Brad DeLong

This reminds me of a great quote: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"[1] 1. https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-…

Along the line of relevant analyses, there was an insightful post by Brad DeLong recently: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one-of-insuffici… Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans. It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.

"Nearly eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes did the math on economic growth and concluded that within a few generations—by the time his peers' great-grandchildren came of age in, say, the 2000's—the persistent economic problem of too-scarce resources and too-few goods would no longer bedevil a substantial portion of humanity. He was right—even in the midst of our current hard times, he is right." (2009) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/01/we-are-live-at-the-week-our-eco…

The author of the tweet also has some excellent advice on learning the history of economics, which is to start from the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. Then follow that up with Das Kapital (which I know is an unpopular stance here on HN) and some Keynes (who is credited with coming up with the economic theory that helped bring the UK and US out of the Great Depression). Here's a snippet of Prof. DeLong's advice: > We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books: 1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book. 2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate. 3. Read through the book actively, taking notes. 4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it. 5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument. 6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading. 7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be. 8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is? 9. Decide what you think of the whole. 10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into…

Don’t read it. Save your brain for a book that isn’t riddled with so many errors Brad DeLong wrote ten articles on the errors in Chapter 11. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.html > I have read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years thoroughly and despite Graeber’s readability, scholarship, and erudition, it is a very bad book. Its tone is much too polemical. More important, when it gets to the more recent history that I know well, it is riddled with errors and distortions. Beyond that, it suffers from serious conceptual confusions, and in his excellent critique, Robert Murphy has only scratched the surface. https://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-david-graebe… >> How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect: > Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages The above is a quote from Debt about Apple. Here is the index of posts about errors in Chapter 11. https://www.bradford-delong.com/.services/blog/6a00e551f08003883400e55…

Being on the other side of the opinion spectrum, I see what looks like wishful thinking on the part of the "Herd Immunity" adherents, with a lot of goal post moving. Two weeks ago, many of them lionized Dr. Knut Wittkowski. But now that his forecast of 10000 (sic!) deaths in the US has proven somewhat optimistic, I haven't seen any followups where he explains what he got wrong in his model, and what adjustments to it he's making. Richard Epstein is at least making revisions to his estimate, but unfortunately, he's making them retroactively as well: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/the-hoover-institutes-richard-… A few weeks ago, the UK briefly flirted with a herd immunity strategy. Would anybody today argue that these days were wisely spent? Now, the benchmark du jour is Sweden. Will Sweden still be the benchmark a month from now? Would be nice if it were, but I'm not confident.

It's kind of funny to consider how long this debate has been going on and the self-driving cars excuse as merely the latest iteration of it: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/must-read-there-is-a-serious-de… To quote Tom Slee from the comment above: - Uber has a nice business as a status product (Uber Black Car ~ 2010) - Uber Black may not be profitable, but Uber will displace taxis and be hugely profitable because of technology-driven efficiencies (UberX: 2014-2015) - UberX may not be profitable, but UberPool will lead to new efficiencies in mass transit (2015-2016) - UberX may not be profitable, but Uber is a logistics company and will rewrite the rules of delivery (UberEats, various speculative stories, 2013-2015) - UberPool may not be profitable, but when Uber displaces car ownership the scale of the market will make it profitable (2016) - Uber with drivers may not be profitable, but driverless cars will make Uber profitable (2014-) - Driverless cars may not be profitable, but Uber is looking into flying vehicles (2016)

> I had never heard of Heritage before I read the article I posted, Well I have and they're hacks and frankly they make you look bad by citing their one note analysis of QE. Brad Delong just this morning on Stephen Moore (coauthor of your citation): http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/stephen-moore-is-a-headline-spe… Jonathan Chait on Moore: Guy Who Gets Paid to Say Obamacare Doesn’t Work Can’t Find a Single True Fact to Support His Case http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/obamacare-hater-cant-find… > but I'm inclined to trust actual economic analysis and a clearly rigorous understanding of the situation You won't find that at Heritage, they do propaganda water carrying not serious economic research. Heritage is another incarnation of the scientists that worked for tobacco companies. The econmists that work at Heritage aren't paid to do real economic analysis, they're paid to support Heritage's policy positions with something that looks like real economic analysis. > From the little I've read of Krugman, I'm baffled as to how he received a Nobel prize. Uncontroversial pick, was one of the favorites. > His opinion pieces in the NYTimes are TERRIBLE and seem to be written with one goal in mind: start as large of a flame war in the comments section as possible. His opinions throughout the financial crisis have stood up as well as anyone…

I remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board. "Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires." https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html

You might like: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/05/brad-delong-1997-the-corporati… . It shows that corporations themselves are engaged in a planned economy. It's not just American thing, but it's the way things work. Paul Graham in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html also calls corporations "communist states".

