) • American Finance: Perceptions, Prospects, and Policies • June 7, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. About the only news is that over the past month we have seen a 1.2%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, largely driven by reductions in durable goods orders, capacity utilization, net exports, and—this morning—employment growth. This might be an impact of Trump's attempt to fight a trade war with China, plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix... • Hoisted from Eleven Years Ago: Poverty Traps: The High Price of Investment Goods in Poor Countries • DeLong Smackdown Watch: Yield Curve: Hoisted from the Archives from 2006: Ooh boy. Was I wrong in 2006. I am not betting against the yield curve again: From 2006: DeLong Smackdown Watch.... Worthwhile Canadian Initiative thinks I'm wrong when I write... "while an inverted yield curve is usually a sign that a bunch of people are trading bonds on their belief that a recession is likely, that is not what is going on in this case... • Comment of the Day: HankP: "Under Bush we had the imposition of torture as policy, now trump has added concentration camps. Republicans applauded loudly in both cases. Everyone knows where this is headed if we don't stop it... • A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Worthy Must- and Should-Reads from the Past Week or so: June 7, 2018 • Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Introduction: "The island Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 miles broad. And there are in the island five nations; English, Welsh (or British), Scottish, Pictish, and Latin. The first inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, and first peopled Britain southward... • Hoisted from the Archives: Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism" 1. John Holbo: "You, for example, are being slightly rude, asking such questions of religious people!: 'But... it is not usually taken as rude in religious circles to ask of people: Will you be on the left or the right "when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory...'" Oh absolutely. Rude to challenge people about their religious beliefs. Because that's religious liberty. But it's not rude for religious people to challenge non-religious people abut their beliefs. Because that's religious liberty. Purest proof of 'liberty' = 'privilege' here!... 2. When the person driving the car becomes so exercised by the derogeance inflicted upon newlyweds Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill and Jennie Jerome by their parents' failure to give them the capital sum to purchase a Stately Home in which to entertain that she misses the turnoff to the Jacksonville airport... 3. Duncan Black: Do You Even Have Friends: "A legitimate joke about conservatives is they occasionally stumble upon a problem that directly impacts them or their family or friends and suddenly become liberals... on only that issue. Learn to generalize... 4. Doug Jones: Amplifier Lakes: "Paleontologists and paleoanthropologists are busy sorting out what was special about the climate and ecology of Africa, especially East Africa, that contributed to various phases of hominin evolution... particular times when lakes were flickering in and out of existence along the... East African Rift Valley... a rich (sometimes) but also a particularly challenging environment.... Lewis Dartnell’s very recent Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History... 5. When and why did the brain eater eat the brain of this guy?: Nick Confessore: "'[Does] secular liberalism ha[ve] a kind of stopping point that accepts the continued not just existence but flourishing of conservative religious traditions?' I haven’t yet encountered a liberal answer to this question in the current instance.... Anyone have a recommendation for a piece on the left engaging with that point?" Parker Molloy: "The premise is insane, Nick. There’s not a reasonable rebuttal to it. It’s honestly scary that there are people willing to view the argument as a reasonable position in the first place. We live in a world where it’s legal for a Christian business owner to fire an employee for being gay, but illegal for a gay business owner to fire someone for being Christian... 6. Charles Jones (1994): "Economic Growth and the Relative Price of Capital," Journal of Monetary Economics 34, pp. 359-82 https://delong.typepad.com/jones94.pdf 7. John Amato: Donald: Federal Reserve Are 'Not His People' Even Though He Chose 4 Out Of 5: "He apparently forgot that the current Fed panel is one of his creation... 8. George Orwell (1936): The Road to Wigan Pier 9. Dan Nexon: Trump Change: Grift and Graft in the New Gilded Age: "Republican concern about many matters – such as the role of congress in overseeing the executive branch and best practices when it comes to securing classified information–extends only so far as partisan political considerations dictates. The same is obviously true of kleptocracy. However, just because the GOP couldn’t care less doesn’t mean that we need to normalize it... 10. Mark Sullivan: Sign in with Apple Puts Apple’s Privacy Stance to Work: "Sign in with Apple is an impressive, privacy-friendly alternative to one of the main data-harvesting techniques used by its rivals. And Apple isn’t just offering it up as a new option for developers. It will require apps that include sign-in buttons powered by other companies to add its new button as well... Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 12, 2019)" » ## Hoisted from Eleven Years Ago: Poverty Traps: The High Price of Investment Goods in Poor Countries Hoisted from Eleven Years Ago: Poverty Traps: The High Price of Investment Goods in Poor Countries http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/poverty-traps-t.html:Here is how Larry Summers and I formulated it back in the early 1990s, and I believe that we were correct: Continue reading "Hoisted from Eleven Years Ago: Poverty Traps: The High Price of Investment Goods in Poor Countries" » ## A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Worthy Must- and Should-Reads from the Past Week or so: June 7, 2018 Worthy Readings at Equitable Growth: 1. That monetary policy is best which avoids creating needless unemployment while still maintaining confidence in the value of the unit of account. Yet surprisingly little thought has been devoted to figuring out which monetary policy jumps the highest with respect to this objective: Nick Bunker: Getting on the level with the Fed’s targeting of prices: "John Williams’s move to New York is a sign that the Federal Reserve may soon reconsider its target for monetary policy. It’s not clear whether a new target would emerge from such a process or how radical a change current members of the FOMC would consider. The current inflation targeting structure may have gotten the U.S. economy to where it is, but it took some time. A quicker recovery from the next recession would be to the benefit of everyone in the U.S. economy. So, a rethink is needed. Hopefully it’s coming soon..." 2. I think "top 20%" is wrong. The fact that most of percentiles 80%-97% perceive themselves as having catastrophically lost the game of relative status vis-a-vis percentiles 98% and 99%—and that most of percentiles 98% and 99% perceive themselves as having catastrophically lost the game of relative status vis-a-vis the 99.9%, and most of the 99.9% perceive themselves as having catastrophically lost the game of relative status vis-a-vis 99.99% makes arguing that they have in some sense succeeded in realizing a dream that they now hoard a hard argument to make: Richard Reeves: Equitable Growth in Conversation_: "Dream hoarders... are the people at the top... the winners of the inequality divide... the top 20 percent roughly of the income distribution. That means they earn healthy six-figure household incomes, with average incomes of about$200,000 a year..."

3. There was a lot of noise about how giving repatriated profits a tax break would boost investment in America. As near as I can see it, none of it was well-founded at all: Kimberly Clausing: Equitable Growth in Conversation: "We are distorting repatriation decisions by having this repatriation tax. But I don’t think we’re dramatically changing the investments found in the United States. The companies that have profits abroad can borrow against them to finance any desired investment. And some of the money isn’t really truly abroad—it’s invested in U.S. assets..."

4. This web page at Slate has the wrong headline. It should be: "Education Won’t Solve Inequality: Not without workers’ power too". Sigh. On the substance, blaming increasing inequality on "Skill Biased Technical Change" was always a non-sequitur. Given the way the models were set up, SBTC was a residual: anything that diminished worker bargaining power was going to be labeled "SBTC" regardless of what it really was: Kate Bahn: Study: Unions increasingly represent educated workers: "Herbst, Kuziemko, and Naidu throws a wrench in the SBTC [Skill-Biased Technical Change] explanation of rising inequality. They find that the education level of union members also followed a U-shape curve from 1936–2016..."

5. Looking forward to what we can learn from this BLS initiative: Kate Bahn: New data on contingent workers in the United States: "On Thursday, June 7, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release data from its freshly collected Contingent Worker Supplement. It’s important for policymakers and economists alike to know what to look for ahead of Thursday’s data release..."

Continue reading "A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Worthy Must- and Should-Reads from the Past Week or so: June 7, 2018" »

## June 7, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. About the only news is that over the past month we have seen a 1.2%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, largely driven by reductions in durable goods orders, capacity utilization, net exports, and—this morning—employment growth. This might be an impact of Trump's attempt to fight a trade war with China, plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Jun 07, 2019: Nowcast: "1.0% for 2019:Q2 and 1.3% for 2019:Q3. News from this week's data releases decreased the nowcast for 2019:Q2 by 0.5 percentage point and decreased the nowcast for 2019:Q3 by 0.7 percentage point. Negative surprises from the ISM manufacturing survey, employment data, and international trade data drove most of the decrease...

Continue reading "June 7, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 5, 2019)

• Live at Project Syndicate: What to Do About China?: "It is entirely foreseeable that America’s attempt to “get tough” with China could accelerate its own relative decline, effectively handing China the semi-hegemony it is already approaching.... So, what should the US do to shore up its position vis-à-vis China?...

• Weekly Forecasting Update: May 31, 2019: No Significant Changes: "About the only news these past three weeks is an 0.7%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, driven by a reduction in estimated durable goods orders and capacity utilization. This might be an impact o Trump's trade war, plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix...

• An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016": Refinding the Path Toward Utopia: From 1938 to 1973 growth in the G-7 jerked forward again: not at the 0.76%/year pace of 1913-1938 or even the 1.42%/year pace of 1870-1913, but at an average pace of 3.0%/year. That is a material wealth doubling time of not the 90 years or so of 1913-1938 or even the 50 years of 1870-1913, but 24 years: less than a generation. Thus the G-7 was three times as well-off in 1973 as it had been in 1938...

