monetary policy

Bernanke on monetary policy and inequality by Steve Randy Waldman

James Bullard came out for NGDP path level targeting.

Clive Crook came out for helicopter drops.

Game of Thrones

Game Of Thrones (experts): “Hardhome”

Game Of Thrones (newbies): “Hardhome”

Karsi the wildling mother was on Borgen!

Game of Thrones

Is Game of Thrones all about the war between Varys and Littlefinger? Charlie Jane Anders

"Welcome to the lefthand path."

AV Club reviews Silicon Valley, "Adult Content."

Podemos

Spain’s Local Election Results Reshape Political Landscape

MADRID — Ada Colau, 41, was not even born when Manuela Carmena, 71, joined Spain’s underground Communist party and started her legal career by attacking labor restrictions imposed by Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator. 

But even if separated by a generation, Ms. Colau and Ms. Carmena both found themselves claiming similar left-wing victories by upstart candidates over Spain’s political establishment, after Sunday’s regional and municipal elections.

Mathiness

Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth by Paul M. Rome

Protecting the Norms of Science in Economics by Paul Romer

Tony Yates's thoughts

How 'Mathiness' Made Me Jaded About Economics by Noah Smith

Beating dead horses by Ryan Decker

inequality

Krugman and Bob Solow discuss Tony Atkinson and his new book on inequality.

Game of Thrones

Finn Jones who plays Loras Tyrell tweets with fans:

"nothing would give Loras or the tyrells more pleasure - to eradicate the snide Lannisters from the power..

..they are the "1percenters" of Westeros - they must be abolished."

Blade Runner sequel

Ryan Gosling might star in the Blade Runner sequel

AV Club reviews Game of Thrones

AV Club reviews Game Of Thrones (experts): “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”

AV Club reviews Game Of Thrones (newbies): “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”

Mad Max: Fury Road

Also, his guitar is a flamethrower.

Blur - Coffee and TV

Ken MacLeod seminar at Crooked Timber

Ken MacLeod responds

Rationalism and the True Knowledge by Henry Farrell

Helical Construction in the Work of Ken MacLeod by Joe Walton

Games, simulation, difference and insignificance in The Restoration Game & The Human Front by Sumana Harihareswara

“The free development of each is the condition of the war of all against all”: Some Paths to the True Knowledge by Cosma Shalizi

And This, Too, Is a Romance by Farah Mendlesohn

Ken MacLeod Seminar

protocol and Bitcoin

Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency

Via DeLong

Weimar, Nazis, Social Democrats and Communists

The National Socialists as Conservative Revolutionaries by John Holbo

So you get in a position where there is a kind of two-dimensional struggle: left-right/inside-outside. The Social Democrats were now ‘inside’, the new core of the so-called Weimar coalition that held power through the 20’s. The traditional, Wilhelmine conservative forces were still insiders, by any reasonable calculation. They had tremendous social and institutional leverage everywhere – not to mention most of the money – but they couldn’t compete electorally for a time. Some really strange stuff happened. Some of the most vicious in-fighting was on the left, especially between the social democrats and the communists, starting right in 1918.

From the balcony of the Reichstag building, the SPD leader Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a German Republic. A couple of hundred meters away, from the balcony of the royal palace, the famed radical socialist and antiwar activist Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a socialist republic. Ebert [a social democrat who didn’t like the suddenness of it all] was furious. He discounted Liebknecht, recently released from the kaiser’s jails, as a wild radical who might just as well have languished longer in prison. But Scheidemann was his close colleague, and no recognized body, no government, not even a political party, had authorized the proclamation of a republic. There had not even been a discussion. (Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, p. 19)

The Social Democrats where forever fighting with the communists, after that. So, on the one hand, the SD’s were solidifying a grand coalition with more centrist parties, proclaiming women’s rights, a free press, freedom of religion, an expanded welfare state; on the other hand, they were forced to use the proto-Nazi Freikorps to put down the Spartacist League, leading to the murders of Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Forced because they literally had no police/military alternative. Right-wing paramilitaries were the only available muscle. The SD’s had to work with the powers-that-still-were. Obviously the correct conclusion to draw is not that the SD’s were really right-wingers themselves – or that the Freikorps had left-wing sympathies. Each group tried to use the other. The SD’s wanted to save the Weimar Republic, by any means necessary. The Freikorps wanted to murder communists and gain the sort of legitimacy that might allow them, eventually, to overthrow the Republic – to whose existence they were not reconciled.

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Sort of like Cersei arming the Sparrows and bringing back the Faith Militant who turn on her.

Baker reviews Bernstein

The Reconnection Agenda: The Fun and Easy Route to Broadly Shared Prosperity by Dan Baker

Fed Fail

Yet by the standard of the pre-2007 period we have a depressed level and anemic growth, combined with acceptance of these as the new normal. Thus the North Atlantic is on track to have thrown away 10% of their potential wealth. And there have been insufficient changes in financial-sector regulation or in automatic stabilizers or in other institutions to keep the North Atlantic from once again developing the vulnerabilities it turned out to have in 2007.

DeLong Speech

Guardians of the Galaxy

Peter Quill's Walkman held up remarkably well.

Bob Solow

Bob Solow on rents and decoupling of productivity and wages by Branko Milanovic

Needed: New Economic Frameworks for a Disappointing New Normal by Brad DeLong

Krugman and PGL

The case for cuts was a lie. Why does Britain still believe it? The austerity delusion by Paul Krugman

Lowballing Estimates of Potential Output by ProGrowthLiberal