So there I was, hanging out in Hearst Gymnasium 230 waiting for my final exam to begin at 12:30. And people began showing up--my students, and some others. "Is this the room for the exam for the Soc 160 exam?" the others would say.
"Well," I said, "I don't think so.'" [...]
Ben Bernanke:
Macro and Other Market Musings: Monetary Policy Quote of the Day: The Federal Reserve has not followed the suggestion of some that it pursue a monetary policy strategy aimed at pushing up longer-run inflation expectations. In theory, such an approach could reduce real interest rates and so [...]
Will Wilkinson likes extruded salt-based potato product, and writes about monetary policy:
Bernanke and the Pringles Problem: I guess we could call it the “Pringles Problem.”... Bernanke seems to think that if the Fed tries to increase long-term inflation expectations once, a fair portion of the public will suspect [...]
1) Menzie Chinn: Teaching Macro, after the Great Recession:
The last time I taught this course in the Spring of 2007, the key topics were inflation, the possibility of stagflation, and the possibility of containing the ongoing housing slowdown.... [This] semester... [the] two big concerns were (1) dealing [...]
He has some very smart things to say:
The Politics of Ressentimentt: The word he wants is ressentiment:
Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense [...]
Shall we just say that I am so much in awe of Avram Gruner, and leave it at that?
Avram Gruner: Paarfi of Roundwood, author of the Quixote: Ever since high school, when I read Steven Boyett’s Ariel, I’ve been meaning to read Don Quixote, but I still haven’t [...]
Free Exchange parses Ben Bernanke:
Free Exchange: From the horse's mouth: I can't imagine getting a more direct answer from the chairman than that. Mr Bernanke does not want to risk a de-anchoring of inflation expectations. He is willing to accept 10% or greater unemployment and the resulting economic' [...]
Next summer's offerings: PEIS 160A under the more general rubric of PEIS 160: Political Economy in Historical Context
PEIS 160A Summer 2010 Draft Syllabus
PEIS 160A COCI Supplement for Online Courses
The different and interesting thing about this particular [...]
A correspondent emails:
Final vote is 16-7 for Bernanke. That is much tighter than I expected. Every Democrat except Merkley voted yes.
Krishna Guha:
FT.com | Money Supply | Bernanke has a Republican problem: Another Republican swing vote that looked as if it was up for grabs has just gone [...]
Sudeep Reddy:
Sen. Vitter Presents End-of-Term Exam For Bernanke: Earlier this month, Real Time Economics presented questions from several economists for the confirmation hearing of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Many of the questions were addressed at the hearing, though not always directly. Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) submitted [...]
Last week the number of unemployment insurance claims dropped--but not by quite as much as the seasonal adjustment factor was expecting. So reported seasonally-adjusted claims rose by 7000.
Last year over the next three weeks--the last weeks of the year--weekly claims rose by more than 300,000, but [...]
1) Matthew Yglesias: All Hail Bernanke!:
Time giving Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year honors seems to me to say a lot about where we are as a society. Bernanke... follows basically conventional thinking and doesn’t make any unusual errors. Unfortunately, conventional thinking and normal errors lead [...]
December 17, 1939:
Force K, comprising the Renown and Ark Royal, was completing a sweep which had begun at Capetown ten days before and was now six hundred miles east of Pernambuco and 21,j00 miles from Montevideo. Farther north still the cruiser Neptune, with three destroyers, had just parted company with [...]
1) Paul Krugman: Would cutting the minimum wage raise employment?:
Serious People (and Fox News) are rallying around the idea that if Obama really wants to create jobs, he should cut the minimum wage.... [R]educing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually [...]
As you know, I agree:
The Monkey Cage: What We Have Learned from the Health Care Debate: [R[]eporters start in with “news analysis” like this silliness from John Broder in Sunday’s New York Times. Here, climate change is framed around what Obama can or cannot accomplish, complete with portentous [...]
Please, everybody, send money to David Frum and Bruce Bartlett. They appear to be pretty much the only people willing to put themselves in political-intellectual harm's way to try to return the Republican Party to its best self. And they need help.
Eric Kleefeld watches the train wreck:
David Weigel:
The John Birch Society to Co-Sponsor CPAC: The 51-year-old ultra-conservative group, once ostracized by the right, is co-sponsoring the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference.
JBS will have a double booth with half dedicated to offering educational and promotional materials and the other half housing a [...]
In one month I have been called a follower of Joe McCarthy by the Volokh Conspiracy, and now a follower of Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria by Lou Dobbs.