• An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016": The Cold War: There was one other fact about post-World War II that cemented the social-democratic mixed-economy Keynesian order that drove a generation of the fastest economic growth and the greatest advance in human prosperity and liberty the world had hitherto seen: it was the Cold War...

• Note to Self: G-7 national income per capita growth since 1800, according to Hans Rosling's http://gapminder.org: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/07Q5v0jKa1sohBHiO8l3Np9Gw...

• Hoisted from the Archives from 2017: Interview: "NAFTA Is Just Not a Big Deal for the U.S.": "In a typical year we sell exports that we could get 2 trillion for if we had to sell them here at home and get imports that would cost us 4 trillion. That makes us 2 trillion per year—25,000 per family each year—richer and more prosperous. That is a big deal...

• A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Must- and Should-Reads from the Week of May 31, 2018...

• Weekend Reading: Belle Waring: Uses and Abuses of Tarps: : "Such creativity! And the need to give Gorky one slender reed on which to lean for his glowing reviews of the labor re-education camps! Even his choice of fiancee seemed to augur his judgments: 'The famous writer embarked from the steamer in Prosperity Gulf. Next to him was his fiancee dressed all in leather—a black leather service cap, a leather jacket, leather riding breeches, and high narrow boots—a living symbol of the OGPU shoulder to shoulder with Russian literature'...

• Weekend Reading: Henry Farrell: The American Right's Torquemada Option: "When anti-modern conservatives decide that the liberal world is depraved... cleanse it of the corruption of tolerance. Call it the Torquemada Option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_the_Warlock. And the moderate success that some modern figures-such as Orban-have enjoyed in taking over the university system and forcibly purging it of those who would pollute our youth with gender studies and the like give old time reactionaries like Kimball some hope it can be done...

• Weekend Reading: Jeremiah: 22 KJV: "'Do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place. For if.. ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself', saith the Lord, 'that this house shall become a desolation'...

• Weekend Reading: Into the Abyss: James David Nicoll on Heinlein's "Starship Troopers": "Heinlein... convinced himself he intended 'veterans' to include people whose public service included non-military organizations but there is no textual evidence of this.... 'Youngster, do I look that silly? I’m a civilian employee'. 'Oh. Sorry, sir'. 'No offense. But military service is for ants'. The doctor clearly sees service as military service...

• Comment of the Day: As Dan Davies says, finance works with criminal penalties for material misrepresentations, and works better. Would not politics also work better with such?: Graydon: "Remember that in this case, Boris made the public lie in an official capacity, was told by the relevant governmental body that it was a lie—the statistics authority officially informed the official persona of the officeholder that no, no, that's not correct; that is not close to correct—and the official persona went right on making the lie in public in ways the court refuses to find obviously immaterial...

1. Gershem Gorenberg: "The actions of a leader desperate to hold power and stay out of jail are utterly beyond prediction...

2. Paul Krugman: Robot Geometry: "Imagine an economy that produces only one good... using two techniques, A and B, one capital-intensive, one labor-intensive.... Technical progress in A, perhaps also making A even more capital-intensive... will lead to a fall in the real wage, because 1/w must rise. GDP and hence productivity does rise, but maybe not by much if the economy was mostly using the labor-intensive technique. And what about allocation of labor between sectors?... Capital-using technical progress in A actually leads to a higher share of the work force being employed in labor-intensive B...

3. Nadiezda Kizenko (2000): A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People https://books.google.com/books?isbn=027101976X: "Three introductory comments.... While I have tried to do justice to a figure as complex as Father John, this is not a hagiography.... Because I intend this book... for readers... interest[ed] in the history of Russia and... of Christianity, I have included background material.... I am well aware that Father John still sparks intense reactions...

4. Mark Thoma (May 29, 2019): Your Daily digest for Economist's View

5. Chris Patten: Unforgettable Tiananmen: "It's not surprising that the Communist Party of China has worked so hard to eradicate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from public memory. History–including the horrors of Mao Zedong’s rule–is too volatile a substance for the Chinese dictatorship...

6. David Evans: New Findings in Global Education: "Want better test scores? Lower the heat....Parents make school choices based not only on test scores but also on a school's contribution to reduced crime or teen pregnancies.... Education reform ≠ education gains.... It’s hard to teach what you don’t know...

7. Erin Blakemore: The Korean War Hasn't Officially Ended. One Reason: POWs: "And then there were the POWs who were not returned at all. About 80,000 South Koreans were in North Korea when a ceasefire ended the war. Most are thought to have been put to work as laborers, 're-educated', and integrated into North Korean society. In 2010, South Korea estimated that 560 were still alive. Their ordeals in repressive North Korea were unknown until a small group of defectors told their stories...

8. Chris Duckett: AMD 3rd-Gen Ryzen Series Coming in July LedbyBy 12-Core Ryzen 9 Beast: "Range of chips beginning at 330 and topping out at 500 for the 12-core Ryzen 9... 7 nanometre technology... 12 cores, can handle 24 threads, has 2.8GHz base frequency with 4.6GHz boost, and has 70MB of cache. 'That's half the price of our competition with much, much more performance', AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su said...

9. HathiTrust Digital Library

10. Mihir Sharma: Modi's Election Win Sends a Populist Warning to the World: "From Trump to Brexit, don’t bet against voters making the same choice again...

11. Hoisted from 2010: How an Economy Can Live Beyond Its Means on Its Wits: P.J. Grigg: "I distrust utterly those economists who have with great but deplorable ingenuity taught that it is not only possible but praiseworthy for a whole country to live beyond its mens on its wits and who in Mr. Shaw's description tech that it is possible to make a community rich by calling a penny two pence, in short who have sought to make economics a vade mecum for political spivs..." Confront economists' theories of depressions... and you find yourself immediately confronted with... seven... Monetarism... Wicksellianism... Minskyism... Austrianism... Vulgar Keynsianism... Hickianism... Post-Keynesianism...

12. Hoisted from 2009: Fama's Fallacy II: Predecessors: Fama, actually, is much worse than the British Treasury economists of the 1920s. They acknowledged that monetary policy could affect the level of employment--could do more than shift resources from one use to another. Fama's argument based on his misinterpretation of the NIPA savings-investment identity has the implication that monetary policy cannot affect the unemployment rate either...

13. Paul Krugman: "Back in the USA and thinking about what it must be like for conservative economists who weren’t always total hacks but have sold their souls-eg backing crazy claims about tax cuts or declaring that Bernanke was debasing the dollar to help Obama. All that self-abatement to curry favor with the right-and then Art fricking Laffer gets a presidential medal while they get nothing. Self abasement. If I could do self abasement I probably would...

14. Neil McInnes: The Great Doomsayer: Oswald Spengler Reconsidered

15. George Kennan (1947): The Sources of Soviet Conduct

16. U.S. National Security Council (1950): NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security

17. Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Irving Kristol: "This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority-so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 5, 2019)" »

## What to Do About China?: Live at Project Syndicate

Live at Project Syndicate: What to Do About China?: BERKELEY–In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, the historian Adam Tooze notes that, “across the American political spectrum, if there is agreement on anything, it is on the need for a firmer line against China.” He’s right: On this singular issue, the war hawks, liberal internationalists, and blame-somebody-else crowd all tend to agree. They have concluded that because the United States needs to protect its relative position on the world stage, China’s standing must be diminished.... But that is the wrong way to approach the challenge.... It is entirely foreseeable that America’s attempt to “get tough” with China could accelerate its own relative decline, effectively handing China the semi-hegemony it is already approaching.... So, what should the US do to shore up its position vis-à-vis China?... The US could start to become what it would have been if Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election, if Hillary Clinton had defeated Trump, and if the Republican party had not abandoned its patriotism... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Continue reading "What to Do About China?: Live at Project Syndicate" »

## Interview: "NAFTA Is Just Not a Big Deal for the U.S.": Hoisted from the Archives from 2017

Joseph Ford Cotto: J. Bradford DeLong says "NAFTA is just not a big deal for the U.S.", explains why: "Support for Bernie Sanders and the Donald did not rise out of nowhere, after all. In such turbulent waters as these, it is important to seek the guidance of a wise, seasoned captain. Insofar as the sea of dollars and cents is concerned, J. Bradford DeLong is just that fellow. He is "a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a weblogger for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth http://equitablegrowth.org/blog, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton administration .... He also writes the weblog Grasping Reality: http://bradford-delong.com," as DeLong's U.C.B. biography explains. Dr. DeLong recently spoke with me about many topics relative to our nation's economy. Some of our conversation is included below....

Continue reading " Interview: "NAFTA Is Just Not a Big Deal for the U.S.": Hoisted from the Archives from 2017" »

## The Cold War: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"

### Post-WWII Political Economy: Stabilization

#### Challengers

But what about the other factors that had fatally disrupted the pre-WWI global order? Imperialism, nationalism, militarism, fascism, and a really existing version of socialism preached and practiced by Stalin and his heirs that was, in many of its modes, hard to distinguish from the barbarism that Rosa Luxemburg feared that World War I had revealed as socialism’s only alternative? Fascism had been buried in the rubble of Berlin in 1945: thereafter its attractions had been limited to those plutocrats, authoritarians, colonels, and landlords trying to run unstable con games to try to stave off popular and global civil society demands for things like land reform and a less-unequal distribution of wealth as underpinnings for political democracy and the mixed economy.

