I Am Still Puzzled Þt Anyone Is Off of "Team Transitory"; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-10 Fr
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
I confess that I still do not understand why everybody is not on Team Transitory right now.
There is little sign of the incorporation of any expectational shifts into contracts looking forward. And the breakevens do not seem to incorporate any expectational shifts of more than minor magnitude either.
People saying that the Federal Reserve needs to, right now, shock the economy out of a path destined to stagflation seem to be applying the 1970s template far outside of its proper zone of application, and doing so far no sensible reason that I can see. Wait, preserve optionality, and confirm that your future actions will be data-dependent seems far and away the best course:
Paul Krugman: The Inflation Suspense Goes On: ‘If there was any information content in today’s release,… extreme scenarios in both directions became a bit less likely…. The headline number is highly likely to come down over the next few months, if only because the big run-up of oil prices from their pandemic lows seems to have gone into reverse…. Underlying inflation appears to be running high by recent standards, maybe around 4 percent instead of the 2 percent that is the Fed’s target…. Production is constrained both by bottlenecks and by the withdrawal of several million Americans from the labor force…. How long will elevated inflation last? The secret answer (don’t tell anyone) is that we don’t know…. The most likely scenario is a minor-league version of the 1946–48 inflation spike…. I still don’t see any evidence that 1970s-type stagflation, in which everyone kept raising prices because they expected everyone else to keep raising prices, is emerging. But today’s numbers neither reinforced nor challenged my beliefs…
LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2>
One Picture:
One Video:
Paul M. Romer: Nobel Prize Lecture 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmgZGIZtiM> <
Very Briefly Noted:
Corey Robin: Why Joe Biden Needs More Than Accomplishments to Be a Success: ‘What each of these… had at their back was an independent social movement…. Lincoln… abolition…. F.D.R…. unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions… was disruptive… upending the leadership and orthodoxies… prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did… <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/opinion/joe-biden-political-time.html>
Wikipedia: Peisistratos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peisistratos>
Steve Inskeep: In The 1920s, A Community Conspired To Kill Native Americans For Their Oil Money<https://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/523964584/in-the-1920s-a-community-conspired-to-kill-native-americans-for-their-oil-money>
NAS: 2021 Nobel Ceremonial Presentations: ‘On December 8 at 2:30 p.m. PST in Irvine, CA, diplomas and medals will be presented to physiology or medicine laureates David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian and to economic sciences laureates David Card and Guido W. Imbens by Ambassador Olofsdotter… <http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/events/nobel-ceremonial-presentations.html>
George J. Stigler (1969(: Does Economics Have a Useful Past? <https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/1/2/217/11359/Does-Economics-Have-a-Useful-Past>
Daniel Wood & Geoff Brumfiel: Pro-Trump Counties Now Have Far Higher Covid Death Rates: ‘Misinformation is to blame… <https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate>
Alex Huffman: ’Nice mask study consistent w/ prev. results <https://t.co/J5fczlbZhS> "face masks sign. reduce the risk of SARS-CoV–2 infection compared to social distancing… <https://t.co/lHifRje3DH>
Claudia Sahm: Let’s Get Real: The American Rescue Plan Was the Best Economic Policy in Forty Years: ‘Nearly a year and a half into the recovery from the Covid recession, it’s indisputable that fiscal relief was a success. Not so, after the Great Recession. It fell far short. It’s time to set the record straight. The recovery is moving fast, and the American Rescue Plan is integral to that fact…
Eric Topol: Ground Truths
Matthew Yglesias: Our Public Health Agencies Should Follow the Science: ‘On dose-spacing, testing, and treatment recommendations, we’re behind the curve…
Paragraphs:
Steve Randy Waldman: Republican Primaries: ‘I agree with Shor’s view that Democratic Party activists, particularly on social issues, constitute a weird, vanguardist community that often fails by placing its own concerns and unpopular remedies before serving the actual preferences of the demos. But public opinion polling is a bad tool… as likely to mislead as to help. Our political parties require sociological change. They cannot remain platoons of ideologues supported by plutocratic philanthropy, joined at the hip to canny lobbyists and dealmakers, and serve the public well. There is no technocratic quick fix to that. The parties have to change. Democrats are no worse than Republicans in this regard, but that won’t save them…. From 2023 on, for the forseeable future, Democrats will have little means of exercising political power at the national level. Of course Democrats should be careful not to let that be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Human affairs are unpredictable and pessimism can be hubris as much as optimism. But the possibility that the United States will be governed by Republicans or else entirely gridlocked for the next decade seems like one we should be thinking about and taking seriously…
