First: I must say that if I belonged to the Chinese Communist Party, I would not be at all confident about what the future is going to bring... 1/
...Economist: The Confidence of China’s Communist Party Is Striking: ’Since the Ming dynasty, Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.” An earthier variant run... <economist.com/china/2021/10/…> 2/
...One Audio: Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: ‘Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. In India, Iran and Egypt, most women remain secluded and surveilled, with few friends. Chinese women work <draliceevans.com/post/ten-thous…> <podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/roc…>... 3/
...Tim Noah: Tragedy Kept Alan Krueger From Claiming a Nobel Prize, but He’s Not Forgotten: ‘Paying tribute to the late economist who, with David Card, changed America’s mind about the minimum wage… <newrepublic.com/article/163994…> 5/
...Angelica Oung: ’Are we about to see the Cultural Revolution 2.0 in China?…. Wen Jiabao… criticized the Cultural Revolution… veiled commentary… China is going the wrong way… using whatever political capital he has… to push… <github.com/braddelong/pub…> 6/
...Dan Alpert: ’“There’s No Great Resignation” My colorfully illustrated data THREAD on the U.S. labor situation, demonstrating why post-pandemic shortages - like goods supply-chain disruptions - will prove temporary… threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453129… 7/
...Sam Ro: There are worse things than inflation: 'Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein explains…
8/
...Jeet Heer: Podcast: David Shor’s “Popularism”: ‘Doug Bell on the promise and peril of poll-based politicking…. Ezra Klein’s recent profile of polling guru David Shor has sparked a flurry of commentary on the idea of “popularism.” Klein sums up popularism... 9/
...Matthew Yglesias: The Inflation Situation Is Pretty Simple: ‘Supply-chain problems are overhyped—we did a lot of stimulus, and people are buying a lot of stuff… 10/
...Paragraphs: Todd Gitlin & al.: An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy: ‘Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse…
...Alan B. Krueger: Reflections on Dwindling Worker Bargaining Power & Monetary Policy: ‘Declining competition and worker bargaining power can help explain the puzzle du jour of relatively weak wage growth despite historically low unemployment… <kansascityfed.org/documents/6984…> 12/
...Janeway Institute: Launch Event: ’The Weslie and William Janeway Institute for Economics will be officially launched on Tuesday October 19th 2021, 16:00–17:45pm (BST-UK) with a series of opening speeches and followed by a panel conversation on t… <janeway.econ.cam.ac.uk/event/janeway-…> 13/
...David R. MacIver: How to Make Easy Decisions: ‘I should warn you that following this advice may transform you into a strange and alien creature. I think this is one of my more disconcerting traits for others, because fully embracing it causes you to stop doing a lot of ... 14/
...Kevin Munger: It’s About Time: ‘The wag will say “bruh this argument is old af, have you even read Plato’s Phaedrus? Socrates said that writing sucks because it will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their... 15/END
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"I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan.... After the Towers were destroyed… one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money?... Some... 2/
[Graeber cont.]: "...spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned… desperately carting off tons of bullion…. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators…. The truly remarkable thing… is... 3/
First: Science fiction. But the science is history. That is, as Paul Krugman observes, what made Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series so striking and thought-provoking: Paul Krugman: Introduction to... 1/
... “Foundation”: ‘how do the ‘Foundation’ novels lok to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever…<web.archive.org/web/2019091808…> 2/
...One Video: Michelle Holder & Lisa Cook: Child Care & the Economy: ‘A clip from… In Conversation at Equitable Growth 2021: Evidence for a Stronger Economic Future… <> 3/
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-10-28 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to note & remember... 1/
...First: Alice Evans sends us to the very good Arash Nekoei & Fabian Sinn: The Origin of the Gender Gap: it is a count of records from the Human Biographical Record, finding that throughout history—save for Egypt in antiquity—only about 10% of women as men have records... 2/
... coming down to us that grant them a place in Human Biographical Record entries, with no significant changes over the millennia. While the 1900s do show the highest female share of entries since the -2000s, the difference is not (yet) very large... 3/
Herbert Hoover published his memoirs in 1952. So perhaps there is some retrospective rightward drift in his recollections of what he... 1/
... thought back in 1928—but only some: he did give the anti-collectivist speech that he quotes at length here.
And yet Al Smith’s pre-Great Depression Democratic Party was not at all a “collectivist” party. As Hoover points out, it was the Bourbon aristocracy of the... 2/
...South combined with the urban machines and with agrarian, consumer, and labor anti-monopolist groups. Labor unions and consumer and farming cooperatives were as far as they went toward “collectivism”. The socialists of the day were Eugene V. Debs—Robert La Follette—... 3/
From 1937, from Winston Churchill's book _Great Contemporaries_:
"When the usurper and tyrant is reduced to literary controversy, when the Communist instead of bombs produces effusions for... 1/
... the capitalist Press, when the refugee War Lord fights his battles over again, and the discharged executioner becomes chatty and garrulous at his fireside, we may rejoice in the signs that better days are come.
I have before me an article that Leon Trotsky alias... 2/
...Bronstein1 has recently contributed to John o’ London’s Weekly2 in which he deals with my descriptions of Lenin, with the Allied Intervention in Russia, with Lord Birkenhead and other suggestive topics. He has written this article from his exile in Turkey while... 3/
Key Insights: Paul Feyerabend was right—science is whatever scientists do: anything goes. But what healthy sciences that... 1/
...survive and flourish and good scientists do is put first and foremost discovering what actually is and making theories to understand reality. So Kuhn and Popper are also right.
2. Economics has not been much of a science. But this Card, Angrist, Imbens—and Krueger—... 2/
...Nobel Prize marks a very big possible improvement in this respect.
3. Keep at it! Keep doing your work no matter the brickbats, and you may, someday, look back and recognize that you have changed the world.
4. Pets are good: they drive you to “become the person your... 3/