Now Confused About þe Labor Market I Am…
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-02-04 Fr
CONDITION: NIMBYism!:
A wealthy Silicon Valley town has blocked new affordable housing projects by declaring itself a 'mountain lion habitat' <https://www.insider.com/california-town-declares-itself-a-mountain-lion-habitat-to-block-affordable-housing-2022-2>
First: Now Confused About the Labor Market I Am…
More (seasonally-adjusted) growth in employment than we had thought last winter and this late-fall and winter; less (seasonally-adjusted) growth in employment than we had thought last summer. And much more of an economy in which demand pressure ran into bottlenecks and showed up in rising prices rather than rising employment last summer than I had thought or than the numbers I was then seeing validated.
And yet the whole round trip seems to leave us right now where I thought we were: still leaving rubber on the road as we rejoin the highway at speed, with the dominant feature of the situation being that we are rejoining the highway at speed and should be incredibly pleased at succeeding in doing so. Thus the most productive position for macroeconomic policy to take is to make sure we do rejoin the highway at speed, and accept that the rubber we are currently leaving on the road as we do so is a necessary side-effect of a very good thing—not something to worry about right now.
The time to worry about inflation will be next year, when we are moving with the traffic. Then will be the time to look at the situation, look at the bond market’s inflation expectations, and decide whether any sort of monetary policy régime reset is called for.
If there is an argument that I am wrong, please tell me. And please tell me what it is. But I do not see it…
One Audio:
Robert Wiblin & Keiran Harris: Audrey Tang on What We Can Learn from Taiwan’s Experiments with How to do Democracy <https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/audrey-tang-what-we-can-learn-from-taiwan/>
One Image:
Very Briefly Noted:
Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Intelligence <https://www.wolframalpha.com/>
Joe Nye: Realism About Foreign-Policy Realism: ‘When realists describe the world as if moral choices do not exist, they are merely disguising their own choice. Survival may come first, but it is hardly the only value worth upholding… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ukraine-and-limits-of-foreign-policy-realism-by-joseph-s-nye-2022-02>
Stacy Conradt: Al Gore Really Did “Take the Initiative in Creating the Internet”<https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/25986/history-us-al-gore-really-did-take-initiative-creating-internet>
Lisa Cook: In Her Own Words <https://www.wsj.com/articles/economist-lisa-cook-in-her-own-words-11643711415>
Gary Gorton & al.: Regulating the Shadow Banking System<https://www.jstor.org/stable/41012848>
Robert Armstrong & Ethan Wu: The Fed Says Nothing, & the Market Won’t Listen<https://www.ft.com/content/82b3e7a0-1e09-48a0-a774-77369a300322>
Benjamin Mueller & Eleanor Lutz: U.S. Covid Death Rates Compared With Peer Nations: ‘Despite having one of the world’s most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the United States has failed to inoculate as much of its population as other wealthy nations… LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&emc=edit_up_20220203&instance_id=52066&nl=the-upshot&productCode=UP®i_id=64675225&segment_id=81543&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F1e953e6f-16c7-5f6d-bac2-bcdba78c17ad&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>
Dave Karpf: Talking “Bretbug” in the Classroom: ‘Lessons from that one time I ended up living my strategic political communication syllabus…
Paragraphs:
Chris Blattman: Why I Do Not Expect A Civil War in America: ‘What drove the northern Irish to insurgency?… Northern Ireland was far, far more polarized… dsenfranchisement was far, far more severe…. a long history of a broad-based, well-organized, clandestine armed movement with a fairly large degree of public sympathy…. The British government was their best recruiter…. There really seemed to be no deal on the table that did not include death, imprisonment, and continued disenfranchisement…
Paul Krugman: Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’: ‘[Robert] Gordon doubles down.. declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event…. Great Inventions… from the late 19th century… refinement and exploitation…. Everything since has at best been a faint echo… and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar. Is he right? My answer is a definite maybe…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html>
J. William Ward: The Kentucky Strain of American Nationalism: From “Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age”: ‘The view that it was the special worth of the American frontiersman that accounts for Jackson’s victory was not only unhistorical, it was astigmatic. The assertion… demanded the rejection of all who did not fit its particular version, who did not spring from frontier life…
