Most-Recent Must-Reads:
Paul Krugman: Will Fiscal Policy Really Be Expansionary?: "It’s now generally accepted that Trumpism will finally involve the kind of fiscal stimulus progressive economists have been pleading for... (M)
Tim Duy: Fed Turns Hawkish: "The FOMC raised the... federal funds rate by 25bp today, as expected... (Tu)
Ben Thompson: Reconsidering Uber: "Part 2 is far better, and in many respects redeems the series... (Tu)
Simon Wren-Lewis: Understanding Free Trade: "There you have, in one calm and measured paragraph, the contradiction at the heart of the argument... (Tu)
Martin Wolf: Democrats, Demagogues and Despots: "Fear and rage must not be used as an excuse to destroy America’s core institutions... (W)
Dietz Vollrath: Can You Do Historical Counter-Factuals?: "Studying slavery and capitalism, for example, we do not have thousands of different societies or cultures to page through... (Th)
Robert Skidelsky: Economists versus the Economy: "Why did [economists] miss the storm?... Queen Elizabeth... asked a group of economists... (F)
Most-Recent Should-Reads:
Peter Lindert: Purchasing Power Disparity before 1914: "The issue has become “when did countries’ contemporaneous purchasing powers diverge?”, not “when did countries’ productivity grow at different rates?”... (F)
Kevin Drum: Business Community Shocked Trump Might Impose Tariffs: "CNN reports that the business community is shocked... (Th)
Daniel Johnson: Have Public Intellectuals Ever Gotten Anything Right?: "What [is] it... that gives gravitas to a public intellectual[?]... (Th)
Most-Recent Links:
Daniel Drezner: So you want to preserve the liberal international order
Maciej Ceglowski: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People: "The emus responded by adopting basic guerrilla tactics: they avoided pitched battles, dispersed, and melted into the landscape, humiliating and demoralizing the enemy..."
Squid314: Epistemic learned helplessness
MOAR Should-Reads:
Storify: Pre-Distribution vs. Social Insurance in Regional and Equality Policy (W)
Andrew Sprung: xpostfactoid on Twitter: .@jamesykwak @delong: Odo of Urras (LeGuin) (Th)
Jonathan Chait: Trump Turns to Always-Wrong Pseudo-Economist Lawrence Kudlow: "The emerging cast... suggests... his party’s domestic platform... continued and even intensified... (Th)
Laurel Lucia and Ken Jacobs: California’s Projected Economic Losses under ACA Repeal: "[With] repeal [of] the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 3.7 million Californians enrolled in the Medi-Cal expansion would lose that coverage... (F)
John Muellbauer: Why Central Bank Models Failed. How to Repair Them: "At the core of representative agent DSGE models is the Euler equation for consumption... (F)
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The Great A.I. Awakening: "Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved... (M)
Very good links today from Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links for 12-20-16
Richard Overy: Why So Few Resisted Hitler: Peter Fritzsche’s “An Iron Wind” shows just how swiftly Europeans were prepared to abandon their commitment to a normative morality and to ignore, justify or endorse Nazi persecutions...
David Cloutier
David Cloutier: Moral Tribes After Trump
Robert Paxton (1998): The Five Stages of Fascism
John Lewis: Unto us a lender of last resort is born: Overend Gurney goes bust in 1866 | The Nightmare before Christmas: Financial crises go global in 1857 | The ghost of crises past, present and future: The Bank Charter Act goes on trial in 1847
Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson: Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors
Susan Helper and Timothy Krueger: Supply chains and equitable growth
Gar Alperovitz: Technological Inheritance and the Case for a Basic Income
Ran Abramitzky et al.: Cultural Assimilation During the Age of Mass Migration
George Parker: How David Cameron lost his battle for Britain: The key moments in the battle that cut the UK adrift from its European moorings: "The Financial Times has spoken to key participants to piece together the story of a remarkable year in British and European politics, a story of political hubris, strategic mistakes, tactical blunders and gut-wrenching despair...
Joshua Gans et al.: What to Learn from US Govt Strategy on AI
Jason Furman et al.: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy
The Laundry Files - Charles Stross - Works | Archive of Our Own
George Orwell: On Book Reviewers: "These books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant... (M)
Edward L. Glaeser (2004): Reinventing Boston: 1630–2003: "The three largest cities in colonial America remain at the core of three of America’s largest metropolitan areas today... (Tu)
Dietz Vollrath: Dumb Luck in Historical Development: "Philip Hoffman’s Why Did Europe Conquer the World?... on its face is another... (Tu)
Sue Helper and Jennifer Kuan: How engineers innovate in the automotive supply chain: "In practice... critical innovation occurs daily at many points throughout a supply chain... (W)
* Matthew Yglesias: Donald Trump’s Trade Team Has Based Their Analysis on a Remarkably Silly Mistake: "Because political life is full of dreary reductive binaries... (W)
MOAR Links:
Noah Smith (2015): Handing the baton to the next hyperpower
Erik Brynjolfsson and John Silberholz: ‘Moneyball’ for Professors?:
Andrew Liszewski: Interactive Periodic Table Reveals Exactly How We Use All Those Elements
John Broich: How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler: Reports on the rise of fascism in Europe was not the American media's finest hour...
Mark Thoma: When It Comes to Trumponomics, Economists Are on High Alert
Mark Koyama, Chiaki Moriguchi, and Tuan-Hwee Sng: Geopolitics and Asia's Little Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of State Building in China and Japan after 1850
John Scalzi: Rogue One, or, the Disneyfication of Star Wars is Complete (and This is a Good Thing)
Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon: Industrial jobs versus self-employment in Ethiopia
Gideon Rachman: The Chaotic Route to Train-Crash Brexit
Blum Center Facilities
Jon Schwarz: The Intercept
Westworld
Alasdair MacIntyre: Against the Self-Images Of the Age | After Virtue
Michael Desch: Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 0268100241) http://amzn.to/2ifc7qn
Daniel Johnson: Have Public Intellectuals Ever Gotten Anything Right?: They didn’t see 9/11 coming.They also missed the 2008 crash, the Arab Spring, Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump.
Brad DeLong: The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists: My paper for the Notre Dame conference on "public intellectualism"
Matthew Klein: The politics of America’s transfer union looks a lot different at the county level