Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...
Paul Krugman: The Transfer Problem and Tax Incidence: "These days, what passes for policymaking in America manages to be simultaneously farcical and sinister, and the evil-clown aspects extend into the oddest places...
Paul Krugman: Schroedinger's Tax Hike: "The Senate bill... tries to be long-run deficit-neutral... by offsetting huge corporate tax cuts with higher taxes on individuals...
Brink Lindsey: Further thoughts on libertarian anti-democracy: "Further thoughts by Will on libertarian anti-democracy’s effect on the GOP...
Martin Wolf: A Republican tax plan built for plutocrats: "How does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy?...
Paul Krugman: Leprechaun Economics, With Numbers: "8% is a reasonable number for after-tax required return...
Stan Collender: GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington: "The GOP tax bill will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches' brew of gimmicks and outright lies)...
Greg Leiserson: The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "First, the Tax Foundation appears to incorrectly model the interaction between federal and state corporate income taxes...
Martin Sandbu: Who should govern the euro?: "I have long argued against further centralisation of fiscal and structural policies, and proposed that some autonomy should instead be returned to the national level...
Justin Wolfers: @justinwolfers on Twitter: "The University of Chicago surveyed 42 leading economists and found exactly one who believes the Republican claim that their tax bill will grow the economy. http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/tax-reform-2"
Ned Phelps: Nothing Natural About the Natural Rate of Unemployment: "A compelling hypothesis is that workers, shaken by the 2008 financial crisis and the deep recession that resulted...
Some Fairly-Recent Links:
Highlighted | Teaching | Reading, Videos, etc.
Must-Reads:
- Martin Wolf: A Republican tax plan built for plutocrats: "How does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy?...
- Matthew Yglesias: If the GOP tax plan is so good, why do they lie so much about it?: "Democratic programs may or may not be... good idea[s], [but] the bills they write that they say will expand the provision of social services in the United States really do expand the provision of social services...
- Martin Sandbu: Who should govern the euro?: "I have long argued against further centralisation of fiscal and structural policies, and proposed that some autonomy should instead be returned to the national level...
- Greg Leiserson: The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "First, the Tax Foundation appears to incorrectly model the interaction between federal and state corporate income taxes...
- Brink Lindsey: Further thoughts on libertarian anti-democracy: "Further thoughts by Will on libertarian anti-democracy’s effect on the GOP...
- Paul Krugman: Leprechaun Economics, With Numbers: "8% is a reasonable number for after-tax required return...
- Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and The Trade Deficit: "TF provides very little detail on their model, which is itself a flashing red light: transparency is essential...
- Chye-Ching Huang: @dashching on Twitter: "A Tax Foundation dynamic score that no-one should pay any attention to an indication of what this bill would do for growth...
- Noah Smith: On Twitter @noahpinion: "Nasty tweets are like nasty blog comments...
- Peter Beinart: Reflections of an Affirmative-Action Baby: "In 1991... Stephen Carter wrote... Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.... Little did I realize that the book’s title applied to me...
- Claudia Goldin: How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple): "Billie Jean King... the United States Open... 1972... $10,000. Ilie Năstase, her male counterpart, won $25,000...
- Julius Martov (1920): The state and the socialist revolution": "Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions...
- Barry Eichengreen: Trade Policy and Growth: "Nothing one can say in this area is uncontroversial...
- David Kamin: Fixing the Loophole in the House Limit on Deductibility of State and Local Income Taxes: "First, under the legislation...
- Paul Krugman: Discredited ideas
- Jason Furman: @jasonfurman on Twitter: Lack of Treasury Dynamic Analysis: "The lack of a Treasury career staff analysis of the growth and dynamic effects of the bill tells you a lot about what such an analysis would show..."
- Roger Farmer: How to Fix the Curse of the Five: "I recently came across this video link to a session held at the 2017 ASSA meetings on the ‘Curse of the Top Five’...
Should-Reads:
- Paul Krugman: Schroedinger's Tax Hike: "The Senate bill... tries to be long-run deficit-neutral... by offsetting huge corporate tax cuts with higher taxes on individuals...
- Alexander William Salter and Daniel J. Smith: Political Economists or Political Economists? The Role of Political Environments in the Formation of Fed Policy Under Burns, Greenspan, and Bernanke: "We analyze the writings and speeches of... Arthur Burns, Alan Greenspan, and Benjamin Bernanke...