It's nice to know that you are having an impact.
Spencer Ackerman watches Lou Dobbs so I don't have to:
ATTACKERMAN: Lou' [...]
Yes, Tom Friedman is that big an amoral idiot.
Daniel Larison:
Eunomia » Friedman’s Jihad: Thomas Friedman’s new column reminded me of the line from Casino Royale: “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand.” In the same column in which he complains that Westerners treat Muslims as nothing more [...]
Carlo Cottarelli:
Climate Change—Some Simple (and Quite Convenient) Truths: As world leaders gather in Copenhagen, climate change is again in the headlines. The science of the issue can get pretty incomprehensible pretty quickly. And the politics are clearly very ugly. Let’s not forget, however, that much of the economics [...]
Paul Krugman worries about his friend Ben Bernanke:
Bernanke and the cover curse - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: So Time magazine has named Ben Bernanke Person of the Year. Be afraid, be very afraid. The magazine cover curse is a well-known phenomenon: you should always short the stock [...]
R.i.P. Yegor Timurovich Gaidar (March 19, 1956 - December 16, 2009.
I talked to him at length only once--when he came to Berkeley to give a lecture in the late 1990s, and wound up at my house for Thanksgiving dinner.
He said that in retrospect he had had only two [...]
Antonio Fatas: Using a hammer or a wrench to pop asset price bubbles?: I am very sympathetic to this argument: [the] interest rate is probably not the right tool to deal with asset price bubbles and using regulation or a 'macroprudential instrument' is the right thing to do. However, [...]
"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," President Obama told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. In a narrow sense, that may be true. But Obama did run for office in part to keep the unemployment rate from rising to -- [...]
Paul Starr lays down the party line:
Deal or Die on Health Caret: [T]he central provisions of the legislation... would extend health coverage to an estimated 33 million of the uninsured, raise standards of protection for millions... eliminate some of the most hated abuses of the insurance industry... create [...]
Worth reading:
Tom Barnett: Chinese turbines, Texas wind farm: "This is just the beginning": U.S. NEWS: "Chinese-Made Turbines Will Fill Texas Wind Farm," by Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, 30 October 2009. 'This is becoming a political storm of sorts, as Chuck Schumer is pressuring Energy Secretary Steven Chu to' [...]
Wow! Just wow!
Greg Sargent FTW, who writes:
VIDEO: Watch Lieberman Endorse Medicare Buy-In Three Months Ago: Here’s some video of Joe Lieberman only three months ago.... Lieberman discussed the Medicare buy-in a meeting with the Connecticut Post in September, according to an article in the paper at the time, [...]
Lindsey Wilson writes:
Please look over your comment and make revisions (or let me know if everything is okay). The transcript wasn’t in good shape this time so we had to guess on some of the comments; therefore, please review your remarks carefully.
Bradford DeLong argued that the [...]
Let's do 10:30-2 on Tuesday at the Qualcomm Cafe in the new CITRIS building, and 9-1 on Thursday in the Business School Cafe...
925-708-0467
[...]Paul Krugman brings us P.A. Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009):
He died yesterday. But there is a sense in which he is still very much alive.
Paul Krugman quotes:
Samuelson, Friedman, and monetary policy: [H]re’s Paul Samuelson, from pages 353-4 of his 1948 textbook:
[...]Worth reading:
Jonathan Leake on the Younger Dryas: Climate change catastrophe took just month: Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found. They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 [...]
December 13, 1939:
From the beginning of the war Commodore Harwood's special care and duty had been to cover British shipping off the River Plate and Rio de Janeiro. Hc was convinced that sooner or later the Spee would come towards the Plate, where the richest prizes were offered to her. [...]
May I say that it is a defect in Dragon Dictate for iPhone that it regularly interprets "Tim Geithner" as "team nightmare"?
One of these days one of these is going to go out. Just sayin'...
That is all.
' [...]It's hard to know how seriously one is supposed to take a Matt Taibbi who begins:
Obama's Big Sellout: Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed [...]
Worth reading:
Calculated Risk: Refinancing with Negative Equity: Unfortunately David Streitfeld doesn't provide any further information on Belvedere's loan. If the loan was held by a bank, then it might make sense for the bank to refinance the loan (this lowers the bank's risk of default). However Belvedere's "lender" might' [...]
There is one set of circumstances in which uncertainty is a reason for inaction: (a) the measures you would take would be expensive, (b) the measures you would take will be irreversible, and (c) you will get a lot of new information soon to help you judge the situation better.
