Worþy Reads: For 2021-10-15 Fr
Worthy Reads from Equitable Growth
1) Our series, focusing—ha! ha!—on experts who you should be reading and listening to, but probably are not yet is, this time, tells you why you should be paying attention to the extremely sharp Francisca Antman, Mónica García-Pérez, Mark Hugo López, G. Cristina Mora, and Eileen V. Segarra Alméstica:
Aixa Alemán-Díaz, Christian Edlagan, & Maria Monroe: Expert Focus: Latino Leaders in Economics, & a Call for More Data & Research About Latinos & Hispanics: ‘Equitable Growth is committed to building a community of scholars working to understand how inequality affects broadly shared growth and stability. To that end, we have created the monthly series, “Expert Focus.” This series highlights scholars in the Equitable Growth network and beyond who are at the frontier of social science research.... In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, this installment of Expert Focus highlights Latino leaders in economics, the need for more, and more accurate, data about Hispanics and Latinos, and research that applies the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and gender from among Equitable Growth’s academic community and beyond.... Francisca Antman... Mónica García-Pérez... Mark Hugo López... G. Cristina Mora... Eileen V. Segarra Alméstica…
2) I remember, long ago, wise Fed staffer David Wilcox telling me that he had realized that nowcasting was both the most difficult and most important part of his job. This looks to be an excellent forthcoming event on the current state-of-the-art here:
Equitable Growth: Presents: Opportunities & challenges of Real-Time Economic Measurement: ‘The coronavirus recession led to a crop of economics working papers trying to understand the effects of the pandemic in real time. This research responded to a pressing policy need: Policymakers were prepared to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to staunch the losses of the pandemic, with relatively little knowledge of how to effectively target the money. Work by economists looked at poverty during the pandemic, how people were using stimulus checks, the impacts of enhanced Unemployment Insurance, and much more. The incredibly short turnaround time of much of this research was unprecedented for the profession. The severity of the COVID-19 crisis, the availability of administrative data sources, and new statistical tools combined to produce an enormous amount of nearly real-time data on the economic health of U.S. families. This event convenes experts on the analysis and application of real-time data to discuss what we learned over the past 18 months. Though future crises may not cause the precipitous economic gyrations that the coronavirus did, the lessons economists are learning now may help us respond more effectively to future recessions, guiding policymakers’ response to the next recession by using empirical results from the current one. Speakers: Austin Clemens, Director of Economic Measurement Policy, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Erica Groshen, Senior Economics Advisor, Cornell University. Jeehoon Han, Assistant Professor, Zhejiang University. Dana Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board…
3) The coming of the plague increased the already high “double shift” pressures that our society imposes on women, especially mothers. Yet to date there has been insufficient thought and very little action with respect to how governments should shift their activities to deal with and offset these additional pressures. This struck me as the best set of meditations on these issues I have yet seen:
Kate Bahn & al.: Shaping the Future of Work: A Conversation about Women & Work Post-Covid: ‘The events of 2020 have turned workplaces upside down. The pandemic has intensified challenges that women already face. Working mothers have always worked a “double shift”—a full day of work, followed by hours spent caring for children and doing household labor. During the COVID pandemic, the supports that made this possible—including school and childcare—suddenly disappeared. As a result of these dynamics, more than one in four women are contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely. This is an emergency for corporate America. Companies risk losing women in leadership—and future women leaders—and unwinding years of painstaking progress toward gender diversity. The crisis also represents an opportunity. If companies make significant investments in building a more flexible and empathetic workplace they can retain the employees most affected by today’s crises and nurture a culture in which women have equal opportunity to achieve their potential over the long term…
LINK: <https://www.docsessions.org/shapingthefutureofworkaconversationaboutwomenandworkpostcovid>
4) Things with respect to unemployment insurance that we ought to have done a generation ago or, if not two:
Alix Gould-Werth: 'Today an amazing contingent of lawmakers introduced a house companion to... Wyden... Brown... [and] Bennet['s] UI Improvement Act. It tackles fundamental flaws in Unemployment Insurance that cause disparities in access.... The bill... says states must offer 26 weeks of benefits... fixes monetary eligibility criteria so low-wage workers are more likely to qualify... makes workers looking for part-time jobs eligible... [and] requires employers to tell separating workers about UI. These fixes are evidence-based and make important strides to address racial disparities in UI access.... Shorter benefit durations mean that workers are less likely to match with the right jobs.... [Currently] you need to make enough while working to qualify for UI—disadvantaging those who make less.... Did you know that even if you held a job part-time before you were laid off, searching for part-time work makes you ineligible for UI in many states?.… When I talked to real humans about why they didn’t access UI, there was a strikingly simple explanation: Many disadvantaged workers just didn’t know that they qualified...