- Paul Krugman: The Transfer Problem and Tax Incidence: "These days, what passes for policymaking in America manages to be simultaneously farcical and sinister, and the evil-clown aspects extend into the oddest places...
- Howard Blum: Exclusive: What Trump Really Told Kislyak After Comey Was Canned: "An Israeli source told Vanity Fair... a small group of Mossad officers and other Israeli intelligence officials took their seats in a Langley conference room on a January morning just weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump...
- Ned Phelps: Nothing Natural About the Natural Rate of Unemployment: "A compelling hypothesis is that workers, shaken by the 2008 financial crisis and the deep recession that resulted...
- Dave Drake: Statues of the Boys in Grey: "In Durham last month, a peaceful mob pulled down a Confederate monument on the grounds of the old courthouse. It wasn’t a statue of Lee or Jackson; it was dedicated To the Boys in Gray...
- Stan Collender: GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington: "The GOP tax bill will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches' brew of gimmicks and outright lies)...
- Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts, Growth, and Leprechauns: "The Tax Policy Center released its macroeconomic analysis of the House tax cut bill...
- Peter Lindert: The rise and future of progressive redistribution: "There has been a blossoming of research into fiscal incidence by income class...
- Jo Mitchell: Dilettantes Shouldn’t Get Excited: "The Freshwater version of the model concluded that all government policy has no effect and that any changes are driven by an unexplained residual...
- Jason Fruman: On Twitter: "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...": "It is hard to know where to start on Treasury's comments on their analysis of dynamic scoring...
- Paul Krugman: Everybody Hates the Trump Tax Plan: "Gary Cohn, Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, met with a group of top executives... asked to raise their hands if lower taxes would lead them to raise capital expenditures...
- Paul Krugman: Days of Greed and Desperation: "The House tax bill is wildly regressive; the Senate bill actually raises taxes on most families, while including a special tax break for private planes...
- Martin Wolf: A bruising Brexit could shipwreck the British economy: "The UK economy remains the most regionally divided in Europe...
- Matthew Yglesias: Watch CEOs admit they won’t actually invest more if tax reform passes: "A telling and important moment...
- Douglas L. Campbell: Ancestry and Development: the Power Pose of Economics?: "George Mason... asked me to present my work joint with Ju Hyun Pyun, taking down the "genetic distance to the US predicts development"...
- Matthew Yglesias: Republicans should admit to themselves they mostly don’t want big change: "It’s a cranky old person party, not a policy visionary party...
- Nick Bunker: The forces behind the highly unequal U.S. wealth distribution: "Two papers... give us some guidance on the forces that have led to such an unequal wealth distribution in the United States...
- Krystal Ball and Ro Khanna: Lessons for Democrats after Virginia election and how tech can help: "Given modern communications technology, there’s no reason why good jobs in the new economy should be sequestered in a few hubs...
- Noah Smith: The "cackling cartoon villain" defense of DSGE: "The new defense of DSGE by Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Trabandt is pretty cringe-inducing...
- Jasjeet S. Sekhon: Causal Inference in the Age of Big Data: "The rise of massive datasets that provide fine-grained information about human beings and their behavior offers unprecedented opportunities...
- Lant Pritchett: The Perils of Partial Attribution: Let’s All Play for Team Development: "There was a growth acceleration in 1993 that created 1.1 trillion in additional GDP...
- Matteo Maggiori, Brent Neiman, and Jesse Schreger: International Currencies and Capital Allocation: "The external wealth of countries has increased dramatically over the last forty years...
- Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (155): From The Roman Oration: "This city... covers mountain peaks... covers the land intervening, and... goes down to the sea...
- Charles J. Sykes: Year One: The Mad King: "Bret Stephens... sought to explain the capitulation of the conservative movement by citing the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz...
- Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Facing the Four Structural Threats to US Democracy: "As California has shown, structural barriers to good governance can be eliminated through citizen-driven reforms...
- Paul Krugman: Trump and Ryan Versus the Little People: "Consider four hypothetical taxpayers.... First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about...
- Ta Nehisi Coates: When Every Word Doesn't Belong to Everyone
- Edward Luce: The House of Trump and the House of Saud: "Mr Trump’s $110bn triumph was as close as you come to a 'fake deal'...
- Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ta-Nehisi Coates has an incredibly clear explanation for why white people shouldn’t use the n-word - Vox: "When you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you...
