Chris Dillow: Wages vs social value [feedly]

Interesting and timely post on a matter of high importance to socialist theory and policy going forward....how to 'value' non-monetized 'value'.

Wages vs social value
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/01/wages-vs-social-value.html

Today is the 23^rd anniversary of the death of Townes Van Zandt, who is now universally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever.

And yet during his lifetime he made very little money. Even in his best years he got less than $100,000 from song-writing royalties, and for much of his life he might well have earned more from the oil drilling rights bequeathed by his rich family than from his music.

Which vindicates a recent tweet from Cameron Murray:

Actions that have social value only rarely coincide with actions that are monetarily compensated.

In Van Zandt's case, this was partly because his genius was not fully recognised during his lifetime. But there are other reasons why Cameron point is correct in many more cases – reasons which are in fact entirely consistent with mainstream economics. I'm thinking of three ideas here.

1. Externalities. Let's assume (heroically) that people are paid their marginal product. Even where this is the case, it is the private marginal product for which they are rewarded, not the social marginal product. The two differ because of externalities. A worker whose job generates huge carbon emissions or other pollution will have a wage greater than their social value.

There are other forms of pollution. There's also risk pollution. In the run-up to the financial crisis, bankers were paid more than their social value because the risks generated by their activities would fall upon others; they were externalities. I suspect this is still the case.

And then there's intellectual pollution. "Writers" such as Giles Coren or Toby Young have a highish marginal product for their employers, but their gibberings coarsen the public sphere. One baleful effect of Twitter is that this is brought to wider attention than previously and thus imposes a greater negative externality.

By the same token, there are also positive externalities, as when researchers' findings inspire further ones. William Nordhaus has famously shown that innovators have captured "only a miniscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances."

2. Compensating advantages. Adam Smith thought the rewards to work tended to be equal across all occupations, once we considered both financial and non-financial returns. And, he said:

Honour makes a great part of the reward of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, all things considered, they are generally under-recompensed.

So, for example, professions such as nursing carry low wages but these are offset by a sense of pride and honour. But professions where these are lacking must pay more to offset that lack.

In his wonderful Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber has revived this idea. Many businesses, he writes, "now feel that if there's work that's gratifying in any way at all, they really shouldn't have to pay for it." But the same bosses who begrudge paying writers, he says, "are willing to shell out handsome salaries for 'Vice Presidents for Creative Development' and the like, who do absolutely nothing." This is pure Smith: financial rewards offset the dissatisfaction that comes from doing a bullshit job, whilst enjoyable work pays less.

3. Bargaining. Your income does not depend upon how much social value you produce. It depends upon your power to extract that value. And Van Zandt was typical of musicians in being unable to do so. In Rockonomics, Alan Krueger wrote that "musicians are not rewarded fairly for their services" because they earn little compared to the countless hours of entertainment they deliver. He pointed out that the typical musician made only $100 in 2018 from streaming and that many artists have suffered from bad record deals: Paul McCartney, he says, made more money with Wings than he did with the Beatles. Jolie Holland, the Van Zandt of our era, has said:

I barely make a living. I think you have to be famous to make a living. I live out of a suitcase.

Although Econ101 tells fairy stories of how W=MP, bargaining (pdf)models are in fact mainstream economics: I recommend chapter 5 of Sam Bowles Microeconomics for a discussion of them.

Yes, we can and should supplement such models with analyses of how power relations (which of course include sexism and racism) also affect (pdf) wages and drive further wedges between social value and earnings. But we don't need to do so to see that Cameron is right. Mainstream economics alone shows that wages need not often coincide with social value.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

'The Tone of Civil Life Has Its Necessity and May Even Have Its Heroic Quality" [feedly]

I found myself moved by Tim Taylor's New Years appeal (via Lionel Trilling) to the possible "heroism" of civil discourse. A good resolution. I will try to do better myself.

'The Tone of Civil Life Has Its Necessity and May Even Have Its Heroic Quality"
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-tone-of-civil-life-has-its.html

Yes, we live in outrageous times. But we also live in a time when there is cachet in being the most outraged, kudos to being the most highly angered and offended, and eminence in being the most exceptionally shocked and appalled. When the rewards for dialing up the emotional level are high, other discourse can be drowned out. This blog, in its own small way, tries to model the virtues of civil discourse.