Continue reading "The Cold War: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"" »

## Refinding the Path Toward Utopia: An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"

Recall the pre-1913 post-1800 progress of humanity in the direction of a utopia of material abundance.

The classic Industrial Revolution period—1800 to 1870—had seen material productivity and living standards rise by perhaps one-quarter worldwide, with an average growth rate of perhaps one-third of a percent per year. Growth had been faster—greater than one-half percent per year—in the countries that were to become the G-7, even though two of its future members, Italy and Japan, as of yet showed few signs of significant industrial-era growth. Then 1870-1913 the modern corporation, the industrial research lab, the manufacturing value chain, plus globalization—the land and submarine telegraph cable, the iron-hulled screw-propellered ocean-going steamship and the railroad, and global migration—pulled the world forward with a large jerk: a more than tripling of growth, with a more than doubling of growth rates in the industrial core that was to become the G-7 and substantial participation elsewhere even where factories were not build. A Mexico, for example, saw its productivity levels double between 1870 and 1913. An Argentina, for example, saw its productivity levels triple. And growth in Italy and Japan for the first time kept pace with that in their future G-7 partners.

Continue reading "Refinding the Path Toward Utopia: An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"" »

## May 31, 2019: No Significant Changes: Weekly Forecasting Update

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. About the only news these past three weeks is an 0.7%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, driven by a reduction in estimated durable goods orders and capacity utilization. This might be an impact o Trump's trade war, plus Trump's attempts to add a trad ar with Mexico to the mix:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: "May 31, 2019.... The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.5% for 2019:Q2. News from this week's data releases increased the nowcast for 2019:Q2 by 0.1 percentage point...

### Key Points:

Specifically, it is still the case that:

• The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut has been a complete failure at boosting the American economy through increased investment in America.
• But it has been a success in making the rich richer and thus America more unequal.
• And it delivered a short-term demand-side Kerynesian fiscal stimulus to growth that has now ebbed.
• U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2%/year.
• There are still no signs the U.S. has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating.
• There are still no signs of interest rate normalization: secular stagnation continues to reign.
• There are still no signs the the U.S. is at "overfull employment" in any meaningful sense.

• A change from 3 months ago: The U.S. grew at 3.2%/year in the first quarter of 2019—1.6%-points higher than had been nowcast—but the growth number you want to put in your head in assessing the strength of the economy is the 1.6%/year number that had been nowcast. The falling-apart of Trump's trade negotiating strategy with China will harm Americans and may disrupt value chains, and the might be becoming visible in the data flow.

• Changes from 1 month ago: Industrial production appears to be falling as new durable goods orders come in below expectations. Industrial production may have peaked last December:

• A change from 1 week ago: Trump has now added a possible trade war with Mexico to the mix...

• Over the past 20 years: United States manufacturers are ordering no more in the way of the nominal value of capital goods than they order two decades ago. Deflators here are very hazardous, but I believe that translates to a zero increase in real orders as well. This is unprecedented for the U.S. economy: nothing like it has happened before:

Continue reading "May 31, 2019: No Significant Changes: Weekly Forecasting Update" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 28, 2019)

1. (23013): Mourning the Death of James Buchanan: "Daniel Kuehn gets it right, I think, on the significance of the career of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan: 'He got a lot right, with public choice and constitutional economics. He also got a lot quite wrong, particularly his take on the political economy of the Keynesian revolution. But he certainly was a talented and productive economist well deserving of his Nobel prize.' I would go somewhat further: he got a lot right that desperately needed to be gotten right and that nobody else would have gotten right in his absence. He made a difference in economics at more than the margin, which is something you can say of very few economists... | Six Faces of Right-Wing Chain-Forging Economist James Buchanan...

2. Abigail Adams (1776): Letter to John Adams: "What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy?... I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us...

3. James Buchanan (1997): Has Economics Lost Its Way? https://delong.typepad.com/buch_econlostway.pdf

4. Dierdre McCloskey: Review of Buchanan, "Better than Plowing"

5. Wikipedia: Étienne Maurice Gérard: "1er Comte Gérard (4 April 1773–17 April 1852) was a French general, statesman and Marshal of France. He served under a succession of French governments including the ancien regime monarchy, the Revolutionary governments, the Restorations, the July Monarchy, the First and Second Republics, and the First Empire (and arguably the Second), becoming Prime Minister briefly in 1834...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 28, 2019)" »

## From Total Industrial to Limited War: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"

### Total Industrial War

A total industrial war sees a state taking control of an economy and society via bureaucracy, mobilizing most young and some old men into its armed forces, and then hurling as much as it can of men, metal, and nitrogen-based explosives at an enemy so using up more than half of society’s productive potential in works of destruction. What is the point? The first aim is to keep the adversary from doing the same to you. The next aim varies: to establish for Germany a proper place in the sun and control of enough land and resources to support a very large and prosperous population; to establish for Japan an empire—a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—like those European powers had established in the 1800s; to end Hitler’s régime; to reform Germany’s politics and somehow transform it into a peaceful democracy; to end all wars; to keep imperial Germany from turning Russia into a puppet semi-colony; to end the encirclement of Germany by a hostile Russia and a hostile France; to demonstrate that Austria-Hungary can destroy Serbia in retaliation for its state-sponsored assassination of Austria-Hungary’s crown prince; to preserve the balance of power on the European continent; to demonstrate that one’s treaty promises are credible by preserving the independence and neutrality of Belgium as guaranteed by the provisions of the 1839 Treaty of London; to preserve the Union that is the United States of America; to end slavery on the North American continent; “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.

Some of these secondary war aims are worth five years of death, destruction, temporary mass poverty, and strict rationing. Most are not.

Continue reading "From Total Industrial to Limited War: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 25, 2019)

1. Rob Beschizza: Reporters Who Quote Ums And Ahs Only Make Themselves Look Bad: "Journalists sometimes use a version of the facts to support faleshoods. Check out the following, posted by Daily Mail reporter David Martosko, quoting a teenager on Trump's use of the racist 'Pocahontas' slur.... Martosko wanted to establish here was that the teen—and perhaps by implication young Warren supporters in general—is confused and foolish. He did this by including all the ums and ahs of speech, filler terms... and extraneous commas. Most people saw this 'verbatim' text for what it was, and Martosko was thoroughly ratioed by readers.... Most of us talk just as the teen did, when challenged to speak extemporaneously. This can be true of even polished and well-prepared speakers. Listen to politicans and pundits on cable news panels, with an ear for the fillers, and you might be surprised.... We don't usually judge speakers for it because our brains correctly interpret it as meaningless filler.... Reporters usually remove speech disfluency when they quote subjects. In fact, it is generally considered unethical and unprofessional for editors not to remove the ums and ahs and filler terms...

2. Julian Matthews: A Cognitive Scientist Explains Why Humans Are So Susceptible to Fake News and Misinformation » Nieman Journalism Lab: "We might like to think of our memory as an archivist that carefully preserves events, but sometimes it’s more like a storyteller...

3. Andrew Carnegie: Steelmaking: "The eighth wonder of the world is this: two pounds of iron-stone purchased on the shores of lake Superior and transported to Pittsburgh; two pounds of coal mined in Connellsville and manufactured into coke and brought to Pittsburgh; one half pound of limestone mined east of the Alleghenies and brought to Pittsburgh; a little manganese ore, mined in Virginia and brought to Pittsburgh. And these four and one half pounds of material manufactured into one pound of solid steel and sold for one cent. That’s all that need be said about the steel business...

4. Sam Biddle: Facebook’s Work With Phone Carriers Alarms Legal Experts: "From these eight categories alone, a third party could learn an extraordinary amount about patterns of users’ daily life, and although the document claims that the data collected through the program is 'aggregated and anonymized', academic studies have found time and again that so-called anonymized user data can be easily de-anonymized. Today, such claims of anonymization and aggregation are essentially boilerplate...

5. Khoi Vinh: ‘John Wick: Chapter 3–Parabellum’ Review: "A film creates a compelling fantasy world and fans clamor for more. So sequels build that world out, they show more of its mechanics, its people, its history... the inevitable outcome is bureaucracy...

6. Joe Wiggins: Why Are Other Investors So Biased? | Behavioural Investment: "If you ask a fund manager why they believe that their investment philosophy can generate excess returns, they will almost inevitably state that they are seeking to exploit the behavioural biases exhibited by other investors that create pricing inefficiencies.  It is somewhat puzzling therefore that if you question the same fund manager about how they seek to address their own biases the response is either entirely unconvincing or evasive...

7. Ben Steverman: The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich: "Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts...

8. Arindrajit Dube: Econ 333 : "Income Inequality & Policy Alternatives...

9. Wikipedia: Barbarian: "The case has been made that [Rosa] Luxemburg had remembered a passage from the Erfurt Program, written in 1892 by Karl Kautsky, and mistakenly attributed it to Engels: 'As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism'...