- Ezra Klein: Donald Trump: America’s pathetic autocrat: "Is this, then, the case for optimism? That we have installed a would-be autocrat in the White House...
- Kung Fu Monkey (2006): Farm Fetish: "For chrissake... only 2 million... people work on farms or ranches...
- Liz Mair: Gillespie's Losing Battle: "7 reasons Republican Ed Gillespie lost so stunningly in Virginia to lackluster Democrat Ralph Northam...
- Eli Stokols: Trump Says Democrats Will Like Senate Tax Plan More Than House Version: "President Donald Trump moved to assuage centrist Democratic senators’ concerns about the House Republican tax overhaul by telling them the Senate version will be more to their liking...
- Nick Bunker: Policy rules and central bank independence: "The general public and their elected officials are not simply passengers on a ship...
- Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Republican tax plan slams workers and job creators in favor of the rich and inherited wealth: "The tax plan... is a remarkable document... most notably in that it achieves the opposite of its stated goal...
- Noah Smith: The U.S. and Japan Don’t Have a Trade Problem: "When Japan buys U.S. bonds, stocks, or car factories...
- Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles: Economic Inequality & Crony Capitalism: Conservatives Should Rethink Their Views: "Conservatives have two intellectual commitments that are increasingly incompatible...
- Sean McElwee: Pandering to Racists Won’t Get Democrats Anywhere: "In the early years of realignment after Barry Goldwater’s overwhelming loss, some prominent Republicans argued that the Republican Party should court black voters...
- Paul Krugman: On Twitter: GOP tax bill is awesomely bad: "GOP tax bill is awesomely bad, raising taxes on half of middle class while mainly benefiting the idle rich. Why?...
- Nick Bunker: JOLTS Day Graphs: September 2017 Report Edition: "The rate at which workers are quitting their jobs hasn’t changed much over the last year...
Links:
- Claudia Sahm: time demands in economics: "Time demands are not an exogenous shock. Many employers can alter the time demands or support employees in meeting them..."
- Tyler Cowen: The Tenure Track Is Too Rigid to Help Diversity: "Universities should experiment with ways to hire more parents and other would-be professors who don't have an inside track..."
- FT: Chipmakers bet on the ‘big bang’ of artificial intelligence: "Broadcom’s $130bn bid for Qualcomm reflects semiconductor companies’ desire to depend less on smartphones and vie for a foothold in AI..."
- Kim Clausing: GOP Tax Plan Doesn't Fit Trump's America First Policy
- Shane Ryan: Beyond the Meme: We Now Know the Entire Life Story of Distracted Boyfriend and His Angry Girlfriend
- Miles Kimball (2013): Quartz #29—>The Complete Guide to Getting into an Economics PhD Program
- Jason Furman, Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, and Anna Stansbury: Policy Implications of Sustained Low Productivity Growth: "Do the Productivity Slowdown and the Inequality Increase Have a Common Cause? and Productivity and Pay: Is the Link Broken?..."
- Nick Bunker: The blueprint for a perpetual wealth machine for the very richest U.S. families: "This transfer of wealth across generations could have significant consequences on wealth inequality and mobility—all to “reward” children who happen to be born into immensely rich parents. What’s the benefit for all the other Americans of creating dynastic wealth for the few?..."
- Nicholas Bagley: The GOP is trading 13 million people’s health care for corporate tax cuts - The Washington Post
- Zeeshan Aleem: Saudi Arabia: life after oil: "Mohammed bin Salman’s... arrest scores of the country’s most prominent officials and business elites under the banner of an anti-corruption purge last week was a remarkable power play, an unprecedented move designed to concentrate all authority in the Gulf state in one man’s hands. But the radical shake-up was also about something else: preparing for life after oil..."
- Heebie-Geebie: Comedy, Misogyny, and the 90s, and the 80s, and so on: "I was completely dumbstruck by the fact that Jimmie invoked his love for his wife there, as the reason he didn't want her to find the dead body. I was so trained and used to the idea that you don't want wives to find the dead body because the wife will scream at you, because she's a shrew and she won't understand, because your wife makes everything difficult and you resent her or put up with it for the sex..."
- David Anderson: The Gold Rush: "The shift out of Silver looks to be two thirds towards Gold.... Covered California is running their own massive marketing campaign... outpacing their 2017 enrollment on an apples to apples basis. We can not extrapolate California’s experience nationally as there are too many differences but again, this is promising..."