I was moved to consider this point when I ran across a comment from the prominent literary critic Lionel Trilling in a 1951 letter to his former student Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz had reviewed a book by Trilling, and in the course of an overall positive review raised concerns that the Trilling's exposition was perhaps not confrontational enough. Trilling responded in this way (the quotation is from Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch, 2018, p. 193):

What I would have said about my own prose is that there is a need for a tone of reasonableness and demonstration, that it was of the greatest importance that we learn to consider that the tone of civil life has its necessity and may even have its heroic quality, that we must have a modification of all that is implied by the fierce posture of modern literature.

However, Trilling also expressed a fear that rises in the hearts of all of us who attempt to be civil--that our attempts at a kind of clarity and civility could mean that people just don't understand when or how we are disagreeing with them. Trilling continues:

I still think this ... But with the arrival in the last few days of some of the English reviews of my book, I have come to feel that my tone isn't what I had thought or meant it to be. I have always supposed it had more intensity, irony, and acerbity than the English have been finding in it, and several remarks about its "gentleness" have disturbed me, for I don't think I am gentle in my intellectual judgments, and don't want to be. Possibly the British response is to my willingness to forgive the writer while condemning the idea, but I must also suppose there is something in the style itself--that something is there that I did not mean to be there, or something not there that I meant to be. 

To be clear, a civil tone doesn't mean avoiding disagreement. It doesn't mean go-along-to-get-along. It doesn't mean squishiness. It doesn't mean a belief that all discussions should be robotic or "just-the-facts." It means a dose of earnestness about trying to convey one's own beliefs, and a dose of humility when confronted by differing beliefs of others.

It does mean not rising too quickly when the easy bait of anger and outrage is proffered. It means trying to make allowances for those who give in to excess, because none of us is perfect, but also not feeding or amplifying that excess, and indeed trying to tamp it down. It means that politeness will be the first and second and probably the third response to disagreements, and even in the cases where politeness must needs be abandoned, a cold, explicit, and angry disagreement can be followed by disengagement, rather than feeding the fire of disagreement for its own sake. 

Those who forsake a civil tone may find that later, when they wish to call on others for sober reflection or careful thought, they have done injury to this form of discourse. If and when they later wish to appeal for a civil discussion, it may no longer be available to them. When tempted to say that you find it impossible to disagree on certain subjects in a civil manner, it may be useful to ask oneself about whether you wish to encourage a society in which conversations will be ruled by those who can emote the loudest, longest, and hardest. 

Most people demonstrate a capacity for civil disagreement in many areas of their lives: family, friends, work, institutions of worship, clubs, local government, and others. In my own experience, there is often a kind of performative dishonesty and group-signalling that occurs when conversations disintegrate into passionate incivility.  What I have in mind here is similar to the sentiment that James Madison expressed in Federalist #50, when he wrote:

Throughout the continuance of the council, it was split into two fixed and violent parties. The fact is acknowledged and lamented by themselves. Had this not been the case, the face of their proceedings exhibits a proof equally satisfactory. In all questions, however unimportant in themselves, or unconnected with each other, the same names stand invariably contrasted on the opposite columns. Every unbiased observer may infer, without danger of mistake, and at the same time without meaning to reflect on either party, or any individuals of either party, that, unfortunately, passion, not reason, must have presided over their decisions. When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.

If someone's passion always aligns them with the same group, it seems to me a tell-tale sign that their membership in the group has become so important that they fear the possibility of being seen to disagree with the group more than they desire to think their own thoughts. In that way, the disciplline of civility offers a kind of personal freedom both to oneself and others. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Lawler: US Population Growth Slowed Again in 2019 [feedly]

Lawler: US Population Growth Slowed Again in 2019
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2019/12/lawler-us-population-growth-slowed.html

CR Note: These lower population estimates are important for projections of economic growth and housing. I mentioned this slowdown in growth earlier this month in Is the Future still Bright?

From housing economist Tom Lawler: US Population Growth Slowed Again in 2019

Yesterday the Census Bureau released its "Vintage 2019" estimates of the US resident population, which showed that population growth in 2019 was the slowest (in numbers) since 1942 and the slowest in percentage growth since 1918. According to these estimates, the US resident population on July 1, 2019 was 328,239,523, just 1,552,022 (or 0.475%) higher than the downwardly-revised population estimate for July 1, 2018. 2009 was the third consecutive year that US population growth slowed significantly, reflecting lower births, higher deaths, and lower net international migration.

