WORÞY READS: from 2021-05-07
A preview of my weekly read-around for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth...
Worthy Reads from Equitable Growth:
1) The surprising and disappointing slow growth of employment between March and April underscores how sick the US labor market still is. We need both better social support networks for those who want to return to work and higher wages in the jobs that people are going to be moving to in order to restore the health of the labor market. And, meanwhile, job displacement will not be without its substantial costs. We are still far from being out of the woods:
Kate Bahn & Carmen Sanchez Cumming: The Consequences of Job Displacement for U.S. Workers: ‘Unemployment in the United States remains high, and there are 8.4 million fewer jobs than prior to the pandemic…. Some of those who lost their jobs are experiencing… job displacement… their prior positions [will] no longer exist even as the economy recovers…. Job displacement is generally outside of the control of individual workers, but it nonetheless can break down career ladders, dissolve valuable worker-employer relationships, and widen existing racial disparities in labor market outcomes…. This issue brief reviews the academic literature on job displacement and offers labor market policies that could help mitigate the negative effects of job displacement…
LINK: <https://equitablegrowth.org/the-consequences-of-job-displacement-for-u-s-workers/>
2) Equitable Growth has, after its ramp-up period, gotten in the groove with respect to funding substantial amounts of truly excellent economic research. If you do not read this, you almost surely have only a partial view of what we are doing and what we have learned from it:
Equitable Growth: Second Annual Academic Research Report: ‘We place a priority on research that is relevant to policy debates, abetting the development of evidence-based policies. Equitable Growth’s in-house team of more than 40 staff helps bridge the gap between researchers and the policy process… And we are committed to increasing diversity… to support more Black scholars and to fund more research based on the lived experience and legacy of structural racism…. Since 2013, Equitable Growth has provided more than $6 million in grants to more than 200 researchers. In 2020, we announced a record $1.07 million in grant funding. The funds went to 19 faculty grants and 12 doctoral grants supporting Ph.D. student researchers. Separately, we awarded more than $250,000 in grants for new research on paid leave, with a focus on medical and caregiving leave and on employer responses to paid leave…
LINK: <https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/equitable-growths-second-annual-academic-research-report/>
3) I have been trying to think through the questions of the evolution and development of China’s economy, and its political economy, over at my weekly videocast. I would not say that I have it nailed. But I would say that I at least have the major puzzles identified.
Brad DeLong: DeLongTODAY: China I & II: China and the CCP… [are] effective and powerful. As long as the General Secretary remains minimally corrupt, key personnel decisions will put people who share the General Secretariat’s vision in the drivers’ seats. And, as I said before, nobody in China wants China to become more like America any more—COVID, Trump, the Great Recession, and so forth put an end to any such aspirations. But I do not think that it is likely to work—at least not the way that Xi Jinping and his faction hope. I see a grave succession problem as the emperor ages. I see the control and information problems that always beset overplanning—and, no, near-ubiquitous surveillance will not help. I see a very powerful incentivization problem as well. When power controls and can threaten wealth, those who would otherwise be entrepreneurial will become focused on acquiring power which can protect itself rather than wealth which cannot, and growth will slow…
LINK: <https://delongtoday.com>
4) Noah Smith and I interview the extremely sharp Cory Doctorow on tech fixes to tech antitrust and public-sphere regulation problems:
Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith, & Brad DeLong: PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: “Mandated Interoperability”: We Can’t Make It Work, or Can We?
LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>
Worthy Reads from Elsewhere:
1) Once again, I find myself compelled to deviate out of my lane. This is happening with very distressing frequency these days: one should in general stick to one lane, because that is where one's ability to add value in the sense of providing information and analysis “above replacement”—above that that would be provided by whatever else the reader would be reading if she or he were not reading this—is. Going out of your lane is justifiable only when you think that what is in your lane is less important and you need to redirect your readers’ attention to what is more important. And today I think that it is:
Heather Cox Richardson: May 5, 2021: ‘the former president today attacked Cheney… McConnell and… Pence, whom Trump blamed for refusing to stop Biden’s election. Far from abandoning the Big Lie, Trump doubled down on it, insisting that the 2020 election was fraudulent. If only Pence and McConnell had been stronger, he wrote, “we would have had a far different Presidential result, and our Country would not be turning into a socialist nightmare!” He ended with words that proved right the concern that he will continue to back attacks on our government: “Never give up!” he wrote. Pro-Trump Republican leadership is now tied to that mess. Cheney and those who might rally to her side are not…. Biden and his administration kept moving forward. When asked about his support for Cheney, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said simply, “One-hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration.”… White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “I guess the contrast for people is 100% of our focus is on delivering relief to the people and getting the pandemic under control”…
LINK: <https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-5-2021>
2) The extent to which American politics and society is still rooted in the collective-utopia “larger raft” religious attitudes of New England Puritans, and the subsequent Congregationalist and mainline-Protestant and revivalist developments of those ways of looking at the world and at the American people, is massively underestimated. We are all, in very profound ways, children of the Pilgrims, of William Bradford and John Winthrop—even if they would be profoundly shocked and appalled at the directions we have taken their collective-utopian religious impulses:
Noah Smith: Wokeness as Old-Time American Religion: ‘Wokeness is much, much more than Critical Race Theory. CRT is simply a nerdy fringe that hovers at the edge of the movement. At the street level, activists are reading Coates, not Adorno or Marcuse. A few ideas and attitudes may make it into their lexicons and worldviews from musty old European intellectuals, but most of street ideology is spontaneously generated at the street level. And for many woke people—especially the White people who numerically make up the bulk of the woke movement—that street ideology springs from a very old American tradition. It comes from the abolitionist movement, which itself was heavily influenced by Protestant Christianity…
LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-old-time-american-religion>
3) The past year has made me more and more certain that the in-person crowded university is an enormous key to a successful collective educational effort. There are those of us who do not need a crowd in order to learn and think. But we are those who can take squiggles on a page and from them spin-up an imago of the author’s mind and then discuss things and argue with it. We run that sub-Turing imago and instantiation in a separate sandbox on our own wetware, and so even when we are alone we are in a crowd of arguing voices. As my wife used to say, I used to talk to my dissertation advisors more in the shower than in person—and they would answer back. But those of us who do not need the crowded in-person university are relatively few. For most of us, real professors and real peers are very, very important:
Nicole Barbaro: EdTech Can’t Forget That Humans Evolved to be Social: ‘Near universal remote learning over the previous year, however, has revealed a fundamental limitation to online and remote learning: students are missing the social experience of education….. The importance of social experiences for students extends beyond quintessential campus events though: research continues to demonstrate the important role of the “human factor” in learning processes as well. Students generally learn better when instructors are present in online instructional content, and online learning content is more effective at boosting learning outcomes when it supplements human instruction, rather than replaces it. Teachers aren’t the only human factor in learning: peers matter for learning, too! Informal friendship networks, like those that are formed on traditional college campuses through social events, are productive means for academic achievement to spread. And even being randomly assigned to study cohorts with highly persistent peers boots student’s grades. In essence, a social campus is good for student learning Humans are built to learn, and specifically to learn socially…
LINK: <https://nicolebarbaro.substack.com/p/human>
4) We are now in the middle of an enormous transformation in the nature of work. I am very positive about its long-run impacts. And I think Adam Ozimek is correct here in focusing on the reduced deadweight loss of commuting.
Adam Ozimek: Future Workforce: ‘Companies continue to be remote: Nine months into the pandemic, 41.8 percent of the American workforce remains fully remote. Companies say remote work is getting easier, not harder, as time goes on: 68 percent of hiring managers say remote work is going more smoothly now than when their company first made the shift to at the start of the pandemic. Remote work will continue through 2021: Managers believe that 26.7 percent of the workforce will be fully remote in one year suggesting that individuals will gradually continue to return to the office, but a significant share will remain remote in the near future. The number of remote workers in the next five years is expected to be nearly double what it was before COVID–19: By 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be remote, an increase of 16.8 million people from pre-pandemic rates. Increased productivity and flexibility continue to be key benefits of remote work: Hiring managers cite reduction of non-essential meetings, increased schedule flexibility, and no commute as aspects of remote work that have worked better than expected…
LINK: <https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/economist-report-future-workforce>
5) Nobody in China right now wants China to become more like America in any way—COVID, Trump, the Great Recession, and so forth put an end to any such aspirations. And they have reason for this judgment. Joe Biden sees how much trouble America is in, and wants to fix it:
Ian Leslie: Biden's Bet: ‘Biden... is... hinting at... “I think they’re going to write about this point in history… about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century. Not a joke. Whether autocracy is the answe—these were my debates I’d have in the many times I met with Xi.”... Biden believes that technology and science are moving so fast that they pose an existential challenge to democracy itself. The consensus used to be that if China wanted to catch with the West it would have to democratise—become more free, and more diverse, with power less centralised. But Xi has doubled down on autocracy and centralisation, partly by deploying new technologies. China is still growing. For Biden, it’s up to America to show the rest of the world that democracy is still the best platform…
LINK: <https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/bidens-bet>
6) America’s—indeed, the world’s—failure sociologically to do what needed to be done to control COVID is extremely sobering, and depressing:
Zeynep Tufekci: Sunday Open Thread for Subscribers: ‘The one big part of the tragedy here is that we had most of the science we needed really early on…. There was more to learn, for sure, but the basics were there. There have been very few scientific surprises… outside of how vaccinable this (luckily!) turned out to be (we didn’t know partly because we didn’t really try for the others exactly because we didn’t care). But sociologically, I am shaken. I knew about all of this, because I teach and study it. The group-think, the institutional resistance and inertia, the cognitive biases, the social dynamics… I know about them all! But I’ve been truly surprised most is how much stronger than I thought these dynamics were, even in a crisis. Perhaps because of the crisis. I’ve learned a lot about viruses last year, but I did not really need that much beyond an introductory textbook to write the policy oriented pieces I’ve published. I think we need to update our social science textbooks and assumptions, though. The dynamics that have dominated our world aren’t novel in the sense that we were new to them, but they are clearly so much stronger than we usually acknowledge…
LINK: <https://www.theinsight.org/p/sunday-open-thread-for-subscribers-d93>
7) A pro-competition tech transition that we, by sheer luck, managed to handle very well:
Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: ‘A Study in Prices and Politics: AT&T’s divestiture was the largest corporate reorganization in history and has had international repercussions. It was a major development in American economic policy, and a prominent part of the deregulation movement of the late 1970s… how private and public interests combined to shape corporate and public policy in late 20th-century America… politics, economics, business, and law… an accessible narrative… [of] divestiture as a great experiment in public policy, competition, openness, and international policy… a mix of deliberate design and uncontrollable forces whose outcome was not foreseen…
LINK: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>
8) Cory Doctorow: Adversarial Interoperability: ‘“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter…. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need +adversarial_ interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor. Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them. But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability…
LINK: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>
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