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Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Meanwhile, Olivier Blanchard has a writeup of his views on debt, with this notable insight: "spending on measures to mitigate global warming may well have a social rate of return higher than the safe rate, and thus justify the use of debt finance." 1/ piie.com/publications/p…
Blanchard is president of the American Economic Association and previously chief economist of the IMF, also one of the world's leading macroeconomists. And what he's basically saying is that a debt-financed Green New Deal could be perfectly OK 2/
Obviously it depends on the details – and this doesn't mean that everything progressives want is free. But when Republicans condemn the GND as crazy and radical, guess what: they're the crazy radicals. Mainstream economics and the GND can go together quite well 3/
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Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
The position that it's un-American to raise any questions about the president – as long as he's Republican, of course – is much more blatant now, but not new 1/ washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…
I remember Republicans declaring that it was unpatriotic to oppose Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, because getting his way was important to his credibility, and he needed to be credible to fight terrorism. 2/
Needless to say, all of this will go down the memory hole as soon as there's a Democrat in office 3/
Read 3 tweets
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Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
I liked this Tim Wu column, which basically says that the public is center-left, but DC won't reflect those preferences 1/ nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opi…
One thing he doesn't emphasize, however, is that it's not just Congress and lobbyists; there's also conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, which tends to congeal around center-right doctrine even when true experts don't agree at all 2/
Classic case: Back in the ways when DC treated Bowles and Simpson as demigods, a central proposition of their screeds on fiscal responsibility was that ... marginal tax rates needed to be reduced! 3/ nytimes.com/2010/11/12/opi…
Read 5 tweets
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Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
One thing I realized after today's column was filed was that Trump's personal history is relevant: before reaching the White House, he was widely known as someone who cheated on business deals 1/ nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opi…
He left a long trail of unpaid bills and stiffed contractors 2/ theweek.com/articles/78397…
Some bankers refused to deal with him, citing the "Donald risk" 3/ nytimes.com/2016/05/24/bus…
Read 4 tweets

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Christopher Newfield
@cnewf
@chronicle has published another piece arguing that #highered is out of touch with regular Americans and disliked by them. It stages the eternal battle between a dynamic society and backward educators. The conclusion is always the same: colleges must "change how they do business"
The frame is compiled from Republican talking points, particularly that college means liberal brainwashing. bit.ly/2tyh31u
@karinfischer puts this out there as though it were a common opinion, not a refutable falsehood (start w @AaronRHanlon bit.ly/2SeAINK) /2
The culture wars discussion goes on for a long time, hitting themes we've heard since the 1980s. They are all about how #highered has been bad--has failed the reasonable expectations of the economy and society. Us must repent and conform to the surrounding society. /3
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Larry Schweikart
@LarrySchweikart
1) Why "debt/deficits" are NOT a useful campaign issue: first, no one "feels" the debt or deficit. Until or unless it creates hyperinflation, or a default, this will never ever work.

2) We don't have the money NOW for 90% of what Congress is doing . . . but we still do it.
3) Where is the inflation? This is the question of the last 50 years. In the 1970s we briefly had high inflation that could arguably be more accurately assigned to OPEC/fuel costs than to US spending.

This is, BTW, why "Global Warming" just doesn't catch on: People don'e see it.
4) Until or unless you see 10%+ inflation and actually see a national default, the U.S. public will NOT be moved by arguments to Dead Eyes (aka, Occasional Cortex) that "we don't have the money."

Their response---yet to be proven wrong in our lifetimes---is "just print it."
Read 9 tweets
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brad plumer
@bradplumer
This new Nature paper on solar geoengineering and crop yields is quite interesting, although some of the coverage of it has not been great: nature.com/articles/s4158… /1
The basic argument of the paper is that future global warming is expected to be bad for crop yields worldwide and those harms might be difficult to minimize through solar geoengineering alone. /2
Why? If we put aerosol particles into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight into space, that could slow the rise in global temperatures — good for crops. But it could also lead to less sunlight hitting Earth — bad for crops. Those two effects, the study says, balance out. /3
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
@mariliacout
1 / DEPLORABLE WORLD
A story written with no plan or script through nano-chapters using the prompts from #vss365 #AmWriting #SunScribbles #SunWIP #SciFi #Satsplat #BadWordSat
“#Swim steady and firm”, 15 yr old David told the others. They had been prepared. Their go-bags had the clothes approved by Deplorables and they had a small list of safe-houses in the mainland. All the adults in the island died do make their escape possible. #vss365 #AmWriting
In the mainland, it was safer to marry the kids to each other. They would live with their assigned parents according to the fake identity genealogy. What used to be known as the #cycle of abuse had been normalized. They had to blend in and hide in plain sight. #vss365 #AmWriting
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Benedict Guttman-Kenney
@gk_ben
Hey @pauldadams let's thread this! A summary of four working papers on credit cards in N tweets. Especially for those interested in #HouseholdFinance #BehavioralEconomics #debt #RCTs 1/n
1 in 4 UK credit card payments are at or close to the minimum payment (US similar). Minimum payment information on credit cards appears to act as an anchor making consumers more likely to pay at or close to the minimum. How can we help consumers to pay more? 2/n
PAPER 1 - Increasing credit card payments using choice architecture: The case of anchors and prompts... 3/n
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