	Births	Deaths	Net International Migration	Total
2010-2016 (Yr. Avg.)	3,961,544	2,601,247	909,644	2,269,941
2016-2017	3,901,982	2,788,163	930,409	2,044,228
2017-2018	3,824,521	2,824,382	701,823	1,701,962
2018-2019	3,791,712	2,835,038	595,348	1,552,022

The latest population estimate for July 1, 2018 was 479,933 lower than the "Vintage 2018" estimate for that year, with the downward revision reflecting somewhat lower births, somewhat higher deaths, and significant lower net international migration. Population estimates for previous years of this decade were also revised downward modestly, mainly reflecting lower estimates for net international migration.

While updated estimates of the population by age won't be available for several months, these latest estimates, if accurate, suggest that both total population growth and the growth in the working-age population were significantly slower over the past two years than previously thought.

For folks who use Census population projections to forecast other key variables, it is worth noting that the latest population estimate for 2019 is a sizable 1,965,493 lower than the estimate from the "Census 2017" projections, which are the latest available.

Updated population projections, originally slated for release in late October, are now scheduled to be released sometime in January. These estimates, however, will use the "Vintage 2018" estimates as a starting point, and as such are out of date before they are even released. Below is the latest from Census on the upcoming population projections release.

"The U.S. Census Bureau will be releasing several new and updated population projection reports that cover projected life expectancy by nativity, projected population by alternative migration scenarios and updated population projections by demographic characteristics. Supplemental data files for the alternative migration scenarios and input data sets for the main projections series are also being released."

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Krugman: The Legacy of Destructive Austerity [feedly]

The Legacy of Destructive Austerity
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/opinion/deficits-economy.html

Paul Krugman

text only: 

A decade ago, the world was living in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Financial markets had stabilized, but the real economy was still in terrible shape, with around 40 million European and North American workers unemployed.

Fortunately, economists had learned a lot from the experience of the Great Depression. In particular, they knew that fiscal austerity — slashing government spending in an attempt to balance the budget — is a really bad idea in a depressed economy.

Unfortunately, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic spent the first half of the 2010s doing exactly what both theory and history told them not to do. And this wrong turn on policy cast a long shadow, economically and politically. In particular, the deficit obsession of 2010-2015 helped set the stage for the current crisis of democracy.

Why is austerity in a depressed economy a bad idea? Because an economy is not like a household, whose income and spending are separate things. In the economy as a whole, my spending is your income and your spending is my income.  

What happens if everyone tries to cut spending at the same time, as was the case in the aftermath of the financial crisis? Everyone's income falls. So to avoid a depression you need to have someone — namely, the government — maintain or, better yet, increase spending while everyone else is cutting. And in 2009 most governments engaged in at least a bit of fiscal stimulus.  In 2010, however, policy discourse was taken over by people insisting, on one side, that we needed to cut deficits immediately or we would all turn into Greece and, on the other side, that spending cuts wouldn't hurt the economy because they would increase confidence.

The intellectual basis for these claims was always flimsy; the handful of academic papers purporting to make the case for austerity quickly collapsed under scrutiny. And events soon confirmed Macroeconomics 101: America didn't turn into Greece, and countries that imposed harsh austerity suffered severe economic downturns.

So why did policy and opinion makers go all in for austerity when they should have been fighting unemployment?  




One answer, which shouldn't be discounted, is that inveighing against the evils of deficits makes you sound responsible, at least to people who haven't studied the issue or kept up with the state of economic research. That's why I used to mock centrists and media figures who preached the need for austerity as Very Serious People. Indeed, to this day, billionaires with political ambitions imagine that dire warnings about debt prove their seriousness.

Beyond that, the push for austerity was always driven in large part by ulterior motives. Specifically, debt fears were used as an excuse to cut spending on social programs, and also as an excuse for hobbling the ambitions of center-left governments.

Here in the United States, Republicans went through the entire Obama era claiming to be deeply concerned about budget deficits, forcing the country into years of spending cuts that slowed economic recovery. The moment Donald Trump moved into the White House, all those supposed concerns vanished, vindicating those of us who argued from the beginning that Republicans who posed as deficit hawks were phonies.

This politically weaponized Keynesianism is, by the way, probably the main reason U.S. economic growth has been good (not great) over the past two years, even though the 2017 tax cut completely failed to deliver the promised surge in private investment: federal spending has been growing at a rate not seen since the early years of the past decade.