- Chad P. Bown and Soumaya Keynes-Read: How to Save a (Pacific) Trade Deal: "The new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).... The motivation behind the agreement for countries like Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Canada and what the United States stands to lose economically from the president's choice to pull out of the Pacific deal..."
- Nick Bunker: What’s the problem a U.S. corporate tax cut will solve? | Equitable Growth: "Even more questionable is the idea that the cost of capital is of much concern these days. Corporations can borrow at very low interest rates, but they have become net lenders to the rest of the economy..."
- Ernie Tedeschi: More on why so many parents lose under the TCJA: "I've created a table below detailing how each policy in the TCJA affects the number of parental families in 2027 seeing a tax hike..."
- Mike Konczal: Republicans are weaponizing the tax code: "They’re rewarding capital, punishing labor — and dismantling the tax code welfare state..."
- Should be "freer markets", not "free markets". Big difference: Noah Smith: Free Markets Improved More Lives Than Anything Ever: "Nothing in human history has done so much to reduce absolute poverty..."
- Tim Duy: Taking Stock: "We do not have much experience with an economy
operating near full employment. This sounds odd, but
generally the Fed kills the economy soon after reaching
that point..."
- Noah Smith: The Robot Revolution Is Coming. Just Be Patient.: "Amid all the fear of robots taking human jobs, skeptical voices have been asking: Where are these robots? Machine-learning systems—commonly marketed as artificial intelligence, but really closer to fancy statistical algorithms—are beating humans at games, improving search algorithms and transforming industry in countless small ways. But so far, the machine-learning boom hasn't done anything to reverse the slump in productivity growth..."
- Jason Matthew DeBacker et al.: The Impact of State Taxes on Pass-Through Businesses: Evidence from the 2012 Kansas Income Tax Reform
- Anton Korinek: Thoughts on DSGE Macroeconomics: Matching the Moment, But Missing the Point? by: "Its conceptual restrictions, numerical methods, and the resulting complexity have created biases.... A richer set of methodologies would also make macroeconomics more robust..."
- Joseph E. Stiglitz: Where Modern Macroeconomics Went Wrong: "At the heart of the failure were the wrong microfoundations failed to incorporate... information economics and behavioral economic..."
- Noah Smith: Fixing Macroeconomics Will Be Really Hard - Bloomberg: "The field is still reckoning with the failure to see the Great Recession coming..."
- Gauti Eggertson, Jacob Robbins, and Ella Getz Wold: The Rise of Monopoly Power in the United States
- Martin Wolf: Taming the masters of the tech universe: "Examining the macroeconomic impact of the world’s most valuable companies..."
- MIT: 6-14: Computer Science, Economics and Data Science: "Computer science supplies the procedures and algorithms on which these technologies operate. Data science structures, parses, and interprets the vast set of informational inputs and outputs that move through these platforms. Economics guides the design of platforms, predicts and interprets their emergent properties, and sets the incentives..."
- Joseph Heath: Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks
- Catherine Rampall: If the tax bill is so great, why does the GOP keep lying about it?: "Nearly every claim Republicans are using to market their tax plan is at best a distortion, at worst a deliberate falsehood. Which raises the question: If their plan is really so great, why not sell it on the merits?..."
- Caroline Baum: Bonds are from Venus; stocks are from Mars: "Wild optimism fuels big gains in equities, but fixed-income isn’t impressed..."
- Rick Perlstein: The Elephants in the Resistance: Don’t Trust the Anti-Trump Republicans: "Sen. Jeff Flake and his ilk aren’t the heroes we’re looking for..."
- Margot Sanger-Katz and Kevin Quealy: What Red States Are Passing Up as Blue States Get Billions: "Avalere estimates that the 18 states that have still not expanded could give up more than $180 billion over the next 10 years..."
- Jared M. Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
- Michael Kremer: Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990
- Paul M. Romer (1986): Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth
- David Glasner: Milton Friedman and How not to Think about the Gold Standard, France, Sterilization and the Great Depression | Uneasy Money
- Marco Tabellini
- James Fallows (2013): Jerry Brown's Political Reboot: "In his reprise as governor, he's been as ruthlessly practical as he's been reflective, embracing his inner politician to restore the California dream..."
