Contra Rafael Guthman; what a Malthusian economy looks like; Twitter is falling over; don't lazily dismiss the worth of really-existing democracy; Maurice Obstfeld, Haonan Zhou, Gautam Mukunda, Tim...
W.r.t. your argument with Guthman. Let's pull back a moment. Your "Malthusian" equation for $n$ is $\beta [ y / y^{sub} - 1 ] + \epsilon_2$. Your recent book points out that after 1870 this equation doesn't fit the data for $ y >> y^{sub} $ anywhere in the world whenever $ y >> y^{sub} $. Rather there was a demographic transition. We have 150 years of strong evidence that as income increases $n$ flattens out then decreases to close to 1 as $y$ increases.
Isn't Guthman just pointing out that there's no reason to believe that the equation for $n$ changed suddenly after 1870? Why is it so hard to believe that there could have been demographic transitions In the bronze age and greek/roman efflorescences?
Brad is being way too hard on Tim Burke. There is a big difference between claiming that really-existing democracy is worthless and claiming that really-existing democracy is far too biased toward the minoritarian desires of the wealthy and fervent. The latter claim--which is that of Tim Burke--can be made by any opponent of Citizens United, Dobbs, or Heller.
Re "a world characterised by disorder, nationalism and great power conflict", I am currently reading Timothy Snyder's book "The Red Prince", and it is great.
Re globalization service flows, I am presently sitting at my desk in my Toronto home, working for an American company with colleagues based mainly in the UK, Serbia, and India.
Presumably nobody would claim that non-human animals do not live in Malthusian conditions? I don't understand how natural selection would work with non-Malthusian assumptions. So consider a set of predator-prey population differential equations instead of your growth equations; let's say lynxes and snowshoe hares. The characteristic mean reversion time under ordinary parameters is on the order of years, not the centuries that you and Guthman are thinking of. But that is just because that is how the equations are parameterized and applied. If one had to consider climatic warming or cooling, there would be waxing and waning over similar time periods. This would be reflected in better or worse "standards of living" for lynxes and hares; but it would not be non-Malthusian.
By the way, Ada Palmer likes to raise the point that urban Italian life expectancies in late Medieval Italy were about twice those of the Renaissance: 35 years versus 18.
Duy: "The Fed is getting closer to accepting that they aren’t returning inflation to 2% within any reasonable timeframe without inducing a hard landing."
There are three variable here: a) what is "reasonable," What are the costs and benefits of a higher FIAT target c) what are the costs of a hard landing? For my money the Fed ought to be defining "reasonable" as enough to give it time to decide if is needs to raise the FIAT (not just allow temporary over-target inflation to continue) to maximize discounted real GDP.
Guthman: What is the policy implication of the economy at time t "being" Malthusian or not?
Also, concerning "urbanization" as an indicator, isn't the need for grain subsidies in Rome and Constantinople (resources that could have been used for defending frontiers and indication that urbanization was super-optimum?
Wu's argument is valid for any non-zero FAIT. What he does not establish to my satisfaction is that 3% is better than 2%. That the Fed DID not achieve it's 2% target in the 2008-2020 period does not prove that it could not have if it had a) been clearer in its communications that 2% was a target not a ceiling and b) that it would "do what it takes" to achieve it.
W.r.t. your argument with Guthman. Let's pull back a moment. Your "Malthusian" equation for $n$ is $\beta [ y / y^{sub} - 1 ] + \epsilon_2$. Your recent book points out that after 1870 this equation doesn't fit the data for $ y >> y^{sub} $ anywhere in the world whenever $ y >> y^{sub} $. Rather there was a demographic transition. We have 150 years of strong evidence that as income increases $n$ flattens out then decreases to close to 1 as $y$ increases.
Isn't Guthman just pointing out that there's no reason to believe that the equation for $n$ changed suddenly after 1870? Why is it so hard to believe that there could have been demographic transitions In the bronze age and greek/roman efflorescences?
Brad is being way too hard on Tim Burke. There is a big difference between claiming that really-existing democracy is worthless and claiming that really-existing democracy is far too biased toward the minoritarian desires of the wealthy and fervent. The latter claim--which is that of Tim Burke--can be made by any opponent of Citizens United, Dobbs, or Heller.
Re "a world characterised by disorder, nationalism and great power conflict", I am currently reading Timothy Snyder's book "The Red Prince", and it is great.
Thx...
Re globalization service flows, I am presently sitting at my desk in my Toronto home, working for an American company with colleagues based mainly in the UK, Serbia, and India.
Presumably nobody would claim that non-human animals do not live in Malthusian conditions? I don't understand how natural selection would work with non-Malthusian assumptions. So consider a set of predator-prey population differential equations instead of your growth equations; let's say lynxes and snowshoe hares. The characteristic mean reversion time under ordinary parameters is on the order of years, not the centuries that you and Guthman are thinking of. But that is just because that is how the equations are parameterized and applied. If one had to consider climatic warming or cooling, there would be waxing and waning over similar time periods. This would be reflected in better or worse "standards of living" for lynxes and hares; but it would not be non-Malthusian.
By the way, Ada Palmer likes to raise the point that urban Italian life expectancies in late Medieval Italy were about twice those of the Renaissance: 35 years versus 18.
Is the way to get the chat app to download "Substack Reader?" That's what appears when I click the Google play link?
Duy: "The Fed is getting closer to accepting that they aren’t returning inflation to 2% within any reasonable timeframe without inducing a hard landing."
There are three variable here: a) what is "reasonable," What are the costs and benefits of a higher FIAT target c) what are the costs of a hard landing? For my money the Fed ought to be defining "reasonable" as enough to give it time to decide if is needs to raise the FIAT (not just allow temporary over-target inflation to continue) to maximize discounted real GDP.
Guthman: What is the policy implication of the economy at time t "being" Malthusian or not?
Also, concerning "urbanization" as an indicator, isn't the need for grain subsidies in Rome and Constantinople (resources that could have been used for defending frontiers and indication that urbanization was super-optimum?
Wu's argument is valid for any non-zero FAIT. What he does not establish to my satisfaction is that 3% is better than 2%. That the Fed DID not achieve it's 2% target in the 2008-2020 period does not prove that it could not have if it had a) been clearer in its communications that 2% was a target not a ceiling and b) that it would "do what it takes" to achieve it.