But why does this history matter? After all, at this point unemployment rates in both the United States and Europe are near or below pre-crisis levels. Maybe there was a lot of unnecessary pain along the way, but aren't we O.K. now?

No, we aren't. The austerity years left many lasting scars, especially on politics.

There are multiple explanations for the populist rage that has put democracy at risk across the Western world, but the side effects of austerity rank high on the list.

In Eastern Europe, white nationalist parties came to power after center-left governments alienated the working class by letting themselves be talked or bullied into austerity policies. In Britain, support for right-wing extremists is strongest in regions hit hardest by fiscal austerity. And would we have Trump if years of wrongheaded austerity hadn't delayed economic recovery under Barack Obama?

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Non-action in times of catastrophe [feedly]

Dan Little: Non-action in times of catastrophe

Sociological Research by reputation varies highly in quality, especially to folks trained as physicists and mathematicians. Dan Little favors studies that track the adherence of statistical studies to MODELS -- which are simplifications, but structured to fit as closely as possible to existing data pertinent to some class or instances of social behavior, and then to refit models via AI techniques that permit auto re-eval of errors in prediction or classification by the models. The variable is sometimes the quality or skills of the researcher, but increasingly simply the amount, availability  and accumulation of sufficient data for the AI models to do their work.  The question below on the phenomenon of  "collective abdication" is an example of analytical model building embracing opposite and intermediary collective reactions to similar or comparable catastrophes. Still you can no doubt tell, by the abstractness of some of the classifications and modeling that the OMB is enthusiastic about incorporating them in official reports, despite that its the kind of analyses that are political cocaine to candidates and elected pols. Here, it is really an exercise in trying to fit serious explanations on contradictory phenomenon. (Little's research often wanders in search of a dialectical computer or calculator... but it is fascinating.

http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2019/12/non-action-in-times-of-catastrophe.html

van Ermakoff's 2008 book Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications is dense, rigorous, and important. It treats two historical episodes in close detail -- the passing of Hitler's enabling bill by the German Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House in March 1933 ("Law for the Relief of the People and of the Reich") and the decision by the National Assembly of the French Third Republic in the Grand Casino of Vichy to transfer constitutional authority to Marshal Pétain in July 1940. These legislative actions were momentous; "the enabling bill granted Hitler the right to legally discard the constitutional framework of the Weimar Republic," and the results in France were similar for Pétain's government. In both events major political parties and groups acquiesced in the creation of authoritarian legislation that predictably led to dictatorship in their countries and repression of their own parties and groups. Given that these two events largely set the terms for the course of the twentieth century, this study is of great importance.

The central sociological category of interest to Ermakoff here is "abdication" -- essentially an active decision by a group not to continue to oppose a social or political process with which it disagrees. Events are made by the actions of the actors, individual and collective. But Ermakoff demonstrates that sometimes events are made by non-action as well -- deliberate choices by actors to cease their activity in resistance to a process of concern.

Abdication is different from surrender. It is surrender that legitimizes one's surrender. It implies a statement of irrelevance. When the act is collective, the statement is about the group that makes the decision. The group dismisses itself. It surrenders its fate and agrees to do so, thereby justifying its subservience. This broad characterization sets the problem. Why would a group legitimize its own subservience and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation? (xi)

Based on a great deal of archival research as well as an apparently limitless knowledge of the secondary literature, the book sheds great light on the actions and inactions of the individual and collective actors involved in these enormously important episodes of twentieth-century history. As a result it provides a singular contribution to the theories and methods of contentious politics as well as comparative historical sociology.

The book is historical; but even more deeply, it is a sustained contribution to an actor-centered theory of collective behavior. Ermakoff wants to understand, at the level of the actors involved, what were the dynamics of decision making and action that led to abdication by experienced politicians in the face of anti-constitutional demands by Hitler and Pétain. Ermakoff believes that the obvious theories -- coercion, ideological sympathy, and the structure of existing political conflicts -- are inadequate. Instead, he proposes a dynamic theory of belief formation and decision making at the level of the actor through which the political actors arrive at the position they will adopt based on their observations and inferences of the behavior of others with regard to this choice. Individuals retain agency in their choices in momentous circumstances: "Individuals fluctuate because (1) they are concerned about the behavioral stance of those whom they define as peers and (2) they do not know where these peers stand. Individual oscillations are the seismograph of collective perceptions. Their uncertainty fluctuates with the degree of irresolution imputed to the group." Ermakoff wants to understand the dynamic processes through which individuals arrive at a decision -- to abdicate or to remain visibly and actively in opposition to the threatened action -- and how these decisions relate to judgments made by individuals about the likely actions of other actors.

