Worþy Reads: For 2021-12-10 Fr
A preview of my weekly read-around for Equitable Growth
Worthy Reads from Equitable Growth
This is the best testimony that I have seen this month. In America today, we do not have enough within-the-household work to be done nor a sharp enough gendered division of labor for it to make any sense at all no matter what your theory of society to confine large groups of people to household production and care work. Yet in America today there is enough care work and household production to be done that it makes no sense to confine anybody to working full-time outside-the-home with zero flexibility. The neoclassical economist in me wants to believe that private agents seeking win-win bargains would have figured out these workforce and work-structuring questions in an optimal way long before now. But it manifestly is not true:
Michelle Holder: House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth: ‘Fully investing in paid leave will spur economic growth through increased labor force participation and improved productivity today, and through enhanced human capital in the workers of tomorrow. Many people in the United States play dual roles as workers in the paid labor force and as unpaid caregivers to their loved ones. Occasionally, workers need weeks or months away from work to devote themselves fully to caregiving, such as when a new child enters a family through birth, adoption, or foster placement, or when a loved one struggles with a serious medical condition such as cancer, or even when workers themselves experience a serious medical need…
LINK: <https://equitablegrowth.org/house-select-committee-on-economic-disparity-and-fairness-in-growth/>
This is the best conference panel I have watched this month. Discrimination continues to be an incredibly stubborn fact in our economy and society even though next to nobody will ever confess up to wishing to discriminate. As best as I can tell, most discrimination that takes place takes place either because of leisure and past-employment social-network structure, and because of a widespread albeit largely false belief that statistical discrimination is somehow wealth-maximizing:
Kate Bahn & al.: Discrimination in the Labor Market: ‘A Model of Occupational Licensing and Statistical Discrimination, Bobby (Wing Yin) Chung... [and] Peter Blair.... The Civil Rights Enforcement and Racial Wage Gap, Jamein P. Cunningham... [and] Jose Joaquin Lopez.... A Jury of One's Peers: The Effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 on Jury Trials, Jose Joaquin Lopez.... The Rise of Guard Labor in the United States: Evidence from Local Labor Markets, Anastasia Wilson... [and] Luke Petach…
LINK: <https://www.southerneconomic.org/session-details/?conferenceId=7&eventId=3570>
Continuing the Child Tax Credit should, I think, be the highest social policy priority of the Biden administration. And I am reinforced in my belief along these lines by the fact that Austin Clemmons agrees:
Austin Clemens: 'The expanded CTC has to be made permanent…. [The] Financial Pulse Survey shows that the expanded CTC helped alleviate food insecurity and healthcare insecurity <<https://t.co/C4cnskysXY>>…
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Worthy Reads from Elsewhere:
Trying to make sense in historical perspective of the extraordinarily uneven progress of feminism across the globe in the 20th century. My big regret is that it looks like Alice Evans‘s big book on this is likely to be more than five years in the future. But who am I to talk?:
Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: ‘What explains the Great Gender Divergence?…. Three kinds of agricultural societies… patrilineal, bilateral and matrilineal. In Eurasia, patrilineal communities transmitted land and herds to sons… tight restrictions on women’s sexuality and mobility…. Horticultural societies in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia tended to be matrilineal… less concern for paternity, [so] women moved freely…. The Middle East and South Asia grew even more endogamous (through cousin marriage and caste). Since rumours of female promiscuity would dishonour the entire lineage, women were increasingly cloistered, especially in socially diverse towns. Meanwhile in medieval Europe emerged several latent advantages: nuclear families and participatory assemblies…. Patriarchal dominance was not geographically determined, but was also a product of cultural evolution…. Patriarchy was cemented in Eurasia by the emergence over 2000 years ago of religions with Big Gods meting out supernatural punishment…. Progress towards gender equality was contingent on strong growth, weak systems of kinship and democratisation. If prevailing wages are too low to compensate for the loss of honour, female seclusion persists (as in much of India, Iran and Egypt). These effects are compounded by political trajectories…
LINK: <https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1>
The slaveholders of the revolutionary-war generation knew damn well what they were doing, and that they should not be doing it. It took two more generations, the cotton gin, and the extraordinary demand for cotton from the industrial revolution-era factories of new and old England to put so much material wealth pressure on their greedy successors to make those greedy successors forget, or pretend to forget:
