Sunday, December 30, 2018

Wrap Up for December 2018

"Cities that suffered manufacturing job losses decades ago are now grappling with the problem of fewer opportunities for white-collar employees such as managers, lawyers, bankers and accountants...roughly a third of major U.S. metro areas have lost a greater percentage of white-collar jobs than blue-collar jobs."

"For the first time in history, America is seeing its budget deficit rise dramatically higher during a period of peace and prosperity." "The current situation  is unusual because the deficit has been soaring dramatically higher even as unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since the 1960s (3.7 percent)."

Paul Romer re education: "We always have to be careful not to treat this as a perfect information competitive market."

"Should the Fed purchase Treasuries only?"

What happened to enthusiasm for start-ups?

Who is willing to work longer hours when the return to work declines?

"The key is to avoid favoring one particular transportation choice over others."

are millennials different?

"Empowering people to lay out their own space led to happier, more productive workers." And sometimes, places which appear to "suffer" from age or benign neglect, are the places where the best ideas happen.

How long before the interstate highway system begins to sputter?

A look at the last decade
"With surprising frankness, high officials at the Fed and other central banks have acknowledged that they simply don't know what the link between unemployment and inflation looks like today."

Success turns out to be more likely, when we embrace the state of being stuck.

Paul Romer, Nobel Prize lecture "On the possibility of progress"

Measures of the money stock should be included in future monetary decisions.

Almost half of West Virginia's budget is dedicated to K-12 education.

"Both free markets and property rights are key principles of classical liberalism, and they are in conflict."

The exploratory mode of attention can connect us to a deeper sense of purpose.

Spending on TANF has been falling since its creation in 1996.

Bloomberg's best books of 2018. There's lots of good non fiction this year.

The road to bipolarity is already being traveled.

Arnold Kling: Memoirs of a Would-be Macroeconomist

Vox on China: Was the wrong aggregate production approach being used? Factor costs and mobility vary widely in different industries.

"If we diagnose our anger problem as merely a Trump problem, we'll be sorely disappointed when he eventually departs public life and we remain enraged."

The "five L" headwinds confronting homebuilders: labour, lots, lending, lumber, local regulations.

How does the deceleration of China's growth rate compare to South Korea?

The principle of knowledge relatedness: "Economies are more likely to enter an activity when they are in presence of related activities."

Attempts to overturn globalization, are no solution for existing inequalities.

Spaced repetition can change the forgetting curve.

Fertility losses are a trend which "is shared with many industrialized nations".

Culture as an emergent order.

Monetary policy is not currently in a good place with monetary theory

"If we spend all of our time looking over our shoulders for killer robots, that means we are not looking ahead to discern the outcomes we might actually want."

Forecasting as an antidote to political tribalism.

Musings on a meritocratic endgame.

"We are heading toward the greatest housing problems for low-income people since the Great Depression..."

"It took the United States 193 years to accumulate its first trillion dollars of federal debt. We will add that much in the current fiscal year alone."

Intergenerational wealth transmission.

A short story about the U.S. economy since World War 2.

What makes this slowdown feel so different from other slowdowns?

Africa's supply chain faces many challenges.

Scott Sumner suggests that behavioral economics not be overemphasized in relation to core concepts. John Cochrane agrees and provides some additional examples.

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