10. Douglas B. Harris (1997): Dwight Eisenhower and the New Deal: The Politics of Preemption

11. Brian Warren: Mac Open Web

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 25, 2019)" »

## May 24, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Next to nothing has changed with respect to the forecast—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. About the only news these past two weeks is an 0.8%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, driven by a reduction in estimated durable goods orders and capacity utilization. This might be an impact o Trump's trade war.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: May 24, 2019: "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.4% for 2019:Q2. News from this week's data releases decreased the nowcast for 2019:Q2 by 0.4 percentage point. Negative surprises from the Advance Durable Goods Report drove most of the decrease...

### Key Points:

Specifically, it is still the case that:

• The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut:
• To the extent that it was supposed to boost the American economy by boosting the supply side through increased investment in America, has been a complete failure.
• To the extent that it was supposed to make America more unequal, has succeeded.
• Delivered a substantial short-term demand-side fiscal stimulus to growth that has now ebbed.
• (A 3.2%/year rate of growth of final sales to domestic purchasers over the seven quarters starting in January 2017,
• pushing the level of Gross National Income up from 2.0%/year from this demand-side stimulus.)
• U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2%/year.
• There are still no signs the U.S. has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating.
• There are still no signs of interest rate normalization: secular stagnation continues to reign.
• There are still no signs the the U.S. is at "overfull employment" in any meaningful sense.

• A change from 3 months ago: The Federal Reserve's abandonment of its focus on policies that are likely to keep PCE chain inflation at 2%/year or lower does not mean that it is preparing to do anything to avoid or moderate the next recession.

• Changes from 1 month ago: The U.S. grew at 3.2%/year in the first quarter of 2019—1.6%-points higher than had been nowcast—but the growth number you want to put in your head in assessing the strength of the economy is the 1.6%/year number that had been nowcast. The falling-apart of Trump's trade negotiating strategy with China will harm Americans and may disrupt value chains, and the might be becoming visible in the data flow.

• A change from 1 week ago: Industrial production appears to be falling as new durable goods orders come in below expectations. Industrial production may have peaked last December:

• Over the past 20 years: United States manufacturers are ordering no more in the way of the nominal value of capital goods than they ordered two decades ago. Deflators here are very hazardous, but I believe that translates to a zero increase in real orders as well. This is unprecedented for the U.S. economy: nothing like it has happened before.

Continue reading "May 24, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update" »

## Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics

Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics: An updated graph that Claudia Goldin had me make two and a half decades ago. The nonfarm unemployment rate since 1869:

Then it was 1890-1990, now it is 1869-2015, thanks to:

• BLS (2015): http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ln

The assumption–debateable–is that “unemployment” is not a farm thing–that in the rural south or in the midwest or on the prairie you can always find a place of some sort as a hired hand, and that “unemployment” is a town- and city-based nonfarm phenomenon.

I confess I do not understand how anyone can look at this series and think that calculating stable and unchanging autocorrelations and innovation variances is a reasonable first-cut thing to do.

Continue reading "Historical Nonfarm Unemployment Statistics" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 21, 2019)

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 21, 2019)" »

Live at Project Syndicate: Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime: "Will the imminent “rise of the robots” threaten all future human employment? The most thoughtful discussion of that question can be found in MIT economist David H. Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?”, which considers the problem in the context of Polanyi’s Paradox. Given that “we can know more than we can tell,” the twentieth-century philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, we shouldn’t assume that technology can replicate the function of human knowledge itself. Just because a computer can know everything there is to know about a car doesn’t mean it can drive it. This distinction between tacit knowledge and information bears directly on the question of what humans will be doing to produce economic value in the future... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

## "Neoliberalisms", Left and Right: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives: From 2015: _"Neoliberalisms", Left and Right: Today's best piece I have read on the internet is by the extremely sharp John Quiggin: The Last Gasp of (US) [Left-]Neoliberalism: "US neoliberalism is... closer to Blair’s Third Way than to Thatcher....

...[US] neoliberalism maintained and even extended ‘social liberalism’, in the US sense of support for equal marriage, reproductive choice and so on. In economic terms, its central claim was that the goals of the New Deal... could best be pursued through market-friendly policies that would earn the support of the financial sector.... [The] signature issues for US neoliberals were free trade, cuts in ‘entitlement’ spending, and school reform... a ‘grand bargain’, in which Republicans would accept minimal increases in taxation in return for the abandonment of most of the Democratic program. The Clinton administration was explicitly neoliberal.... And, while Obama’s 2008 election campaign was masterfully ambiguous, his first Administration neoliberal through and through.... But developments since then, including the global financial crisis, the failure of school reform and increasing awareness of entrenched inequality have destroyed the appeal of neoliberalism...

I think that John Quiggin is largely correct—if you correct "abandonment" to "reconfiguration".

Continue reading ""Neoliberalisms", Left and Right: Hoisted from the Archives" »

## The ε-Stigler and the Other Components of Stigler: On George Stigler's 1962 Denunciation of the "Insolence" of Demonstrating Negroes, and Other Topics

Twitter Thread: Daniel Kuehn wrote: "We say something intelligent and on-point about Buchanan or Friedman or Tullock or Stigler and then we try to extrapolate a history of conservatism from it. Generally we're not equipped to do that (I'm certainly not), and should be wary of it. Wary doesn’t mean don’t cross-pollinate. I think the interaction between the two communities is great. Just something to be aware of..."

Let's take the George Stigler vector and project it onto a complete intellectual basis made up of the unit vectors ε, σ, π, β, γ:

Continue reading "The ε-Stigler and the Other Components of Stigler: On George Stigler's 1962 Denunciation of the "Insolence" of Demonstrating Negroes, and Other Topics" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 19, 2019)

1. Yes, Some People at the Ludwig von Mises Institute Think Churchill Was a War Criminal for Not Making Peace with Hitler in May 1940. Why Do You Ask?

2. Robin Harris: The Bastards Say, Welcome: "The most famous computer ad that never ran was created for Data General.... After IBM announced the Series/1.... DG marketing came up with a rough draft of a 2-page ad: 'They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome'...

3. Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand and Harald Hagemann: Business Cycles in Juglar and Schumpeter􏰀: "One important difference is that for Schumpeter the classical business cycle is driven by technological innovations of medium size, whereas for Juglar the cause for an overheated boom is speculation fuelled by easy credit...

4. Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus: Life of Tiberius Gracchus

5. Erik Wade: St. Bride's Day Massacre : "We had to kill the Vikings, because they bathed and brushed their hair and our wives couldn't resist such sophistication" is a HELL of a take by medieval English chroniclers: 'One thirteenth-century chronicle attributed a slaughter of Danes by Anglo-Saxons in 1002 to the former's irresistibility to the latter's spouses: "The Danes made themselves too acceptable to English women by their elegant manners and their care of their person. They combed their hair daily, according to the custom of their country, and took a bath every Saturday, and even changed their clothes frequently, and improved the beauty of their bodies with many such trifles, by which means they undermined the chastity of wives...

6. Sam Lau, Joey Gonzalez, and Deb Nolan: Principles and Techniques of Data Science

7. Lyall Taylor: The LT3000 Blog: Uber, Delusion, and Ride-Hailing's Structural Economic Inefficiency: "NYC and Silicon Valley based investors forget that the majority of the world doesn't live in these areas.... Every time I go back to New Zealand to spend time with my parents [I see] that private vehicle ownership isn't going to cease any time soon. Commuting with one's own car is cheap, reliable, fast, and comfortable. Why wait around for an expensive Uber when you can just whip yourself down the road to the local store or restaurant in 5 minutes, and park for free outside on the road or in designated parking areas outside?...

8. Lumen Learning: The Bank War

9. James A.Kahn and Robert W.Rich: _Trend Productivity Growth: "Through 2019Q1... with probability 0.93 productivity remains in a low-growth (1.33% annual rate) regime.... Productivity growth in 2019Q1 in the nonfarm business sector was 3.6% (annual rate), the highest rate in more than four years...

10. I missed this when it came out three years ago: Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Zhenxiang Chen, Paul M. Ong, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr.: The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles

11. The full text is online. Go read it!: Heather Boushey, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh: Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy

12. George A. Akerlof et al.: Exhibit A: "George A. Akerlof, Professor Susan Dynarski... and Professor Janet L. Yellen... regularly use and teach statistical analytical methods.... Amici have a wide range of views about the appropriateness of using race as a factor in college admissions. However, they share the view that Dr. Card is one of the most outstanding and respected scholars in the field of econometrics and applied economics, that his statistical analyses in this case were methodologically sound, and that the criticisms of his modeling approach in the Brief of Economists as Amici Curiae in Support of Plaintiff, Dkt. 450 ('Plaintiff’s Amici Br.'), are not based on sound statistical principles or practices...

13. Jacob T. Levy: "Somehow this article never asks whether... maybe our experience with a president whose qualifications were 'playing a rich person on TV' and 'shouting on twitter' has some important lessons...

14. Boing-Boing: Nebula Awards: "The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman)...

15. Leah McElrath: @leahmcelrath: "//begin sarcasm font// It’s absolutely totally okay to have no idea how many children our government has stolen from their parents. Just business as usual. //end sarcasm font// This is what we’re accepting now...