Robert Pleasants (1785): To George Washington: ‘Thy example & influence at this time, towards a general emancipation, would be as productive of real happiness to mankind, as thy Sword may have been: I can but wish therefore, that thou may not loose the opertunity of Crowning the great Actions of thy Life, with the sattisfaction of, “doing to Others as thou would (in the like Situation) be done by,” and finally transmit to future ages a Character, equally famous for thy Christian Virtues, as thy worldly achievements…. How inconsistant then will it appear to posterity, should it be recorded, that the Great General Washington, without fee or reward, had commanded the united forces of America… relieving those States from Tyranny & oppression: Yet… keep a number of People in absolute Slavery, who were by nature equally entitled to freedom as himself…. “God will not be mocked,” and is still requiring from each of us, to, “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly before him”…
LINK: <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-03-02-0384>
I remain absolutely flummoxed at this. So many people who I was sure would know better are viewing this economic recovery and its inflation through the template of the 1970s, rather than of the post-World War II demobilization or the Korean War-era mobilization for the Cold War. Attempting to pull the economy in a very short time into a new structural configuration will, in a sticky-downward wage and price economy, get you inflation. But that inflation does not then as a rule become embedded in wage and price expectations. It does not lead to a stagflation problem without special circumstances and bad luck. Those special circumstances and the bad luck are not even on the horizon. Here, however, we have Mike Hiltzik talking sense, and that somewhat reassures me:
Michael Hiltzik: Why Do We Fear Inflation?: ‘There’s a right way and a wrong way to think about inflation. Here’s a right way…. There are no signs that the inflation surge showing up in the latest statistics is caused by sustained overheating of the U.S. economy. The signs point to several short-term factors coming together all at once…
LINK: <https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-26/right-way-and-wrong-way-to-think-about-inflation>
Jason Furman says a good deal of our current burst of inflation is transitory, and that it should not be used—as it is being used—to derail appropriate fiscal policy measures. It would have been nice to hear this from you at greater volume six months ago, Jason! One thing, however puzzles me. I do not understand why Jason says the Fed should “continue to pivot”. The Fed has not yet begun to pivot. The Fed is just preparing to pivot. And whether the Fed should start pivoting or not in any significant way—that is, or ought to be, data dependent:
Jason Furman: 'CPI up 0.8% in November, 6.8% for the last 12 months. A lot of that was volatile energy which is coming down. Core up 0.5%, or 4.9% for the last 12 months.... What does this mean for workers? It hasn't been good so far. Real wage are down about 1% since February 2020 and are 2.9% below trend.... Much better for lower-wage workers.... POSITIVE PREDICTION: Monthly increases in CPI will come down a lot in the next few months. But core CPI will still be avg ~0.4/month for a while.... NORMATIVE: Monetary policy: Continue to pivot both because the large decline in unemployment/UI claims means we're closer to max employment & further from inflation goal. Fiscal policy needs to stay focused on our medium/long-term problems, don't get distracted by this!…
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I confess that I would’ve thought that by now the CDC would’ve implemented some of the lessons it ought to have learned from the past two years. But it really appears that it has not done so. This should be a very high priority for the Biden administration to fix, as rapidly as possible:
Matthew Yglesias: The CDC’s Vaccine Data Is All Wrong: ‘the answer to the riddle “Why is the CDC’s vaccination count so bad?” turns out to be that actually nobody is counting…. You may be reported to them as two separate individuals if you get different doses from different providers…. Not everyone has county of residence information…. In a methodological choice that I think was a mistake, they top code everything at 99.9%…. By doing so, they are obscuring the underlying flaws in the data…
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We have a small but pricey grocery store two blocks away. We have a big Safeway 10 blocks away from us. Minor trips thus do not require a car. Nor do trips to the coffee shop, or the cleaners. In a different America, it would be possible for this to be true of most of at least close-in suburbia. But, regrettably, it is not:
Addison Del Mastro: Going Nowhere Fast: ‘An intersection, and a Rorschach test…. What is going on here?… A land-use pattern that virtually requires car trips for nearly everything…. What we’re seeing at this is really the opposite of overcrowding. It’s a little like one of those noisemaker toys with a couple of marbles inside a sphere. If you shake it, the marbles are everywhere and it feels like it’s full of them. But there are still just two. They’re going nowhere fast…. Total people and total car trips are not directly related, and it’s largely poor land use that makes them appear to be…
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