That [...]
I thought there was something very, very wrong with George Mason's Charles Rowley when he began trashing Avner Greif for no reason.
Now Henry Farrell and company watch the wreckage...
UPDATE: A correspondent tells me that there is now a Godwin's Law violation there--something about how John McCain's ideology is the [...]
What House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer should be saying:
Because of the uniquely high unemployment rate, the benefits to government spending are much greater than usual--not only does it deliver needed services and build necessary infrastructure, but it puts people who otherwise would be jobless and broke to work. Because [...]
A Partisan Post: You Have Been Warned
That is all.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kwak R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!
[...]He writes, among other things:
Is The Administration's Economic Thinking Incoherent?: Brad DeLong parses my piece today on the administration's struggle to create jobs while still minding the deficit and pronounces himself "increasingly bewildered about administration thinking."...
Now, obviously, not every member of the administration and every Democrat [...]
Macro Advisors has just upped their tracking estimate of seasonally-adjusted fourth-quarter real GDP growth to a 4.2% annual rate. We know that the fourth-quarter labor input growth rate will be about -1.0%. That means another high--5.0%-labor productivity growth rate quarter.
If productivity growth continues at 5% for a while, we would [...]
The real unemployment rate--the share of Americans who say that they are actively looking for work and don't have jobs--has been drifting down since late spring--from 9.7% in June to 9.4% in November. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate over that same period has risen from 9.5% to 10.0%, as the actual' [...]
Senator Conrad voted for Medicare Part D. Senator Gregg voted for the Bush tax cuts. Of the $36 trillion Auerbach-Orszag present-value fiscal gap through 2080 $11 trillion is due to the Bush tax cuts and $6 trillion is due to Medicare Part D. Eliminate those two fiscal policy mistakes, [...]
Treasury sells $13 bln in 30-year bonds at 4.52%:
Since the middle of 2008 the U.S. Treasury has increased the supply of Treasury bonds held by the public by $2.5 trillion. And it has done this without moving the needle at all on either the [...]
He writes about the Conrad-Gregg deficit commission:
The Deficit Commission Bill Is Here, And It's Insane: Let me get this straight. You have a commission proposing a package of highly unpopular legislative changes. And, in addition to having to surmount the 60-vote barrier in the Senate, which is nearly [...]
As in my recent link to here: William Easterly (2009), "Why there’s no “GrowthGate:” Frustration vs. Chicanery in Explaining Growth".
I think the answer is that "Easterly" is just a little too close to "Easterlin," and my brain is now full: there is one and only one pattern of neurons [...]
Noam Scheiber reports from inside the Obama Administration:
Balancing The Budget: As of late this summer, Democrats in Washington shared a tidy consensus about the economy: The stimulus was working more or less on schedule, and the job market was gradually recovering. That meant the administration could start thinking [...]
A good move by Goldman Sachs.
Sue Chong:
Goldman Sachs management won't get cash bonus: SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Goldman Sachs Group (GS 166.27, -0.18, -0.11%) said Thursday its management committee will be receiving its bonus in the form of "shares at risk" in 2009 instead of cash. The shares' [...]
Paul Krugan:
Things free trade doesn’t do: There are a lot of good things you can say about international trade. But it does not, repeat not, do anything to alleviate a shortage of overall demand. Yes, if you liberalize trade countries will export more. But they will also import [...]
Humans have, as Adam Smith wrote more than 200 years ago, a natural propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange"--to enter into reciprocal gift- exchange relationships with one another. These reciprocal relationships do three things: (i) they allow us to trade things that we value less or that are less useful to [...]
...a Laevinic defeat, according to "Benjamin." Hoisted from Comments:
Another Such Defeat and We Will Be the Winners!: Benjamin said...
a Laevinic defeat would certainly be the correct term, Publius Valerius Laevinus being on the receiving side of Pyrrhus' victory.
However, the Berkeley Classics Department inclines toward' [...]
Jan 20: Modes of Production
Jan 27: Malthus and the Demographic Transition
Feb 3: Industrious Revolutions
Feb 10: Trade, Law, and State
II. The Industrial Economic WorldFeb 17: Industrial Revolutions
Feb 24: Globalizations
Mar 3: Divergences
Mar 10: WWI and the Great Depression
Mar 17: WWII and the Thirty Glorious Years
Mar 31: The Forward March of [...]