16. Michael Bennet: Why We Need a Public Health Insurance Option: "I Got Lucky With My Cancer Treatment, But Many Americans Go Bankrupt. That's Why We Need a Public Option...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 19, 2019)" »

## May 17, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Nothing has changed—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: May 17, 2019: "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 1.8% for 2019:Q2. News from this week's data releases decreased the nowcast for 2019:Q2 by 0.4 percentage point. Negative surprises from industrial production and capacity utilization data largely offset positive surprises from housing and regional survey data...

Continue reading "May 17, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update" »

## "Attempts to Make Sense Out of Right Wing Austrian Economics Can Never Amount to Anything"—rootless_e: Hoisted From the Archives

rootless_e is correct: Ludwig von Miese is not: Hoisted from the Archives: Quote of the Day: November 12, 2011: "Attempts to carry out economic reforms from the monetary side can never amount to anything but an artificial stimulation of economic activity by an expansion of the circulation, and this, as must constantly be emphasized, must necessarily lead to crisis and depression. Recurring economic crises are nothing but the consequence of attempts, despite all the teachings of experience and all the warnings of the economists, to stimulate economic activity by means of additional credit"—Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit...

"Attempts to make sense out of right wing Austrian economics can never amount to anything."—rootless_e...

"Fictitious" Wealth and Ludwig von Mises: Nevertheless, like a moth to a flame—or like a dog to vomit, or like a dog to something worse—I find myself under a mysterious but inexorable and irresistible compulsion to waste what would otherwise be productive work time trying to make some kind of sense of it—to at least understand wherein lies the error, and how somebody trying very hard to understand the economy (never mind that he is a big fan of the political leadership of Benito Mussolini) can go so pathetically wrong. It is, of course, not the case that every expansion of the circulation is an "artificial" (and unnatural) "stimulation of economic activity" that must "necessarily lead to crisis and depression". So why does Ludwig von Mises think that it must? Here is my current guess as to where von Mises is coming from:

Continue reading ""Attempts to Make Sense Out of Right Wing Austrian Economics Can Never Amount to Anything"—rootless_e: Hoisted From the Archives" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 16, 2019)

• Yes, Societal Well-Being Depends on a Very Strong Distributional Bias Along the Lines of "To Each According to Their Need". Why Do You Ask?

• PREVIEW: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective: U.C. Berkeley: Spring 2020

• Note to Self: F--- you, @jack: "Quite stunning that you have developed such potentially useful tool, @jack, and yet have managed to make yourself so thoroughly my enemy, isn't it?...

• Note to Self: Are all the cool kids still writing weekly email newsletters? If not, why no longer? If so, why?...

• Twitter Thread: On Thomas Jefferson's Declaration: The problem with it rhetorically (which is only a very small part of the problem with it morally) is that it requires an extra paragraph: "He tempted us, and we fell, and now we are in a horrible spot. And now he is trying to make their and our situation worse by sparking a servile insurrection, with all its bloody and terrible consequences, upon these shores". But I do not know if he could say that paragraph, even to himself in his heart. And certainly the Constitutional Convention would not say it...

• Twitter Thread: On Peng Dehaui: "In 1970 Peng was formally tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1974...

• Twitter Thread: On James Buchanan: "If you are hanging with Mt. Pelerin, with its Lykourgan moments and its "the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally" and "by the slogan that 'it is not your fault' that the demagoguery of unlimited democracy, assisted by a scientistic psychology has come to the support of those who claim a share in the wealth of our society without submitting to the discipline to which it is due", either you dissent strongly and sharply or... we read between the lines...

• Comment of the Day: John Howard Brown: "Most white males don't experience their lives as privileged. If anything, they feel less privileged than their fathers.... Too bad that so many 'Baby Boomers' got scared by the inflation monster in the 1970s...

• Comment of the Day: Howard: "Graduated high school in Allentown, PA in 1970.... White males like me who didn't go to college expected to find life-long work and reasonable pay at Bethlehem Steel, Mack Truck, or the Western Electric Plant. All those jobs are long, long gone...

• Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "Why promise inflation after the recession rather than produce inflation now when monetary policy isn't at the zero lower bound? Is it really likely that people could be convinced that the Fed will accept inflation over 2% some years after then next time we are in the liquidity trap when it demonstrates that it won't accept it right now? They should walk the walk, not just pre-commit to possibly talking the talk at some time in the indefinite future. Still progress...

• Weekend Reading: Joseph Schumpeter (1927): The Explanation of the Business Cycle

• Weekend Reading: Raymond Aron (1955): Nations and Ideologies

1. Martin Wolf: How the Long Debt Cycle Might End: "Start then with inflationary fire. Much of what is going on right now recalls the early 1970s: an amoral US president (then Richard Nixon) determined to achieve re-election, pressured the Federal Reserve chairman (then Arthur Burns) to deliver an economic boom. He also launched a trade war, via devaluation and protection. A decade of global disorder ensued. This sounds rather familiar, does it not?...

2. Charlotte Ahlin: The 'Game Of Thrones' Survival Odds For The 5 Characters Who George R. R. Martin Said Would Make It To The End: "TV Bran stands a pretty good chance of surviving.... Survival chances: 9.5/10. No one cares enough to kill him anymore.... Good luck to anyone foolish enough to try and kill Arya Freaking Stark.... Survival chances: 7/10. 'Not today'.... TV Tyrion... will probably survive to be the power behind whoever ends up on the throne... but a Tyrion death scene would give us one hell of a gut punch in the series finale. Survival chances: 6/10. Leave our boy alone, Bronn!... TV Dany... yikes. Her babies are dropping like (dragon)flies.... Survival chances: 3/10. Dracarys.... TV Jon is everyone's top pick for Special King Boy.... But... honorable Stark men don't fare all too well down south.... Survival chances: 8/10. It's his game to lose...

3. Barry Ritholtz: Index Funds Don’t Hurt Consumers, But Monopolies Do - Bloomberg: "Critics of passive investing blame the wrong thing for higher prices in some industries...

4. Minxin Pei: Is Trump’s Trade War with China a Civilizational Conflict?: "Recent remarks by a senior Trump administration official suggest that the United States' current approach to China is dangerously misconceived. The rise of China under a one-party dictatorship should be met with a united front in defense of the liberal order, not talk of a clash of Caucasian and non-Caucasian civilizations...

5. University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: Marianne Johnson: "Dr. Johnson's research focuses on the history of public economics and public choice, particularly as related to public goods and public policy decision-making. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal for the History of Economic Thought and Oeconomica. Dr. Johnson recently finished a five year term as co-editor for Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Dr. Johnson is the secretary for the History of Economics Society and former president of the Wisconsin Economics Association...

6. Christopher Monroe: Quantum Computing Is a Marathon Not a Sprint

7. Josh Brown: The Book That Changed My Life: "The 20th anniversary of Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth.... Nick Murray has taught thousands of financial advisors about the inherent dignity of our careers...

8. Golden Gate National Recreation Area (U.S. National Park Service): Fort Baker: "Fort Baker, the 9th and final 'Post-to-Park' conversion in the Golden Gate National Parks, is a 335 acre former 1905 U.S. Army post located immediately north of the Golden Gate Bridge. This hidden gem of a site consists of over 25 historic army buildings clustered around a main parade ground, a sheltered harbor protected by a jetty, a number of historic gun emplacements, and trails and forested areas climbing gently up from San Francisco Bay...

9. Cavallo Point Resort: The Luxury Hotel at the Golden Gate

10. Ludwig von Mises: Dictatorships and Double Standards: "Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history...

11. Ludwig von Mises: The First Lesson About Conservative Thinkers Is That They All Rot in One Generation or Less...: "The socialists are coming with a plan to equalize gender relationships–and by making the wife an equal of the husband it is only a matter of time until the worker seeks to be the equal of the boss, and with sex itself freely shared among consenting equals how can we even maintain the idea of 'private property'?...

12. Ludwig von Mises: The First Lesson About Conservative Thinkers Is That They All Rot in One Generation or Less...: "The pseudo-democratic movement endeavours... to make the strong equal to the weak, the talented to the untalented, and the healthy to the sick.... The radical wing of the women’s movement seeks to make women the equal of men…. But the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be decreed away than other inequalities of mankind...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 16, 2019)" »

## Yes, Societal Well-Being Depends on a Very Strong Distributional Bias Along the Lines of "To Each According to Their Need". Why Do You Ask?

At least half of our wealth comes from the ideas and investments of those who are now dead. And as we grow richer, that proportion grows as well. None of the living have any just exclusive claim on any portion of this cornucopian storehouse of technologies. The dead have no just claim on it either: respect for their legacy does not entail honoring their wishes as to its use, if that honoring upsets the principle of equal opportunity. Thus the most bedrock moral-philosophical principal is that more than half of our wealth is held in common for the human community to distribute as it decides is good.