LINK: <https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9047.html>
Zachary Bleemer & Aashish Mehta: College Major Restrictions & Student Stratification: ‘Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid–1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which increasingly enforce GPA restriction policies that prohibit students with poor introductory grades from declaring popular majors. We investigate these GPA restrictions by constructing a novel 50-year dataset covering four public research universities’ student tran- scripts and employing a staggered difference-in-difference design around the implementation of 29 restrictions. Restricted majors’ average URM enrollment share falls by 20 percent, which matches observational patterns and can be explained by URM students’ poorer average pre- college academic preparation. Using first-term course enrollments to identify students who intend to earn restricted majors, we find that major restrictions disproportionately lead URM students from their intended major toward less-lucrative fields, driving within-institution ethnic stratification and likely exacerbating labor market disparities…
LINK: <http://zacharybleemer.com/wp-content/uploads/Working-Papers/Restrictions_Paper.pdf>
Lina M. Khan: The Separation Of Platforms And Commerce: ‘A handful of digital platforms mediate a growing share of online commerce and communications. By structuring access to markets, these firms function as gatekeepers for billions of dollars in economic activity. One feature dominant digital platforms share is that they have inte grated across business lines such that they both operate a platform and market their own goods and services on it. This structure places domi nant platforms in direct competition with some of the businesses that de pend on them, creating a conflict of interest that platforms can exploit to further entrench their dominance, thwart competition, and stifle innovation…
LINK: <https://columbialawreview.org/content/the-separation-of-platforms-and-commerce/>
Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne, & Peter T. Leeson (2014): Earw(h)ig: I Can’t Hear You Because Your Ideas Are Old: ‘We contend that the market for ideas, while no doubt competitive in terms of scientific rivalry, is not free of distortions in the incentives and signals that guide economic scientists. As a result, ideas that are flawed can come to dominate the profession, while useful ideas are left on the proverbial sidewalk of intellectual affairs. The smooth evolution of economic thought from falsehood to truth that underlies the Whig perspective is complicated by both historical circumstances and the intimate relationship between economics and politics that follows from the attraction of public policy for those who enter the discipline…
LINK: <https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/38/3/531/1696458>
Duncan Black: If You’re A Star They Let You Do It: ‘Dylan [Beers]’s an incredibly dumb guy who has a buzzer on his desk that starts sounding every time a rich person is facing criticism. But being an incredibly dumb guy, he occasionally says the things that the rest of his colleagues are smart enough not to say. In this case: “What you fools don’t understand is that journalism is just for profit entertainment, this is just how things are, and nobody cares about anything except money and it’s absurd to expect any different, you stupid cretins. You might as well be criticizing the ”ethics“ of the Real Housewives of Chattanooga or Love Island.” And, well, ok buddy… you said it!…
LINK: <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2021/12/if-youre-star-they-let-you-do-it.html>
Matthew Yglesias: “Latinx” Is a Symptom, Not the Problem: ‘People doing mass politics… need to try to speak the way that most people in the intended audience speak…. The smart play is to talk the way the more politically moderate members of the community speak…. If you’ve got a group of people talking this way, it likely reflects a lack of direct engagement with the community in question, which is going to be a larger political problem…
LINK:
Seniors on fixed incomes and Medicare are losing to Medicare inflation. The Social Security benefit was increased by 7% to cover the 6.8% inflation of 2021. But Medicare Pt B has been increased 14%. So a net loss for Medicare recipients. It is forever thus - seniors getting shafted by ever-increasing medical costs rising faster than inflation. It is stealth debasement of the social security benefit.
You're on Team Transitory because you're looking at the data.
Various people insisting that the inflation monster will eat everything unless killed now, now, now are seeing real wages rise, and feel (which some justification in the practices of the last couple generations) that the Fed is not doing its actual job, which is to make sure that never happens.