Economics & Marginalia: April 16, 2021

Hi all,

This week has rushed by in the blink of an eye, despite spending far more of my time awake and holding a restless baby than asleep at night. You’d imagine that all those extra minutes would make for the slow passing of time, but instead they seem to have compressed time into essentially two memories: woozily sitting at my desk and listening to pumping rap music to keep me awake, and desperately sitting next to a crib singing Navigator for the 19^th time that night (my son’s lullaby of choice: he’s too young for cheap talk so this isn’t declared interest, but reflects that it is by far the most successful song for lulling him to sleep. I wonder, when he discovers The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash independently in his late teens, as all teenagers should, if the song will still make him sleepy?) Meanwhile, my coding jam this week has been What’s My Name? by DMX – the line “we gonna get to the bottom of this s**t if it takes all night” is my life every time I open an R script after more than a week away from it. In the moments between X and Shane MacGowan, it’s been a good week for economics writing, if my addled brain understood any of what I read…

1. Via my ex-colleague Huw, this LRB long-read by Adam Tooze about the intellectual evolution of Paul Krugman is absolutely brilliant. Wide-ranging and provocative, it weaves together many strands: a potted intellectual history of macroeconomics, primarily focusing on its evolution since the 1970s, but dropping back to the 1940s and ‘30s on occasion; an account (contestable, no doubt) of US economic policymaking over the last decade or two, drawing in threads from global economic history; and a commentary on the current state of American politics, and in particular the disruption of the traditional forces that have proscribed the economic policy space there. Michal Kalecki, one of my favourite economists, though sadly now little-read, makes an unexpected appearance: I was not aware of his role in Krugman’s intellectual evolution. But the cast of characters is wide, as is the economics it touches upon. Hugely, hugely recommended. And to give a little symmetry, this week Krugman published an account of the intellectual evolution of Robert Mundell, also well worth reading.

2. And while we’re talking about iconic figures, here are three: Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. NPR watch 9 to 5 and report on how the world has changed since it was made. If you’ve never seen it, first stop reading this email and go straight to your nearest streaming service. Now you’ve finished it, how you think about it probably depends at least a little on where in the world you are. In the UK you probably think it was ahead of its time, successfully predicting many innovations that have improved the workplace, particularly for women, if a little optimistic about the widespread provision of workplace-based childcare or the prospects for equal pay. But if you’re in the US you would be forgiven for asking when the utopia Dolly and co. might arrive: flexible working, paid maternity leave, sick leave and so on. Things have actually gotten worse, not better (transcript). By the way, did you know Dolly has written a sequel to her song, 9 to 5? It’s called 5 to 9 and it’s about all the unpaid work women do on top of their paid jobs. As ever, Dolly gets it right.

3. And while we’re discussing the iconic figures, Angus Deaton has filed his final Letter from America. As it has always been, it is personal and interesting, and full of reflections on economics past and present, some of which will no doubt inspire disagreement. He worries that the big journals are nudging the discipline towards an ‘American in-breeding’, a fear I think is largely justified (and on which the ship has largely sailed); and he gets a good few digs at Trump in, too. His first Letter, much shorter, is about Alan Krueger and David Card’s now-seminal work on minimum wages, and the attacks it had to weather, hard to remember now that the work is economic canon.  

4. And another milestone for an economic institution: the Development Impact blog has turned 10, and celebrates with a new logo (something I think Seema Jayachandran has long been campaigning for). I’ve already tweeted this, but DI is the best economics blog out there, and their greatest hits post confirms this: so many of the posts they mention I don’t even need to click through – I’ve read them so often that I know exactly what they refer to. Another ten years, please!

5. Tim Harford on what we’ve learnt from one year of the pandemic, giving due credit to the much-maligned Imperial modelling of the pandemic’s likely impact. As he points out, much, including what was rubbished, has been largely borne out.

6. Rachel Heath and co-authors look at the impact of the post-Rana Plaza collapse reforms on workers in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry, and find a complex picture. They discover that working conditions did indeed improve after the reforms, but their effects in other ways have been less clearly positive: wages are demonstrating a long-term decline, and so has the likelihood of formal contracting. It isn’t clear what the overall welfare effect is here – but the complexity uncovered is itself an important result.  

7. Finally, Michael Spitzer’s forthcoming book about the relationship between humanity and music looks amazing, and this excerpt draws the links between Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Mozart; the universality of emotion evoked by Japanese flute music, and the astonishing global spread of Gangnam Style – which of course, sent me down a rabbit hole of K-Pop videos. None of them are anywhere as good as Psy, though, and I’m afraid that my son has now heard Gangnam Style about 300 times and is still not tired of it. Still, at least I’ve avoided getting him hooked on DMX yet.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R