Continue reading "Yes, Societal Well-Being Depends on a Very Strong Distributional Bias Along the Lines of "To Each According to Their Need". Why Do You Ask?" »

## PREVIEW: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective: U.C. Berkeley: Spring 2020

After hearing Ellora Derenoncourt rave about being a TA for Melissa Dell and her Econ 142: The History of Economic Growth, I have decided to go full parasite and stand up my own version of the course for the spring of 2020 here at U.C. Berkeley. Tell me what you think! Here are my notes so far:

Course to be at: Teaching Economics: https://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/econ-135.html

## Econ 135: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective

This course examines the idea and reality of economic growth in historical perspective, beginning with the divergence between human ancestors and other primates and continuing through with forecasts for the 21st century and beyond. Topics covered include human speciation, language, and sociability; the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals; the origins and maintenance of gross inequality; Malthusian economies; the commercial and industrial revolutions; modern economic growth; international prosperity differentials; OECD convergence and East Asian miracles; the political economy of growth and stagnation; and the stubborn persistence of poverty.

Continue reading "PREVIEW: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective: U.C. Berkeley: Spring 2020" »

Note to Self: F--- you, @jack. Twitter keeps—somehow—reversing my view from "Latest Tweets" to your algorithmic "Home", showing me first tweets I am likely to engage in. But tweets I am likely to engage in are not the tweets I want to see. You are hacking my brain, @jack—and not in a good way.

Quite stunning that you have developed such potentially useful tool, @jack, and yet have managed to make yourself so thoroughly my enemy, isn't it? One might say it requires a close-to-unique talent...

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 10, 2019)

1. Robert Kuttner: Karl Polanyi Explains It All

2. Wikipedia: Friedrich von Hayek: "In August 1926, Hayek married Helen Berta Maria von Fritsch (1901–1960), a secretary at the civil service office where Hayek worked, on the rebound upon hearing of his cousin's marriage. They had two children together. Upon the close of World War II, Hayek restarted a relationship with his cousin, who had married since they first met, but kept it secret until 1948. Hayek and Fritsch divorced in July 1950 and he married his cousin Helene Bitterlich (1900–1996) just a few weeks later after moving to Arkansas to take advantage of permissive divorce laws. His wife and children were offered settlement and compensation for accepting a divorce. The divorce caused some scandal at LSE where certain academics refused to have anything to do with Hayek.] In a 1978 interview to explain his actions, Hayek stated that he was unhappy in his first marriage and as his wife would not grant him a divorce he had to enforce it. He rarely visited his children after the divorce...

3. Peter Kafka: Disney says its over \$400 million Vice investment is now worthless - Vox: "A now-familiar story: Investors say they overvalued a high-flying digital publisher...

4. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers: The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn: "The main house at Johnson’s Blue Spring Farm is gone.... On the right-hand side... stands an antebellum-era building... so overgrown with weeds, grasses, and brush that it is barely visible... but it looks sturdier than the Choctaw Academy school building. It is believed to have been one of the slave cottages or a kitchen building at Blue Spring.... On the other hand, just a few miles away, thousands of visitors annually stream through the impeccably maintained gardens and halls of Ashland, the home of Henry Clay.... The contrast between the two sites couldn’t be any starker. And the difference has everything to do with race. Make no mistake: Richard’s decision to live publicly with Julia and their children, Imogene and Adaline, and Henry’s decision to hide his black 'mistresses' in the slave quarters and sell their offspring downriver to New Orleans, played enormous roles in how the two men are remembered today...

5. Michael Staub: The Mismeasure of Minds: "Seeking to wipe away forever the fake science of The Bell Curve.... The book’s analysis refuses to die, animated by already existing racial resentment in U.S. politics and culture and helping to fuel more in its turn...

6. Samuel Brittan (1980): Hayek, the New Right, and the Crisis of Social Democracy

7. Robert Waldmann Has an Interpretation of Karl Marx that Is New to Me...: I tend to read Marx as a Christian heretic--as writing in an eschatological mode in which the time when "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" is exactly as real and near to him as the expectation of Paul of Tarsus that someday soon: "we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord..." (1 Thess. 4:17). Robert disagrees, and hears a sneer whenever Marx says "come the Millennium" that I cannot...

8. Hayek and the "Shut Up and Be Grateful You Were Even Born!" Argument: I ran into a passage that makes me wonder whether Hayek in his inner core believed that democracy had any value—even any institutional value—at all.... "Egalitarianism is of course not a majority view but a product of the necessity under unlimited democracy to solicit the support even of the worst.… It is by the slogan that 'it is not your fault' that the demagoguery of unlimited democracy, assisted by a scientistic psychology, has come to the support of those who claim a share in the wealth of our society without submitting to the discipline to which it is due. It is not by conceding 'a right to equal concern and respect’ to those who break the code that civilization is maintained…" Now it is certainly true that of the trio "Prosperity, Liberty, Democracy," Hayek puts prosperity first and liberty second—or, rather, that freedom of contract needs to be more closely safeguarded than freedom of speech, for if there is freedom of contract then freedom of speech will quickly reappear, but if there is no freedom of contract than freedom of speech will not long survive. But the passage above makes me wonder whether democracy has any place in Hayek's hierarchy of good things at all...

9. H. Clay and Richard L. Troutman: The Emancipation of Slaves by Henry Clay

10. Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (5/8/19): "Competitive Edge: Principles and presumptions for U.S. vertical merger enforcement policy: Antitrust and competition issues are receiving renewed interest, and for good reason. So far, the discussion has occurred at a high level of generality. To address important specific antitrust enforcement and competition issues, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth has launched this blog, which we call “Competitive Edge”...

11. Joakim Book: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

12. Susie Madrak: Rep. Escobar: 'We Have A President Who Has Created An Addiction To Hate': "I'll tell you, that clip, when I saw it last night, it made me very, very sad, very sad for our country, that we are at such a moral rock bottom," Rep. Escobar said...

13. Nancy LeTourneau: Why Is Trump So Afraid of Mueller?: "The fact that the Commander in Chief is describing an investigation conducted by his own administration as “treasonous” ranks right up there with some of the worst. Why would Trump be so afraid of what Mueller has to say, especially when he claims that the special counsel’s report totally vindicated him? It could be because Mueller has earned a tremendous amount of political capital by conducting himself as the consummate professional surrounded by a sea of angry lunatics otherwise known as the Trump administration...

14. Paul Mason: Reading Arendt Is Not Enough: "Arendt’s descriptions of the dynamics of totalitarian movements hold good—... [but] her explanations for them do not.... If Trump has triggered a crisis of progressive thought, it is in particular a crisis for the cult of Hannah Arendt. The United States of America was her last and enduring hope: the only political institution on earth that was supposed to be immune to totalitarianism, nationalism, and imperialism...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 10, 2019)" »

Note to Self: Comment on Richard Baldwin: The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work: Start from the observation the the human brain is a massively-parallel supercomputer that fits inside a breadbox and draws 50 watts of power.

For 6,000 years, since the domestication of the horse, human backs, human thighs, and human fingers have becoming less powerful as sources of economic value, as animals and machines have increasingly competed with and substituted for them. Up until recently, however, every domesticated animal every machine had required a microprocessor. And the highly-productive decentralized societal division of labor of enormous extent created huge and increasing amounts of need for white-collar information processing: the accounting, control, transmission of information, and purveyance of misinformation jobs that are most of what people like us here do. Thus while human backs and thighs and fingers became less powerful as sources of economic value as time passed, human brains become more valuable. But now we have robots which contain their own microprocessors, and software 'bots that handle huge amounts of the white-collar information processing. So the job-creating aspects of technological creative destruction are now open to question

From this standpoint, we can worry along either of two dimensions:

## Where Frank Fukuyama Went Wrong; or, Zombie Fascism!!

Brad DeLong: Council on Foreign Relations: The Future of Democracy Symposium: Session Two: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: this political moment—Louis Napoleon mobilized these kinds of sentiments to overthrow the French Second Republic and establish himself as emperor. Francis Fukuyama wrote an excellent article about how really-existing-socialism—public ownership of the means of production, hopefully leading someday to the free society of associated producers—had crashed and burned, and that the only big idea left about how to organize society was that of liberal market democracy. But Fukuyama made a key mistake: there had been a third challenge. That is the basally-Roman idea thateach of us is individually a stick, very weak, but if we can unite ourselves in a big bundle of sticks and if we can tie ourselves together in leather thongs, we then become a powerful force that, in the hands of our strong leaders, could bruise our enemies.

Continue reading "Where Frank Fukuyama Went Wrong; or, Zombie Fascism!!" »

## May 10, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report: "The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.2% for 2019:Q2. News from the JOLTS, CPI, PPI, and international trade releases left the nowcast for 2019:Q2 broadly unchanged...

### Key Points:

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Nothing has changed—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways.

What has changed in the past week is: The falling-apart of Trump's trade negotiating strategy with China will harm Americans and may disrupt value chains, but the effects are unlikely to be clearly visible in the data flow.

It is still the case that U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2%/year, that inflation is unthreatening, and tha trhe donomy is closing in but not yet at full employment.

Continue reading "May 10, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 6, 2019)

1. Britannica.com: Fasces

2. George Orwell* (1937): The Road to Wigan Pier

3. This Time It Is Not Different: Walter Bagehot and the Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics: Origins of Central Banking: E.M. Forster's Great Aunt Marianne

4. Peter Temin (1990): _Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930s

5. Hans-Peter Ullmann: Organization of War Economies

6. EMB Numbers: Why are Red and Purple "Next to Each Other"?: "I make colored paint by starting with white and adding varying amounts of pigments from my three buckets, CMY. To see 'purple' I add pigment only from the magenta bucket.... I add cyan to magenta to get blue. I add yellow to magenta to get red. Therefore, it makes sense for red and blue to be adjacent on opposite sides of magenta...

