1. Lars Christensen is now available to do public speaking. Please hire him.
2. Speaking of which, Warren Buffett needs to spend more time reading market monetarist blogs. But at least he understands labor economics.
3. Ed Dolan has the wrong test of fiscal policy. He includes lots of eurozone countries for which monetary offset does not apply. Numerous researchers who have done the correct regression (for countries with an independent monetary policy) find no effect.
4. David Beckworth says Fed policy contributed to the housing boom. My view is that a counterfactual of 5% NGDP growth, level targeting, would have seen a smaller housing boom, but only slightly smaller.
5. Marcus Nunes sent me a long NYT article on the question of whether the Fed should raise its inflation target to 4%. Space devoted to the level targeting option? Zero. Space devoted to the NGDP targeting option? Zero.
6. David Levey pointed me to another British blog advocating NGDPLT, by Anton Howes.
7. On June 18, 2008, the Fed thought 2009 would be a pretty decent year. At the time they knew full well that the US housing market was in a horrific free fall. What they didn’t know is that they had set their interest rate target at a level that would soon produce the biggest fall in NGDP since the 1930s. It began within days of this forecast, long before Lehman failed.
8. I wish journals like the AER had more articles similar to this Scott Alexander blog post. And this excellent follow-up is quite, well . . . depressing.
9. Are Texas and Arizona dramatically less racist than New York and New Jersey? Maybe. But I wouldn’t draw that conclusion based on this study.
10. Are you a white or black person, and feel like you are a nobody. Go to China and get involved in real estate promotion. This very amusing 6 minute video shows how.
11. Scientists like experiments. Businesses likes experiments. Artists like experiments. Governments hate experiments. More than 200 governments control over 50 million square miles of land. Many of the governments are pathetic, and much of the land is useless. But they won’t allow even 5 square miles for an experiment in governance. Not one of them. Not even the worst of them. Not even on worthless land. Paul Romer doesn’t seem that scary to me. What are they afraid of?
Yes, I know, politics isn’t about good governance.
12. Speaking of which, lots of people (including me) like to pose as rebels, but the blogosphere contains only one true radical. Everyone else is struggling to overcome homo sapien bias.