JW Mason
@JWMason1
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I'm posting on Bluesky these days.
Joined September 2023
It's kind of incredible how convinced the Biden team are that they can solve their Gaza problem by simply lying about it.
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Dude. Your magazine is called Jacobin. And you posted this on Bastille Day.
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This one I just reproduced myself. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is not the nonsense content, but the fact that the first hit is an AI ripoff site that stole the Onion’s story.
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The fact that J. D. Vance and Ron Klain worked together at a venture capital fund is really a perfect detail for our times. The fact that the fund was called Revolution is a bit much, tho.
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This piece on Bidenomics is @adam_tooze at the top of his form. Read the whole thing, as they say.
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Its remarkable how many economists insist on sticking with intuitions from models where producers are price takers facing increasing marginal costs, no matter how far real economies diverge from that.
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Just sent off the draft of Money and Things to the publisher -- @arjun_jayadev's and my 180,000-word manuscript on the nature of money. Coming next year, knock on wood.
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Price controls are ubiquitous in modern economies. The case of extending them to groceries is based on the extent of market power there. Martin Sandbu is almost the only high-profile economics commentator making these obvious and sensible points.
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Maybe the sharpest criticism of Acemoglu and Robinson that I've seen on here.
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Smart post. US officials point to low margins in Chinese manufacturing as a sign of overcapacity. But isn't an economy with high investment and low margins the best case scenario for those of us who aren't business owners?.
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I have a new piece in Dissent, asking whether we can separate industrial policy from militarism, nationalism and the US-China rivalry. My answer: economically, you can certainly have one without the other; politically, I hope so but am not sure we can.
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Absolutely right. Back in 2016, when Jerry Friedman (and I, and others) argued that the big increase in public spending proposed by Bernie Sanders could have this kind of macroeconomic impact, Krugman, Brad DeLong and others said we were obviously wrong. They should apologize.
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Breaking the bipartisan consensus that there is a zero-sum rivalry between the US and China is going to be one of the most important challenges of the coming years.
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In the first economics class I took as an undergraduate, on day one we had two people on a desert island. On day two we had landlords who owned buildings, tenants living in them, and a government regulating rents. I could never escape the feeling that some steps had been skipped.
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In absolute awe of the student journalists who wrote this comprehensive, unflinching account of Columbia's efforts to suppress student speech, for the campus paper. The world may be f*cked, but the kids are all right.
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This is real, it is something happening in the world. Right now, with the full support opf the United States.
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Elite higher education today: Rather than allow any criticism of Israel, all public discussion will be banned.
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Here's my new Barron's piece, arguing that the rise of China shoud be treated as the very good thing for humanity that it is, and not as a threat to the US. As usual, I added a bit to the blog version that didn't fit in the published one.
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It's hard for me to understand how anyone looks at the experience of the past few years and concludes that the kind of industrial policy being pursued by the US (call it "derisking" if you like) has not been effective.
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Seems like a good occasion to re-up my piece "China's Economic Growth is Good, Actually."
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The business case against AI: Sure, it can replace writers. But it’s not like there’s any money in writing.
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Tulkarm is in the West Bank. Not Gaza, not Lebanon. There's not even the pretense of a war here, just killing for the sake of killing. (Where did that F16 come from, I wonder.).
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This seems to me to be an underappreciated argument in favor of rent control. It's perfectly rational for renters to oppose local improvements if landlords can capture all the windfall gains through higher rents.
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In light of the Harris speech, seems like a good time to re-up this post on why I think price gouging or profiteering is a useful frame for thinking about and managing price increases.
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Perhaps it's foolish to be shocked by this. By I still find it incomprehensible that this paragraph could be published.
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The people who control our productive activity want to burn as much as electricity as possible to run their plagiarism and trading-card machines, while their Chinese peers are focused on producing electric cars that people want to buy. The solution? Don't let people buy the cars.
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This is not a small point, or a gotcha. The lies spread by Eric Levitz (and others) about invented atrocities on 10/6 had real consequences.
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One wonders how different these number might look if Democratic leadership had challenged the narrative of a crisis at the border, instead of trying to co-opt it.
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Here's a new, rather long blog post on money, interest rates, and how economics should be, based on a talk I gave at the Political Economy of Finance Summer School at Brown earlier this week.
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We may not be able to stop Congress from inviting mass murderers to the Capitol, but we can at least make it clear that they don't speak for all of us. The amazing @LauraTanenbaum is somewhere in that crowd.
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One way of making sense of this is that when economists talk about inflation, they mean the change in prices over the past 12 (or sometimes 3) months, but people experience inflation as the change in price over some longer period. It's not obvious why 12 months is correct.
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This is one of maybe two or three most important things to get right in macro.
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Best account I have seen on the violent suppression of student protests at City College last night.