This is an exceptional time--a time in which many of the normal rules of the Dismal Science are changed and transformed. It is a time for, as Paul Krugman puts it, not normal economics but rather “depression economics.” The terms on which the U.S. government can borrow now are exceptionally [...]
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? I mean, it hasn't even crashed and burned. It's dead and rotted: a source of smell and disease.
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias: Fred Hiatt Wants The Washington Post to Go Out of Business: FWhat other explanation could there be for [...]
Ahem:
Thus wroth against the deniers he put on the gift of the god,
Which Hephaistos had wrought for him by his art.
First on his legs he set the fair greaves fitted with silver ankle-pieces,
Next he donned the cuirass about his breast.
Then round [...]
Chris Blattman experiments on humanity... well, on some people in Ethiopia...
Marx vs Smith: The randomized evaluation:
The laborer receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labor-power; the capitalist receives, in exchange for his means of subsistence, labor, the productive activity of the laborer, the [...]
Is there a word for the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory?
Robert Waldmann on the health care "compromise":
The Current Health Care Reform Compromise: the public option is replaced by an sub–exchange of private non profit insurers (which is very close to nothing at all), and people from 55 to [...]
This has got to belong in the New York Times crashed-and-burned-and-smoking watch:
Stanely Fish: My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a [...]
Justin Fox:
Employment-to-population ratio among men 25-54 hit all-time low in November: As of November, 19.4% of American men in their prime working years didn't have jobs.... [T]he current job situation (for men, at least) is much, much worse than in any downturn since the BLS started measuring this' [...]
Matthew Yglesias is puzzled:
Matthew Yglesias: Bernanke Used to Know What to Do: Even though Ben Bernanke is a conservative Republican Bush appointee, and even though the Fed mishandled a lot of things before the Bear Stears meltdown and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, a lot of people I know were [...]
Looking down this New York Times buyout list from Gawker, I am reminded of the cartoon where Dibert explains his company's buyout program thus:
we have to pay the good people to leave.
If any news organization wants to gain credibility with me at least, hiring a chunk of these' [...]
Fortunately, Paul Krugman does:
Unhelpful Hansen: [T]oday’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — [...]
esterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in [...]
Matthew Kahn writes:
The Return of a Minor League Blogger: I twice had the chance to sit down and chat with Brad Delong. He was blogging so I didn't want to bug him but we had a chance to talk and I enjoyed it...
But I wasn't blogging! I was [...]
But sometimes it tells me things that man was really not meant to know.
Henry Farrell:
Crooked Timber: I’m a bit hesitant to link to this (as I’m not an elderly right wing economist, I’m worried I might be accused of “belittling the other”), but it’s super-duper awesome! Charles Rowley, [...]
Knut Wicksell, 1898:
Those people who prefer a continually upward moving to a stationary price level forciblyremind one of those who purposely keep their watches a little fast so as to be more certain of catching their trains. But to achieve their purpose they must not be conscious or remain [...]
Will Wilkinson writes::
Anything at All?: Brad DeLong writes:
At this point, anything that boosts the government’s deficit over the next two years passes the benefit-cost test–anything at all.
30,000 more troops to Afghanistan? Anything?
He says it with special emphasis, as though he’s [...]
Did I ever remember to post this here? From The Week Online:
The White House is hosting a jobs summit this week. I, however, cannot but think that it is the wrong jobs summit—that it will be the wrong people talking about the wrong things.
Let me back up. Ever [...]
Stephen Bainbridge writes, apropos of (as best I can see) nothing at all:
ProfessorBainbridge.com: I don't read Kos or Brad DeLong or, for that matter, Brookings Institute position papers very often...
Let me say that in my view this is a serious mistake: reading people with whom one does not already' [...]
Good to see:
ROBERT KUTTNER: You know, most of the things that have been proposed today cost money, and there is this concern about the federal deficit. I hope that your administration will recognize, as I know you will, that it's possible, first of all, to reduce the deficit over' [...]
Just saying...
This, from Ben Bernanke yesterday, was unprofessional:
Silla Brush: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday threw cold water on efforts to push a major new fiscal stimulus package. At his confirmation hearing for a second term as chairman, Bernanke emphasized that the government has spent less than [...]
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
In America today to actually know something about the world, public policy, or government disqualifies you from covering the White House for a major media organization. Thus what they produce is worse than uniformative: it is positively destructive.
Matthew Yglesias is on' [...]
The BLS says: "nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-11,000)..."
[...]