Ermakoff's key theoretical concept is alignment: the idea that the individual actor is seeking to align his or her actions with those of members of a relevant group (what Ermakoff calls a "reference group"). "By alignment I mean the act of making oneself indistinguishable from others. As a collective phenomenon, alignment describes the process whereby the members of a group facing the same decision align their behavior with one another's." For individuals within a group it is a problem of coordination in circumstances of imperfect knowledge about the intentions of other actors. And Ermakoff observes that alignment can come about through several different kinds of mechanisms (sequential alignment, local knowledge, and tacit coordination), leading to substantially different dynamics of collective behavior.

Jon Elster and other researchers in the field of contentious politics and collective action refer to this kind of situation as an "assurance game" (link): an opportunity for collective action which a significant number of affected individuals would join if they were confident that sufficient others would do so as well in order to give the action a reasonable likelihood of success.

Though Ermakoff does not directly suggest this possibility, it would appear that the kinds of decision-making processes within groups involved here are amenable to treatment using agent-based models. It would seem straightforward to model the behavior of a group of actors with different "thresholds" and different ways of gaining information about the likely behavior of other actors, and then aggregating their choices through an iterative computational process.

Much of the substance of the book goes into evaluating three common explanations of acquiescence: coercion, miscalculation, and ideological collusion. And Ermakoff argues that the only way to evaluate these hypotheses is to gain quite a bit of evidence about the basis of decision-making for many of the actors. A meso-level analysis won't distinguish the hypotheses; we need to connect the dots for individual decision-makers. Did they defer because of coercion? Because of miscalculation? Or perhaps because they were not so adamantly opposed to the fascist ideology as they professed? But significantly, Ermakoff finds that individual-level information fails to support any of these three factors as being decisive.

Part III moves from description of the cases to an effort at formulating a formal decision model that would serve to explain the processes of alignment and abdication described in the first half of the book. This part of the book has something in common with formal research in game theory and the foundations of collective action theory. Ermakoff undertakes to provide an abstract mid-level description of the processes and mechanisms through which individuals arrive at a decision about a collective action, illustrating some of the parameters and mechanisms that are central for the emergence of abdication as a coordination solution. This part of the book is a substantial addition to the literature on the theory of collective action and mobilization. It falls within the domain of theories of the mechanics of contentious politics along the lines of McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's Dynamics of Contention; but it differs from the treatment offered by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly by moving closer to the mechanics of the individual actor. The level of analysis is closer to that offered by Mancur Olsen, Russell Hardin, or Jon Elster in describing the logic of collective action.

Consider the logic of the "abdication game" that Ermakoff presents (47):

The "authoritarian challenger" is the leader who wishes to extend his powers beyond what is currently constitutionally permissible. The "target actors" are the groups and parties who have a say in modification of the constitution and legislative framework, and in this scenario these actors are assumed to have a blocking power in the legislative or constitutional process. If they remain unified in opposition the constitutional demands will be refused and either the status quo or an attempt at an unconstitutional seizure of power will occur. If they acquiesce, the authoritarian challenger will immediately undertake a transformation of the state that gives him unlimited executive power.

There is a difficult and important question that arises from reading Ermakoff's book. It is the question of our own politics in 2020. We have a president who has open contempt for law and political morality, who does not even pretend to represent all the people or to respect the rights of all of us; and who is entirely willing to call upon the darkest motivations of his followers. And we have a party of the right that has abandoned even the pretense of maintaining integrity, independent moral judgment, and a willingness to call the president to account for his misdeeds. How different is that environment from that of 1933 in Berlin? Is the current refusal of the Republican Party to honestly judge the president's behavior anything other than an act of abdication -- shameful, abject, and self-interested abdication?

It seems quite possible that the dilemmas created by authoritarian demands and less-than-determined defenders of constitutional principles will be in our future as well. This book was published in 2008, at the beginning of what appeared to be a new epoch in American politics -- more democratic, more progressive, more concerned about ordinary citizens. The topic of abdication would have been very distant from our political discourse. Today as we approach 2020, the threat of an authoritarian, anti-democratic populism has become an everyday reality for American society.