Andrew Gelman: How Do Things Work at Top Econ Journals, Exactly? This Is One Weird-Ass Story: ‘I applaud [Ken] Judd making all this public. I just wonder if he has a sense of how bizarre this all seems from the outside…. I get that both sides… were frustrated and angry, and a lot of us will say or write rash things in a fit of passion—but… I’ve been writing scientific articles for close to 40 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it…
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Thinking About the Garbage Pile-on Against Lisa Cook…
My student (in a small way—I joined the Berkeley faculty long after she had arrived for the Ph.D. program). Spellman College magna cum laude, a junior year abroad in Strasbourg, Truman Scholar, Oxford PPE, an M.A. from Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Ph.D. from Berkeley with a dissertation on credit markets in Russia, Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Senior Advisor on Finance and Development to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, three years at the Hoover Institution, Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors as, among other things, the point person on the Eurozone-crisis phase of the Great Recession, MSU Professor, Deputy Team Lead for Finance on the Biden-Harris transition.
From my perspective, her big economic research hits are “The Green Books and the Geography of Segregation in Public Accommodations”, “Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism,” “A Green Light for Red Patents: New Evidence from Soviet Innovation Abroad, 1933 to 1991,” “Violence and Economic Growth: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870-1940,” “Overcoming Discrimination by Consumers during the Age of Segregation: The Example of Garrett Morgan,” “Inventing Social Capital: Evidence from African American Inventors, 1843-1930,” Explorations in Economic History,” and “Metals or Management? Explaining Recent Economic Growth in Africa”. None of these were easy to write: they all involve a huge amount of data-intensive gruntwork, as opposed to turning on the computer, feeding it a bunch of numbers, and then printing out pretty graphs.
Perhaps most interesting of the things that she has written from the perspective of the waves of garbage that have landed on Lisa Cook this week is her 2004 “The Next Battleground in the Terror War” <https://www.hoover.org/research/next-battleground-terror-warhttps://www.hoover.org/research/next-battleground-terror-war>, from 2004, that she wrote for the Hoover Institution:
The war on terror has not been won in Africa…. Bringing stability to countries is one thing, but making democracy work in them is quite another…. Underdeveloped and dysfunctional economies breed poverty and are prime breeding grounds for terrorists…. The Bush administration has extended and promoted programs such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act…. The schedule for making more manufactured products from Africa available to American consumers needs to be speeded up… the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)…. HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases are having a devastating effect…. Finally, all the aforementioned peace talks and agreements encouraged and supported by the administration are fragile…. Terrorism bred in distant failed states can eventually make its way back to us and to our allies. It is time to take Africa’s problems seriously…
I read this, and I think: if there still were a Jack Kemp wing of the Republican Party, I really could see Lisa Cook either in it or as a valued centrist partner of it. I can see the George W. Bush African-engagement policy group enthusiastically embracing Lisa Cook as well.
But in the modern American Republican Party and conservative movement, there is absolutely nothing any African-American can do to gain approval—other than to let themselves be slotted into the role of an enthusiastic denouncer of "wokeness" in all of its forms. A John McWhorter can gain… not approval and respect, for that is beyond possibility, but a certain tolerance… with things like his Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America <https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B095JLK96B>.
Short of that, however, nothing else will gain you respect, or anything other than furious denunciations that, whatever you have managed to wrestle out of American society, it is much more than you deserve.
Republicans tolerate McWhorter because he provides a facile "even the liberals!" line of attack on wokeness. McWhorter is IMO not particularly liberal, but he is black and not patently crazy, which is good enough for antigovernmental work.
On one image. We would not need to be asking this question if CDC had been doing randomized screening screening testing since day one. Depending one the answer, would that have mean we should already have an Omicron-optimized booster?