The post is here. Among other items, it mentions an essay by Richard Hanania.
Richard Hanania argues that the left is ideological while conservatives are tribal. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.
…Hanania’s thesis came up during the first meeting of our seminar, when we talked about contemporary political engagement. I plan to include my notes from the seminar in a separate essay.
My review of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is here. Again, I conclude on a quibbling note.
In short, almost every reference to “market” is pejorative. But one could easily argue that the market is an expensive, long-lasting trait and thus should be presumed to be adaptive. Unfortunately, WH seem to see no reason to investigate what positive functions it serves and what trade-offs might exist in attempting to do away with it or regulate it.
In general, although I found the sermons in WH interesting and worthwhile, I felt that the book suffered from a framework in which the individual engages in a lonely battle with the natural and social environment.
I review The Money Illusion. I conclude on a skeptical note:
Would an NGDP futures market provide a reliable guide for discretionary monetary policy? That seems like an empirical question. But my guess is that if NGDP can be accurately forecast by speculators, then the market NGDP forecast can already be extracted from the above-mentioned indicators.
An assertion that you made a better forecast of NGDP than the Fed did in 2007, even if that assertion is true, does not prove your case. If I were a market monetarist, articulating an NGDP forecasting algorithm derived from market indicators, and demonstrating its reliability through a variety of historical episodes, would be high on my research agenda.
The coronavirus produced an epidemic of working from home. This has revealed a sharp split, between business leaders who want their workers back in the office, and a workforce that would rather stay home. My bet is that the return to the office that many CEOs anticipate will not take place. Building security firm Kastle Systems’ Workplace Occupancy Barometer probably will not return to 50 percent anytime soon. And I expect to see soft demand for office construction to last for many years.
Lately, I have been asking myself: how can we have so much intelligence around us and yet find ourselves deluged by stupidity? I mean, we have smart phones, smart TV’s, smart thermostats, computers everywhere, information at our fingertips. . .But if stupidity were a river, I would say that it’s at flood stage.
When writing was invented, humans lost the ability to memorize epic poems. But it didn’t make us stupid.
Perhaps because of machine intelligence, people are immersed in the present and have lost historical perspective. My guess is that 90 percent of Harvard graduates today know less about the Second World War than what you can find in this book that I read as a child.
I recommend checking this out. Concerning the last link in the essay, I write
Many of my readers know that in Specialization and Trade I pointed out that the political process for industrial policy is to subsidize demand and restrict supply, which is never what orthodox economics recommends for dealing with market failures. Subsidizing demand while restricting supply has ambiguous effects on output (in the case of housing, for example, the net effect is probably negative) while certainly raising prices.
This refers to Noah Smith’s link to a paper by Steven M. Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash.Their paper is called Cost Disease Socialism, which I think of as synonymous with “subsidize demand and restrict supply.”
I differ from Noam and from the authors in that I don’t believe that “cost disease socialism” is some sort of mistake or aberration. Instead, it is the inevitable path for industrial policy, given the way political incentives work. See Specialization and Trade.
Somewhat to my surprise, only a few of the paid subscribers so far have applied to participate in the seminar on Institutional Irrationality. I’m surprised that more folks prefer just to watch.
Anyway, if you have not applied because you don’t think your chances of acceptance are good, think again. Please apply by 6 PM New York time on October 25 if you wish to be one of the six attendees who will be unmuted during the seminar.
The essay includes procedures for applying.
I would put it this way.
High unemployment is a really bad problem. If you think that inflation is the price that you pay for avoiding high unemployment, then you can legitimately say that inflation is the problem you prefer to have.
So I think that most of the attacks on Jason Furman and others who picked up on his tweet are being uncharitable. Moral: don’t try to make a subtle economic point in a tweet!
But I would also say that I reject the premise that inflation is the price that you pay to avoid high unemployment. So I would argue against Furman and others on that level.
I also think that inflation hurts the middle class and the poor more than it hurts the rich, because inflation creates confusion, and rich people are better able to navigate through the confusion. I could say more, but I already have, in my essay What’s Wrong with Inflation?
If you use your economics, then no matter how complex the supply-chain problems might appear, they can be solved using the price system. The price system may or may not be able to call forth more supply, but it certainly can ration demand, and it can do so more efficiently than is being done at present. Everywhere the supply chain is “broken,” higher prices can ensure that scarce goods are allocated to the highest-priority uses.
The award announcements says that one-half of the award is given to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics,” while the other half is given jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”
All three are involved in what Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke dubbed the “credibility revolution” in empirical economics. As Alex Tabarrok puts it,
Almost all of the empirical work in economics that you read in the popular press (and plenty that doesn’t make the popular press) is due to analyzing natural experiments using techniques such as difference in differences, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity.
The Leamer critique caused economists to largely abandon ordinary multiple regression and to instead employ more credible research designs, such as natural experiments.
Leamer in 2010 pointed out that the newer methods also come with limitations. But, alas, he was bypassed by the Nobel committee.
Noah Smith goes way overboard in praise of the new laureates. He makes it sound as though the results that David Card and Alan Krueger claimed about the minimum wage were only controversial because they were surprising. But they were also controversial because they were wrong.