One other aspect of the book bears mention, though only loosely related to the theory of collective action and abdication that is the primary content of the book. Ermakoff's discussion of the challenges that come along with defining "events" is excellent (chapter 1). He correctly observes that an event is a nominal construct, amenable to definition and selection by different observers depending on their theoretical and political interests.

Events are nominal constructs. Their referents are bundles of actions and decisions that analysts and commentators abstract from the flow of historical time. This abstraction is based on a variety of criteria—temporal contiguity, causal density, and significance for subsequent happenings—routinely mobilized by synthetic judgments about the past. Because events are temporal constructs, their temporal boundaries can never be taken for granted. They take on different values depending on whether we derive these boundaries from the subjective statements left by contemporary actors (Bearman et al. 1999) or construct them in light of an analytical relevance criterion derived from the problem at hand (Sewell 1996, 877).

Ermakoff returns to this theme at the end of the book in chapter 11. The approach here taken towards "events" is indicative of one of the virtues of Ermakoff's book (as well as the work of many of the comparative historical sociologists who have influenced him): respect for the contingency, plasticity, and fluidity of historical processes. We have noted elsewhere (link, link, link) Andrew Abbott's insistence on the fluidity of the social world. There is some of that sensibility in Ermakoff's book as well. None of the processes and sequences that Ermakoff describes are presented as deterministic causal chains; instead, choice and contingency remain part of the story at every level.

(Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die provides a stark companion piece for Ermakoff's historical treatment of the ascendancy of authoritarianism  

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DeLong: Hyman Minsky (1988): Review of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" by William Greider. Ne... [feedly]

I concur with DeLong on Greider, and some other Left-liberal popular econ writers, whose spin style (or shallow knowledge) undermines the intended message.

Hyman Minsky (1988): Review of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" by William Greider. Ne...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/hyman-minsky-1988-_review-of-secrets-of-the-temple-how-the-federal-reserve-runs-the-country-by-william-greider-new.html

Hyman Minsky (1988): Review of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" by William Greider. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 799 pp. , $24.95 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40720477.pdf: 'Secrets of the Temple is a long and tedious book with a core that could have been interesting and important. The subtitle of William Greider's book... announces... its chief conceit: the Federal Reserve runs the country. As the only unqualified true proposition in economics is that there are no unqualified true assertions, the conceit is false.... Embellished with sleep-inducing asides on psychology, history, anthropology, and politics. The tone is iconoclastic; implicit conspiracies are suggested, but the evidence is anecdotal. The aim might be to demythicize money and the Federal Reserve, but ultimately Greider' s weak command over the relevant economic theory blunts his message. This reader feels that Greider set out to prove a conspiracy but he couldn't marshall the evidence. The main policy recommendation-to bring the Federal Reserve under the control of the administration-is weak, especially in light of Greider' s strong views. Given the economic weirdos that recent administrations have favored, I am reluctant to endorse such a concentration of power.... During the 12 years of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the Federal Reserve and the central banks of the advanced capitalist countries seemed impotent validators of price levels resulting from the exercise of market power by unions, firms, and cartels of raw material suppliers. No strong claims that the Federal Reserve runs the country were put forth. Proposals for incomes policies were rife.... The Reagan Administration had an incomes policy... high unemployment... welcom[ing] imports, it kept the minimum wage constant, and it bashed unions. Breaking the air controllers strike was the key anti-inflationary act of the Reagan Administration. The second most important such act may have been the acceptance of the flood of imports.... Ultimately, Greider cannot sustain his conceit because his command of economics is incomplete.... Especially when the financial structure is fragile, the Federal Reserve is mainly a crisis-containing mechanism, rather than the agency of a conspiracy to bias income distribution.... In spite of the evident shortcomings in his understanding of economics, Greider had the makings of a good, forceful, 200-page book that could have... opened a public discussion of the proper use of the Federal Reserve. His text runs to 717 pages. In this case, more is clearly less...  

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DeLong: Not a surprise: Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce : Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Conne... [feedly]

Not a surprise: Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce : Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Conne...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/not-a-surprise-aaron-flaaen-and-justin-pierce-_disentangling-the-effects-of-the-2018-2019-tariffs-on-a-globally-connect.html

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