7. Adolf Hitler (1941): Top 10 Quotes from World War II: "You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down...

8. Online Etymology Dictionary: Nazi

9. John Maynard Keynes (1936): The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead: "If effective demand is deficient, not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros, so that the players as a whole will lose if they have the energy and hope to deal all the cards. Hitherto the increment of the world’s wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough...

10. John Maynard Keynes (1936): The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead: "Whilst, therefore, the enlargement of the functions of government, involved in the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism. I defend it, on the contrary, both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative...

11. John Maynard Keynes (1936): The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead: "The result of filling in the gaps in the classical theory is not to dispose of the ‘Manchester System’, but to indicate the nature of the environment which the free play of economic forces requires... There will still remain a wide field for the exercise of private initiative and responsibility. Within this field the traditional advantages of individualism will still hold good.... These advantages are... partly advantages of efficiency... decentralisation and of the play of self-interest.... Above all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatest of all the losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state. For this variety preserves the traditions which embody the most secure and successful choices of former generations; it colours the present with the diversification of its fancy; and, being the handmaid of experiment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the most powerful instrument to better the future...

12. Jacob Viner (1937): Mr. Keynes on the Causes of Unemployment: "In a world organizedin accordance with Keynes' specifications there would be a constant race between the printing press and the business agents of the trade unions, with the problem of unemployment largely solved if the printing press could maintain a constant lead and if only volume of employment, irrespective of quality, is considered important...

13. Julia Carrie Wong: 'I See Any Dinosaur, I Buy It': At Home with the Embattled Owner of the Flintstone House: "Florence Fang’s colorful home is a landmark for many in California’s Bay Area. But the town of Hillsborough is suing her, declaring the property a ‘public nuisance’...

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 6, 2019)" »

## Killing My Darlings: A "Great Depression Recovery" Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"

No, Brad: The "Great Depression Recovery" chapter needs to be 7000 words, not 30,000. I am willing to torment editors by shipping them 10000 words, but not more:

## 13.1: Recovery Outside the United States

The rule to memorize about recovery from the Great Depression is: the sooner countries went off the gold standard, the better; and the less that gold standard habits of orthodoxy fettered countries thereafter, the better. The Scandinavian countries bailed first, and did best. Japan and Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, but Japan embraced expansionary policies more thoroughly. The U.S. and Germany abandoned the gold standard in 1933, but Hitler had a clearer view that Nazi persistence and success required putting people to work than FDR did with the try-everything-expediency of his New Deal. France stuck it out on the gold standard until 1937, and did worst of all.

Continue reading "Killing My Darlings: A "Great Depression Recovery" Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"" »

## The Great Depression: An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"

This is the current draft of chapter 10 of Slouching Towards Utopia?. I am, again, of several minds with respect to it. I think it says what really needs to be said. I am not sure it says it in the right length. And I am not sure that I have successfully assembled the puzzle pieces in the right way...

So tell me what you think of it:

## X. The Great Depression

https://www.icloud.com/pages/0mzIvbURq0n3I0Ct0e3aCZbEw

George Orwell (1937): The Road to Wigan Pier:

Presently the train hove in sight. With a wild yell a hundred men dashed down the slope to catch her as she rounded the bend. Even at the bend the train was making twenty miles an hour. The men hurled themselves upon it, caught hold of the rings at the rear of the trucks and hoisted themselves up by way of the bumpers, five or ten of them on each truck. The driver took no notice. He drove up to the top of the slag-heap, uncoupled the trucks, and ran the engine back to the pit, presently returning with a fresh string of trucks. There was the same wild rush of ragged figures as before. In the end only about fifty men had failed to get on to either train.

We walked up to the top of the slag-heap. The men were shovelling the dirt out of the trucks, while down below their wives and children were kneeling, swiftly scrabbling with their hands in the damp dirt and picking out lumps of coal the size of an egg or smaller. You would see a woman pounce on a tiny fragment of stuff, wipe it on her apron, scrutinize it to make sure it was coal, and pop it jealously into her sack.

### 10.1: Understanding the Business Cycle

#### 10.1.1: Say’s Law

When market economies emerged, there was great worry that things would not necessarily fit together: Might not the farmers be unable to sell the crops they grew to the artisans because the artisans could not sell the products they made to the merchants who would be unable to make money carrying artisans products to the farmers because the farmers would not purchase anything? Back at the beginning of economics it was Jean-Baptiste Say who wrote that such an idea of a “general glut”—of economy-wide “overproduction” and consequent mass unemployment—was incoherent. Nobody, Say argued, would ever produce anything for sale unless they expected to use the money they earned in order to buy something else. Thus, “by a metaphysical necessity”, as subsequent-generation economist John Stuart Mill outlined Say’s argument in 1829, there can be no imbalance between the aggregate value of planned production-for-sale, the aggregate value of planned sales, and the aggregate value of planned purchases. This is “Say’s Law”.

Continue reading "The Great Depression: An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 3, 2019)

1. John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace

2. Jérémie Cohen-Setton, Egor Gornostay, and Colombe Ladreit:: The Aggregate Effects of Budget Stimulus: Evidence From the Large Fiscal Expansions Database: "Large, persistent, and positive effects of fiscal stimulus on GDP with a decrease in net exports that only partly offsets the increase in private domestic demand.... suggestive evidence that fiscal policy is more effective in a slump than in a boom...

3. Noah Smith: Why Macroeconomist Emi Nakamura Deserves John Bates Clark Medal - Bloomberg: "The John Clark Bates Medal almost never goes to a macroeconomist. Emi Nakamura is a worthy exception...

4. Greg Ip: For Lower-Paid Workers, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived: "Software and algorithms are used to screen, hire, assign and now terminate workers...

5. Jessica M. Goldstein: Behind the Scenes with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Before Anyone Knew Her Name: "Rachel Lears' documentary 'Knock Down the House' captures a political phenom on the rise—and three other women running for office for the first time...

6. Jason Kottke: Grace Hopper Explains a Nanosecond: "In this short clip from 1983, legendary computer scientist Grace Hopper uses a short length of wire to explain what a nanosecond is...

7. Steve M.: The Rot In The Republican Party Started Long Before Fox 'News' And Trump: "Sorry James Comey, but William Barr didn't need to spend time with Donald Trump to become who he is now...

8. byu/cil3x: MacBook Pro Keyboard Failures: Why Apples dust excuse is bullshit! [Teardown + Explanations] : apple: "What the actual cause is, honestly I don't know. My suspicion is that the metal dome experiences metal fatigue and slowly begin to lose connection, or that that little U-shaped cutout in the centre of the dome weakens and starts to easily bounce when pressed, making contact 2+ times.... Always have AppleCare, even if paying extra to cover a flaw that should be properly dealt with is morally questionable and a shitty thing to do...

9. John Maynard Keynes: Obituary for Alfred Marshall: "Economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.... An easy subject, at which very few excel!...

10. Forrest Capie: Money and Business Cycles in Britain, 1870–1913

11. Joseph Schumpeter (1927): The Explanation of the Business Cycle

12. Matthew Yglesias (2011): Demand Denialism: "Frédéric Bastiat... his 'What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen', which I’ve seen a lot of people cite as the foundation for their opposition to stimulus policies. It’s an extremely insightful essay, but I think the correct way to understand it is as precisely laying down the theoretical conditions in which stimulative policies do work...

13. Deficit Denialism: Frederic Bastiat Actually Favored Expansionary Fiscal Policy in Recessions Edition: It has always seemed to me that very, very, very few of the people who cite Frederic Bastiat have actually read him. Most have not even read all of "What Is Seen and Unseen". For example: "There is an article in the Constitution which states: 'Society assists and encourages the development of labor.... through the establishment by the state, the departments, and the municipalities, of appropriate public works to employ idle hands'. As a temporary measure in a time of crisis… this intervention… could have good effects... as insurance. It… takes labor and wages from ordinary times and doles them out, at a loss it is true, in difficult times...

14. Why Can't More People Actually Read Frederic Bastiat?: John Holbo's jaw drops as he reads Alex Tabarrok praise the carried interest rule.... Indeed, Alex Tabarrok does crawl out on a limb and applaud all tax loopholes as islands of freedom on the road to serfdom.... I would say that, in a democracy, one pays a progressive share of one's income to fund the many useful and convenient services and actions the government undertakes.... Methinks Frederic Bastiat would have agreed with me: "Often, nearly always if you will, the government official renders an equivalent service to John Goodfellow. In this case there is... only an exchange.... I say this: If you wish to create a government office, prove its usefulness."... Frederic Bastiat. I wonder how many people really read him these days?...

15. Karl Marx (1857): The Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in England

16. This Time It Is Not Different: Walter Bagehot and the Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics: Origins of Central Banking: E.M. Forster's Great Aunt Marianne

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 3, 2019)" »

## May 3, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change

Today: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employment Situation Summary: "Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 263,000 in April, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.6 percent.... Notable job gains... in professional and business services, construction, health care, and social assistance..." Note that all of the decline in the unemployment rate is a shift of workers from "unemployed" to "out of the labor force", which now stands 800,000 lower than it did in December. The unemployment rate is broken as an indicator of the business-cycle state of the labor market.