"The government regularly spends more than it takes in from taxes by issuing bonds. [...] That in turn lets the government spend money, which ultimately makes its way into the economy as a whole" This is straight up nonsense. All currency issuers have the ability to spend which is skew from their need to tax. Taxes do not fund Federal spending. Taxes destroy money, and thus control inflation. That is a fundamentally different role. https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/04/abba-lerner-1943-functional-fi…

I've seen it, and didn't find it very convincing. Graeber presents some interesting anecdotes regarding selected ancient social conventions, which may or may not be accurate[1], but—in my opinion—even taken at face value they don't really support his conclusions regarding the nature of debt. Perhaps the book would seem more compelling to someone who already shares the author's worldview. [1] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/12/2014-11-24-mo-ann-leckie-on-da…

another primer: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/01/what-is-modern-monetary-theory…

Actually, for the middle class (which was admittedly somewhat smaller than what we may think of as "middle class" now) domestic help was pretty normal before the 20th century. http://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/01/agatha-christie-i-never-thought… is somewhat telling; Agatha Kristie's Wikipedia entry says her family was "upper middle-class", but it's not that common for families like that to have live-in help nowadays. Except maybe au pair arrangements.

You won't find anything in any set of economic statistics that can offer the slightest justification for this statement: "The JavaScript ecosystem nowadays is responsible for the global revolution the same way steam engines were responsible for the first industrial revolution" That is ridiculous. Here is reality: 1.) Labor productivity has been in long-term decline, though computers did cause a temporary surge in the 1990s. See the charts in this post: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/monday-smackdown-republican-eco… 2.) Economic growth remains sluggish, especially compared to the post war boom of 1945-1973. 3.) The railroads sparked a massive investment boom. The only time computer technologies came close to triggering a similar boom was during the 1990s.

I'd suggest the 1943 essay Political Aspects of Full Employment would help square the gap. http://www.bradford-delong.com/1943/07/michal-kalecki-political-aspect…

One example: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/03/the-benefits-of-free-trade-time…

Obligatory Orwell on class in England: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2010/12/george-orwell-on-belonging-to-e…

I think ideology plays a strong role in addition to interests. In my mind (from reading about this a lot) there are roughly four political factions at the elite level (there's probably more variation at the grassroots level). The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s). The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things. On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say…

They mean - Parable of the broken window Destruction like this is awful, these people have no where to sleep (Some figures at 300,000 lost homes ), they are stressed, they will work less. There's no reason to think this is good for the economy. In war at least you kill people and steal their stuff which increases your wealth. Try Keynes, "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2011/08/paul-krugman-reminds-us-of-the… This is different. Rather than let money sit, you create something stupid which isn't perfect but better than nothing. It has good arguments against it, but it's a more reasonable idea. Also even if Broken Windows Theory is wrong, that doesn't mean give up on a region. It means fix underlying issues. I however think Broken Windows Theory is correct. It brings back pride, but I take it at more of the literal sense, fixing the look of the neighbourhood, not criminal enforcement.

Chang seems to be conflating two visions of economics: one vision of economics that says how things are, and one vision that says how things should be. There's a lot of overlap, of course, but one is economic theory and one is political theory. In the former, there are well studied areas of economics where we have consensus for cause and effect[0][1][2][3]. To just point to areas of disagreement and say the whole field is bad reminds of those who point to disagreement on abiogenesis and say evolution is wrong. Not to say that agreement indicates correctness, but disagreement doesn't indicate that everyone doing research is wrong. The article's other problem with economics seems to be that it assumes people are unfeeling, which is a fair criticism but not one that is particularly new. There is a field called Behavioral Economics which tries to address this and is on the radar of pretty much every economist[4]. The problem I think is more that economics never reaches people directly but is filtered through politics. I was reading on Bradford DeLong's blog the story of Mankiw, who is a respected economist but worked for the Bush administration, where he felt he had to be silent about incorrect economic theory but he could influence them in small ways to be better on economics, effectively trading truth and reputation for a small amount of power[5]. [0]: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tariffs [1]:…

Some of us believe living in a place, especially a place one was born/grew up, should be a right, not a privilege. Here's Polanyi (with comments from Brad Delong) on land: "Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution: Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful.... Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the…

I don't really view it as an age things - for one, I still consider myself a "kid", and second, past a certain minimum age we have a mix of experiences and any of us is "the noob" in a given situation. It is, however, a bit of a generational experience. If you grew up using card catalogs and learning to spell from a dictionary (?!), your relationship with knowing/not knowing will be different than someone who grew up with the Web always around and accessible. I think it was Agatha Christie who said of her childhood "I couldn't imagine being so rich as to have a car nor so poor as to not have servants". Irony: I just googled that to confirm, and was mostly right but not quite accurate, assuming the links are themselves accurate: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/01/agatha-christie-i-never-thought…

The page is compressing the three-step process[0] for overriding local prerogative into one step. Perhaps this is disingenuous but your implication that step 1 doesn't imply steps 2 and 3 are likewise disingenuous. At any rate, I'd urge everyone to take a look at Brad Delong's critique of the TPP[2], which focuses heavily on the dispute resolution process. Surely we can all agree that he knows a little more about international economics than the average HN poster? [0]: Step 1) Pass an international treaty with a corporate/government dispute resolution process. Step 2) Get sued for having non-mandated local laws, lose, and receive expensive economic sanctions. Step 3) "Regrettably" change local laws to conform to the agreement. This is analogous to Sir Humphey's three-step process for dealing with international crisis: 1) Nothing's going to happen. 2) Something may happen but there's nothing we can do. 3) Perhaps there was something we could have done but it's too late now. [2] http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/01/the-grand-strategy-of-rising-su…