LINK: <https://twitter.com/alixgouldwerth/status/1447988172940529667>
Worthy Reads from Elsewhere
1) I get very confused when people do any form of utility- or social welfare-based calculation in an environment in which preferences are shifting. How does one benchmark the different preference maps against each other? Nevertheless, this nevertheless, this is an extremely interesting take on how high and growing market power have shifted the benefits from reductions in marginal cost away from consumers and toward producer interests:
Hendrik Doepper, Alex MacKay, Nate H. Miller, & Joel Stiebale: Rising Markups & the Role of Consumer Preferences: '[We] examine whether product-level markups are increasing over time. We estimate IO-style models with flexible consumer preferences, allowing us to look at potential drivers of change in both supply and demand.... Using data in over 120 consumer product categories, we find that markups increase by over 25 percent from 2006 to 2019. However, real prices barely increase over the period—the biggest source of increased markups is falling marginal costs.... Falling marginal costs do not translate one-for-one to lower prices because the markets are not perfectly competitive. Further, consumers are becoming less price sensitive.... Due to changing preferences, consumer welfare increased from 2006 to 2019, despite higher prices in 2019. If preferences had not changed, consumer surplus would have fallen by 3.5 percent. Thus, accounting for preferences is essential to interpret the effects of changing markups. Other factors we examine include changes in perceived quality and product-level concentration. These factors are not correlated with changes in markups over time. We do find a positive correlation between changes in markups and concentration at the level of the parent company…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/_amackay/status/1448633921235664906>
2) The London Economist has an excellent interview with two of our three Nobel Prize winners this year—David Card and Josh Angrist. If you want to know why we economists respect them so much and are cheering their Nobel Prizes so loudly, follow the link:
Joshua Angrist, Ryan Avent, David Card, & Rachana Shanbhogue : A Real-World Revolution in Economics: ‘THIS YEAR’s Nobel prize celebrates the “credibility revolution” that has transformed economics since the 1990s. Today most notable new work is not theoretical but based on analysis of real-world data.... How their work has brought economics closer to real life…
3) The organization American Compass, its leader Oren Cass who is cheering for this piece, and its author Michael Lind—they have now joined my list of people whose writings are properly classified as attempted cognitive denial-of-service attacks. To attempt to draw a distinction between social assistance, which is a government function, and social insurance, which is not a government function but is instead… something else… unspecified—well, that may well be the dumbest and least honest thing I have seen in months:
Michael Lind: The Government Should Keep Its Hands Off Your Medicare: ‘There are two kinds of people: those who want politicians to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” and those who think that’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard. When an angry constituent made the declaration at a town hall meeting convened by Rep. Bob Inglis during the 2009 health care debate, pundits across the political spectrum seized on it to symbolize the lamentable ignorance of ordinary people in general and populist conservatives in particular. On the right, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen called the remark, “The funniest sentence I read today.” On the left, Slate’s Timothy Noah announced his initiative “to combat the pernicious and big-babyish meme that Medicare lies beyond government control and must remain so.” With its supercilious mockery, the overclass intelligentsia revealed an inability to distinguish between social assistance and social insurance…
LINK: <https://americancompass.org/essays/the-government-should-keep-its-hands-off-your-medicare/>
4) I have never been sure in any particular case how to interpret the failure of the Washington Post or the New York Times or others of their ilk to properly link. Is it their reporters toadying to the powerful by not handing their readers the tools to detect lies they have stenographically transmitted with straight faces? Or is it simply—simply—trying to deprive sources of information they regard as competitors of their deserved share of oxygen. In neither case is it at all a good look:
Adam Serwer: Justice Alito Proved My Point by Attacking Me: ‘The longtime SCOTUS reporters for outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post [Robert Barnes and Mike Berardino] did not even link to my piece that Alito was mischaracterizing so that their readers could make their own judgments; His Honor’s word would do. And yet here is [Adam Lipton of] the Times: "He addressed the recent decisions in unusual detail, rejecting, for instance, what he said was the 'false and inflammatory claim that we nullified Roe v. Wade' in early September by allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks to come into effect. 'We did no such thing, and we said so expressly in our order', he said, quoting from it. Indeed, the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling said it based its decision on procedural grounds.... The effect of the ruling, however, has been to deny abortions to most women in Texas. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority’s unsigned order 'illustrates just how far the court’s "shadow docket" decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process.'" This is the closest a Supreme Court reporter for a major outlet gets to saying, “Although the justice insisted the liquid was rain, chemical analysis shows the composition to be identical to urine.”... Many observers surmised that the majority was happy to leave it in place for now, because it does not think women should have the constitutional right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and therefore does not consider circumstances in Texas to be a matter of significant concern…