Today: Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Staff Nowcast: "May 03, 2019: The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.1% for 2019:Q..." In the past week, good news about employment and personal consumption largely offset by bad news about manufacturing.

### Key Points:

The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Nothing has changed—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. Specifically, it is still the case that:

• U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2%/year.
• There are still no signs the U.S. has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating.
• Thus there are till no signs that the U.S. has gone beyond or is even at "full employment".
• There are still no signs of interest rate normalization: secular stagnation continues to reign.
• Printing money (and bonds) to increase the global supply of safe assets and using the proceeds to buy useful stuff continues to look like good business cycle-management policy.
• The unemployment rate is broken as an indicator of the business-cycle store of the labor market.
• The Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut:
• To the extent that it was supposed to boost the American economy by boosting the supply side through increased investment in America, has been a complete failure.
• To the extent that it was supposed to make America more unequal, has succeeded.
• Delivered a substantial short-erm demand-side fiscal stimulus to growth that has now ebbed.
• (A 3.2%/year rate of growth of final sales to domestic purchasers over the seven quarters starting in January 2017, pushing the level of Gross National Income up by 2.1% from this demand-side stimulus.)

• A change from 3 months ago: The Federal Reserve's abandonment of its focus on policies that are likely to keep PCE chain inflation at 2%/year or lower does not mean that it is preparing to do anything to avoid or moderate the next recession.
• A change from 1 month ago: The U.S. grew at 3.2%/year in the first quarter of 2019—1.6%-points higher than had been nowcast—but the growth number you want to put in your head in assessing the strength of the economy is the 1.6%/year number that had been nowcast.
• A change from 1 week ago: The disjunction between household- and establishment-survey views of the labor market continues to grow: since December seasonally-adjusted establishment payrolls have grown by an average of 210000 a month, while the CPS reports that the seasonally-adjusted number of workers with jobs has fallen by 80000 a month.

Continue reading "May 3, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: Little Change" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 1, 2019)

1. Lindsey Graham: CNN New Day: “You Know How You Make America Great Again? Tell Donald Trump To Go To Hell”:n "Trump’s a Race-Baiting, Xenophobic, Religious Bigot. He Doesn’t Represent My Party. He Doesn’t Represent The Values That the Men And Women Who Wear the Uniform are Fighting For...

2. Ben Thompson: Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, and the SaaS Opportunity: "For all of the disruption that the enterprise market has faced thanks to the rise of software-as-a-service (Saas), Microsoft was remarkably well-placed to take advantage of this new paradigm, if only they could get out of their own way...

3. Charlie Stross: [Social Architecture and the House of Tomorrow(http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/04/architecture-and-the-house-of-.html): "The bedroom, wardrobe, bathroom, and some type of food storage/preparation area, aren't going away. Other spaces will also be around, and social/spatial insulation will be in demand. At the high end, the elite (whoever they are) will try to ape the living arrangements of previous century's elites, as a status signal if nothing else. What else is conceivable? What am I missing that should be as obvious as the multimodal shipping container in 1950, or photovoltaic panels on house rooftops in 1990?...

4. Students who come to a country to study are one of the most important elements of any country's soft power: they should be encouraged and cosseted. They become its friends. And God knows the Britain that Cameron and May have made will need lots of friends: Financial Times: British Universities and the Brexit Dimension: "Britain’s universities are a rare export success for its services-driven economy.... As well as the monetary benefits the UK gains soft power and ties of affection with future business leaders, technocrats and politicians. Whatever happens, Britain will need these friends...

5. Neil Turok: The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything

6. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers: The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn, U.S. Vice President Richard M. Johnson’s Black Wife

7. David Mills: The Vice President and the Mulatto: "Race, sex and politics in 19th-Century America.... Brenda Gene Gordon, a 67-year-old white woman in Chandler, Ariz.... How on earth could Brenda Gordon not have known that her great-great-great-grandfather was Vice President Richard M. Johnson? Wasn’t this fact passed proudly from generation to generation inside her family? No, it was not.... Julia Chinn... was, by law, a Negro. And in Johnson’s time (not to mention since), this was scandalous. 'I grew up never hearing the names Richard M. Johnson (even in Kentucky history classes) or Julia Chinn', Mrs. Gordon wrote to me during a recent email exchange...

8. Henry R. Robinson: An Affecting Scene in Kentucky

9. Abigail Adams: Letter to John Adams, 31 March - 5 April 1776

10. Wikipedia: Otto Bauer

11. I would suggests to Senator Rick Scott—indeed, I would suggest to all the Republican senatorså—that this is sufficient reason to vote against Stephen Moore, unless this is the face the REpublican Party wants to put forward to minority voters for the next two generations: Margaret Hoover: Firing Line: "Stephen Moore explains his 2016 joke about Donald Trump moving into the White House and kicking 'a black family out of public housing'. Moore says, 'That is a joke I always made', adding he didn’t mean it 'like a black person' lived there. 'I shouldn’t have said it', he says...

12. Ella Nilsen: Infrastructure: Trump and Democrats’ maybe-doomed meeting on infrastructure, explained - Vox: "2 trillion in the nation’s roads, bridges, and rural broadband, according to Democratic leaders.... Democrats are thrilled with that number; Republicans likely won’t be. Trump himself admitted his plan 'may not be typically Republican', according to the source...

13. Emily Stewart: How Occupy Wall Street Animated Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the Left: "Occupy Wall Street was seen as a failure when it ended in 2011. But it’s helped transform the American left...

14. Nisha Gopalan: China's Bay Area Plan Has Holes, Concerns for Hong Kong: "The plan gives scant detail on how Hong Kong and Macau will be integrated without eroding their special status.... Late Monday, the official Xinhua News Agency released details of the State Council’s Greater Bay Area plan—a project to knit together Hong Kong and Macau with nine mainland cities into a global innovation hub to rival California’s Silicon Valley. The trouble is, there’s little new on how authorities plan to make this grand vision into a reality...

15. The Hoarse Whisperer: "The last time Barr engineered a cover-up, people didn’t have cellphones, e-mail or the internet. He’s the caveman of coverups. No wonder he’s so bad at it...

16. Katherine Eriksson, Katheryn Russ, Jay C. Shambaugh, and Minfei Xu: Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 1, 2019)" »

## Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (April 28, 2019)

1. Adam Schiff: The Barr S---show: "Russians were engaged in a systemic effort to interfere in our election; the Trump campaign welcomed it, embraced it, built it into their plan, made full use of it, lied about it, covered it up, and then obstructed the investigation into it...

2. Alan Rappeport: Stung by Trump’s Trade Wars, Wisconsin’s Milk Farmers Face Extinction: "The Voelker dairy farm in Wisconsin sold off most of its cows this year as economic and technological forces, including President Trump’s trade war, take a toll on the dairy industry.... The flagship industry in a pivotal swing state faces an economic crisis.

3. Paul Krugman: The Great Republican Abdication: "The modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that’s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy...

4. Abigail Disney: "Let me very clear. I like Bob Iger. I do NOT speak for my family but only for myself. Other than owning shares (not that many) I have no more say in what happens there than anyone else. But by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane...

5. Emma Newburger: Steve Schwarzman: Raise Minimum Wage, Eliminate Taxes for Teachers: "Blackstone CEO and Chairman Steve Schwarzman outlines a 'Marshall Plan' for the middle class to address increasing income inequality in America. The billionaire private equity titan and supporter of President Donald Trump pointed to three main pillars of the plan: a higher minimum wage, more resources for technical training programs in schools and the elimination of taxes for teachers. 'What we have is less an issue of income inequality than income insufficiency for the bottom 50% of the society', he says...

6. Bloomberg: Quadriga’s Downfall Began When Founder Abruptly Fired All The Exchange’s ‘Law And Order’ Folks, Former Lawyer Says: "Christine Duhaime says Gerald Cotten decided one day in 2016 he no longer wanted the crypto exchange to be a listed company...

7. Dan Margolies and Celia Llopis-Jepsen: Kansas Supreme Court Rules State Constitution Protects Right To Abortion

8. Wikipedia: More Cowbell

9. Walter Laquer: On Thomas Mann's "Reflections on a Non-Political Man: "The war was totally justified, a genuine popular cause... Germany had been driven into the war by its envious adversaries. But it was also a necessity ('fate'), for the prewar world had been deeply corrupt, not worth preserving. War was a tremendous creative event, it brought about national unity and moral elevation. These basic ideas (of the early war years) were coupled with violent attacks against the decadent West: against France which had a democratic civilization but no culture; against the British who wanted to re-educate Germany using Gurkhas and Hottentots...

10. Gwern: Spaced Repetition

11. Branko Milanovic: Shadows and Lights of Globalization: "Today’s globalization and its effects, positive and negative, as in many ways a mirror-replay  of the first globalization that took place from the mid-19th century to the First World War...

12. Michael Nielsen: Augmenting Long-Term Memory

13. Wikipedia: Ian Richardson

Continue reading "Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (April 28, 2019)" »