- Sean Carroll (2015): The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: "I become sad when people continue to misunderstand it... obviously wrong reasons.... I’m thinking of... 'MWI is not a good theory because it’s not testable'... appeared recently in this article by Philip Ball... whose snidely aggressive tone is matched only by... its off-base[ness].... Clearly I am either being too obscure, or too polite..."
- David Wallace (2016): What is orthodox quantum mechanics?
- James H. Oliver (1953): The Ruling Power: A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ
through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides
Author(s):
- James Pethokoukis: Will the future bring amazement or dismay? A long-read Q&A with Tim O'Reilly
- Jason Furman: Can Tax Reform Get Us to 3 Percent Growth?
- Lawrence Summers: A Republican tax plan that will help the rich and harm growth
- Matthew Klein: European leaders seem determined to remake the “global savings glut” on a massive scale: "European officials have been systematically shrinking the supply of euro-denominated safe assets.... In general, European officialdom seems to think this is good..."
- Elizabeth Cascio: Public Investments in Child Care: "Investments in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems and in expansion of universal preschool for four-year-olds..."
- Rob Beschizza: Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, denounces it: ""It's a social-validation feedback loop... exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators—it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway..."
- Margaret C. Levenstein (2012): Escape from Equilibrium: Thinking Historically about Firm Responses to Competition | Enterprise & Society | Cambridge Core
- German Lopez: A new study compared opioids and over-the-counter painkillers in ERs. Opioids didn’t do so well. - Vox: "The study challenges some big assumptions about acute pain treatment in emergency settings..."
- Michael M. Kasumovic and Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff (2015): Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour
- Bess Levin: Former Treasury Secretary Suggests Steve Mnuchin Is Being A Partisan Hack On Taxes | Vanity Fair: "Either that or he’s being 'ignorant"..." <--Why not both?
- Dylan Scott: House Republican: my donors told me to pass the tax bill “or don’t ever call me again”: "Chris Collins is saying the quiet part loud..."
- Rick Wilson: The Strange Pleasure of Seeing Carter Page Set Himself on Fire: "In any other administration, this awkward and silly man would be at the bottom of the barrel. In Trump world, he’s in the middle quintile..."
- Perry Bacon, Jr.: Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him <--Quite possibly the worst piece written in the 2008 campaign.
- Nouriel Roubini: The Plot Against America’s 99%: "Making matters worse, America’s pluto-populist president is peddling a tax plan that will further increase economic inequality at a time when income and wealth gaps are already widening, owing to the effects of globalization, trade, migration, new labor-saving technologies, and market consolidation in many sectors..."
- German Lopez: Ted Cruz accidentally explained America’s gun problem in one sentence: "'Evil is evil is evil', Cruz said on CNN, 'and will use the weaponry that is available.' This, it turns out, is exactly the point made by gun control advocates.... What Americans... have... is extra stock of—and way more access to—incredibly deadly weapons..."
- Bruce Bartlett: 6 favorite political books: "The Emerging Republican Majority... Reagan in His Own Hand... Plutocrats... Growing Public... The Wealth and Poverty of Nations... Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy..."
- David Kamin: Is There a Gaping Hole for the Best Off in the House Bill’s Limitation on the Deduction for State…: "Does the House intend to give a huge preference to owners of companies and even passive investors (think law firm partners or Donald Trump) over employees by allowing the owners and investors to write off their state and local income taxes, while employees can’t?..."
- Wikipedia: Nicolaism
- Mark Kleiman: How the Rich Rig Regulations: "Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center and Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University set out to generalize this phenomenon, arguing that regressive regulation is a major contributor to inequality and a major drag on growth..."
- Ricardo Hausmann: The Moral Identity of Homo Economicus: "The new revolution may lead to strategies that make us more responsive to our better angels. Economics and our view of human behavior need not be dismal. It may even become inspirational..."
- Robert Waldmann: The Critique of the Golgotha Program
- Danny Vinik: The GOP’s hidden 46% tax bracket: "If you’re rich enough, some of your income is taxed at a rate unseen since the ‘80s..."
- MIFROMA
- Bryan McGrath: What We Learned from the Navy’s Collision Inquiries
- Berkeley Social Club American New, Breakfast & Brunch, Korean
- German Lopez: I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened: "This was exactly what anti-legalization activists have warned about: Companies got a hold of a dangerous, addictive product, marketed it irresponsibly, and lobbied for lax rules. The government’s regulatory response floundered..."