LINK: <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/alito-supreme-court-texas-abortion/620339/>
5) This is, I think, massively, massively overstated. But there is something real and, I think, very important underlying it:
Chris Herd: 'What I've learnt talking to 2,500+ companies about remote work.... HQ’s are finished: companies will cut their commercial office space by 50-70%. They will allow every worker to work from home 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week. Fully distributed: ~30% of the companies we talk to are getting rid of the office entirely and going remote-first. Companies doing this have seen their workers decentralize rapidly, leaving expensive cities to be closer to family. Access talent: The first reason they are going remote-first is simple – it lets them hire more talented people. Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every role. Cut costs: The second reason they are going remote-first is because it lets them be far more cost-efficient. Rather than spending $20,000/worker/year on office space they can provide the best remote setup on the planet for $2,000/worker/year. Remote burnout: The productivity inside the companies we’ve spoken to has gone through the roof. Their biggest concern is that workers burnout because they are working too hard. They are actively exploring ways to combat this. Remote onsites: 60%+ of companies we talk to are already thinking about ways to use time together physically to improve culture. The most popular we hear is flying the team into remote locations for ~week. Portugal, Spain, Puerto Rico seem to be the most popular. Personal choice: the smartest people I know personally are all planning to work remotely this decade. The most exciting companies I know personally all plan to hire remotely this decade. ~90% of the workforces we’ve spoken to never want to be in an office again full-time. Async by default: is the thing that organizations are struggling with most. The majority of companies have replicated the office remotely and it is causing strains that are beginning to show. Personal injury: These are exploding. Companies haven’t moved quickly enough to prevent them and back, neck and repetitive strain injuries are becoming a huge problem.... Quality of life: even more importantly companies are realizing that they don’t need to expect workers to waste 2 hours a day commuting to sit in an office chair for 8 hours. Almost every company we talk to believes that their workers will be happier as a result of remote work…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/chris_herd/status/1446522708670521358>
6) This is better than 99% of the things that crossed my screen on inflation these days. Remember: you cannot rejoin the highway at speed without leaving rubber on the road, and so you should not be alarmed when you do so—unless, of course, you really do not want to rejoin the highway at speed at all:
Claudia Sahm: Inflation is Not the Emergency: ‘Fast forward to today, and surging prices are behind us. That’s a step back to normal. Monthly inflation—a better indicator of current conditions than year of year—peaked in June 2021. In September, inflation excluding food and energy, was back near its pre-Covid average. Total inflation is higher, but food and energy prices tend to be more volatile and, as result, often tell us less about where inflation is headed. Supply chains and commodity prices remain a thorn in the side of consumers and businesses. As with jobs, progress is progress, even when it’s slower than we want. Demand matters for inflation too. This year spring demand surged. In fact, in April and May of 2021, the highest percent of consumers, on net, said it as a good time to buy big-ticket durables since the crisis began. That coincided with the surge in inflation. Now that measure of demand is lower than the depths of the recession. Again, it’s hard to see a spiral inflation taking hold when consumers are willing to wait it out until inflation settles down, as they expect it will.... Inflation is not an emergency, but getting the pandemic under control is.... Covid has turned out to be wave of after wave of Category 5 hurricanes laying siege to the United States and the world.... Inflation is NOT spiraling out of control. It is coming down. Whether “transitory” is six months or twelve is NOT an emergency. It’s a pain in the ass for the Fed. The pandemic is an emergency. The heated debates in Congress about infrastructure, climate change, the child tax credit, health care, and affordable housing are extremely important too. Focus, people…
LINK: <https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/inflation-is-not-the-emergency>
7) this is, I think, the best single thing to read about the Card, Angrist, Imbens Economics Nobel Prize:
Noah Smith: The Econ Nobel We Were All Waiting for: ‘To predict who will win the Econ Nobel... list the most influential people people in the field who haven’t won it yet.... Assume... micro theorists won’t win... two years in a row.... The ones whose influence is the oldest are the most likely to win.... For years, this method led lots of people—including me—to predict a Nobel for David Card. His 1994 paper with Alan Krueger on the minimum wage was a thunderbolt.... Since then, Card has been at the forefront of empirical labor.... Angrist and Imbens’ impact... though also hugh... came later.... I wouldn’t have been surprised had they won the prize in later years. But Card was clearly overdue. Perhaps the reason it took this long was that Card’s conclusions in his famous minimum wage paper were so hard for many in the field to swallow.... At the time, Card and Krueger’s finding seemed revolutionary and heretical. In fact, other researchers had probably been finding the same thing, but were afraid to publish their results, simply because of their terror of offending the orthodoxy.... In the 1990s, economics was still a fairly conservative field as academic fields go, and some economists probably still saw their role as that of a bulwark against socialism. In fact, economists who lean to the political right still say Card and Krueger’s result can’t possibly be true, even though it’s been replicated by a massive number of follow-up studies.... Peter St. Onge.... I guess when you’ve lived in an echo chamber of propaganda, empirical evidence feels like propaganda!... But it wasn’t just the conservative opposition that discouraged this sort of work. It was the perception that the work would be seized upon by liberal activists.... Here’s what Card said in a 2016 interview.... “I don’t go around saying you should raise the minimum wage—yet advocates point to my work to say they should raise minimum wages. That’s one reason why I don’t work on that topic anymore, because everyone just assumes I’m advocating for raising the minimum wage, and therefore everything I do will be discredited.” “It’s the same with immigration,” he continues. “There is no point in me writing another paper on that, because everyone just assumes that I must be advocating raising immigration.”... Wat Card wanted to do wasn’t to push minimum wage or expanded immigration — it was much bigger than that. He wanted to make the field of economics more scientific.... The importance of Card and Krueger (1994)... is... that economics consists of a set of falsifiable claims about the world we live in, rather than simply a set of thought experiments.... The genius of Card’s work—and of Angrist’s and Imbens’ work.... These economists devised clever ways to find comparisons... for natural experiments and policy experiments... “quasi-experimental” methods... the core of what economists have called the “credibility revolution” in empirical economics.... Far from simply evangelizing the credibility revolution, Angrist pushed it forward, developing new statistical techniques for measuring causal effects — often in cooperation with Imbens, as well as the late Alan Krueger—and applying these new methods to questions in education, health, and other areas. Imbens, for his part, has been nothing short of virtuosic in his quest for the development of ever-more-accurate ways of teasing out causal effects.... When evidence is credible, it means that theory must bend to evidence’s command.... [While] many of the most striking results to come out of the credibility revolution so far are things that bolster the case for government intervention... this is not a property of the Universe; there was simply a backlog of popular theories that concluded that the free market was the best, and so studies showing otherwise got lots of attention. That doesn’t mean the facts have a liberal bias.... And that’s fine.... If you ignore reality in the name of politics for too long, eventually you’re going to find yourself shouting orders that nature refuses to obey…
LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-econ-nobel-we-were-all-waiting>
8) Outside my wheelhouse, but vitally important. It is entirely possible that our democracy depended on Mike Pence doing his job on January 6. And perhaps I am overly alarmed. Perhaps there are prliamentary procedures that I am not aware of for overruling and even replacing the chair of a joint session of Congress. But nobody has ever told me what those procedures are. Can one appeal a ruling to the members, and if so does each senator get one or get 4.35 votes?:
Robert Costa: 'One episode on Jan. 5 that deserves more attention: Trump issued a statement late at night speaking for Pence, hours before the next day's certification. Trump declared he and Pence were in "total agreement that the [VP] has the power to act." Of course, they were not. "This breaks protocol," Pence chief Marc Short said tersely in phone call with Trump adviser Jason Miller, who was at the Willard with Giuliani and Bannon, among others. Miller refused to retract a word. Why this matters: the Trump-Pence Oval meeting on Jan. 5 was not the end of it. Even when Pence flatly refused to do what Trump wanted, Trump soon decided to issue a public statement defining the vice president's power and position on the election. And even when Pence was at home for dinner on January 5, the pressure campaign continued. Let's not forget: Giuliani was hoping to come over there and have his own one-on-one talk with the VP... a follow up to Trump's Oval showdown with Pence. Three main plays at Pence on night Jan. 5: 1-Trump pushes him in Oval, but fails. 2-Statement then stuns him, his aides by declaring Pence in agreement with Trump. 3-Giuliani pushes for one last 1-on-1 push at VP residence, but Pence's advisers stop it from happening. Boris "Epshteyn told [Pence adviser Marty] Obst Giuliani would be happy to come over to Pence's residence and have a discussion. For Obst, the suggestion felt straight out of a bad mafia movie"…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1447663750832664576>
Re: all the leaning on Mike Pence; of course, we can see now (I hope everyone sees now) that there are no really firm rules/constitutionally spelled-out processes that guarantee that democracy will not be subverted by the likes of The Former Guy. Marc Short's comment that "that breaks protocol", under the circumstances of Jan 5 and 6, is like saying "a true Scotsman would not do that" and about as enforceable.
Alito's febrile rant about how people (presumably journalists, women who attend pro-choice rallies, and anyone else who differs from him) are "trying to intimidate him" is profoundly dangerous. It is an attack on the 1st amendment that should not be allowed to stand unchallenged, and the Times and Post are not helping by their "neutrality".