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This is not just score settling. There is a very important point of theory at stake. What Krugman is saying here is that a *temporary* stimulus has had a *permanent* effect on output. That is certainly not with his textbook says. I wonder if he plans to revise it.
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Between 1988 and 2018, Chinese households at every point in the income distribution saw annual income growth 5-6 points higher than households in the US, Russia or France.
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Jodi Dean, a tenured professor at Hobart and William Smith College, has been suspended from teaching because of a political opinion she posted. Tis is an obvious and blatant violation of the most basic principles of academic freedom.
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It's striking how much the focus of centrist criticism of Le Pen and the RN is not on how they will be too harsh to immigrants and Muslims, but on how they will be too generous to French workers.
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My newest piece in Barron's. As we debate tariffs on China, let's not forget that Chinese industrialization has led to a much more equal global distribution of income. (Not paywalled - that's just an ad.)
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This is something I'm struggling with as I read Brett Christophers' book, much of which I quite like. The book is framed as an answer to the question of why the transition to renewable electricity is failing. But the standard it's falling short of is never spelled out.
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What a fantastic graph from @JosephPolitano, showing both how thoroughly Keynesian the economy is in normal times, and how exceptional the pandemic period was. (I didn't even know this survey existed.)
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People talk as though "prices are a little higher than they were a year ago" is an economic fact, while "prices are a lot higher than they were several years ago" is a subjective feeling. But they are both equally factual.
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The point of this picture is that the inflation problem in the US is basically solved. But there's also a larger point: There's no such thing as "the" inflation rate. There are just different prices changing in different ways, and a range of plausible ways to summarize them.
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I'm still puzzled why the change in prices over the 12 months is the central concern of macroeconomic policy, worth throwing millions of people out of work for. While the change in prices over the past 24 or 36 months is irrelevant, meaningless, not worth thinking about at all.
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Next Wednesday at 7pm, the one and only @IsabellaMWeber will be speaking at John Jay College (where I teach) in midtown Manhattan. I think this talk is going to be packed, so if yoiu want a seat, better get there early!
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When a government becomes nothing but a debt-collection agency for foreign creditors, it's hard to see how it can continue to exist as a sovereign state.
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This is a rule I'd love to see in the US. While gerrymandering is a serious problem, another big problem is that with arbitrary, frequently redrawn districts people simply don't know what district they are in, or who their representatives are.
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I suppose where I break ranks with many of my friends on the liberal left is that if embracing the rivalry with China is the price for getting green industrial policy, I think the price is too high, it's not worth it.
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Here is the text of a long talk on Keynes and socialism that I gave in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It also functions as a kind of manifesto for the book on money that @arjun_jayadev and I are almost finished with.
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100%. I personally think that the current US turn toward protectionism is a bad thing for the world and should be opposed. But free-trade dogmatism is not the right place to oppose it from.
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I think this is correct, and important. Better to think of "Democrats" simply as a category of elected officials, like "county legislators" or "district attorneys.".
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I can't get over the fact that this is the response to a political protest on an American campus in 2024. And not, you know, a still from a movie or videogame about a near-future dystopian police state.
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Glad to see this piece on the New Popular Front from Piketty and Cagé. While most attention has been focused on the gains by the right, the success of a unified left with an ambitious program seems like just as an important story from the French elections.
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My favorite part of Dylan Matthews new back-to-the-90s bit of deficit scaremongering in Vox is this bit, on how we should focus on the debt since all the problems have been fixed now. That's a top tier comfortable middle-aged pundit move there.
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Here are some macroeconomics teaching notes, on productivity, employment and wages. The content is mostly consistent with what you'd get in any intermediate macro textbook. But the framing is different, and I think better gets at the questions at stake.
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The central fact about the situation is that the Biden-Harris administration has created a one-way bet for Netanyahu. They have guaranteed that he faces no downside to escalating the war.
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Important point. It's always seemed to me that economists focus too myopically on the role of prices in maintaining economic coherence, as opposed to buffer stocks and market makers.
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A lot of the confusion here comes from mixing up national-accounts reasoning with balance-sheet reasoning. Calling lower desired consumption "higher ex ante savings" is confusing but not wrong. But cross-border financial flows have no connection with saving whatsoever.
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It's striking how many of the mainstream responses to Isabella Weber have been like this: Not debating her arguments but trying to exclude her from the conversation entirely.
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This study has interesting findings on public support for price regulation. But the authors sure seem to have some funny ideas about democracy.
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This is a very important fact about the world, with quite far-reaching implications, I think.
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I've thought for a while that one big reason monetary policy doesn't work (anymore?) as the main tool of demand management, is that asset prices respond much more sterongly to the policy rate than real activity does.
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This is an admirable letter. And, a reminder that the suppression of protests is not being done by universities as such, but by specific administrators. The faculty have as much claim to speak for "the university" as the President or Trustees do. Whatever the law may say.
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I've mostly dropped out of the inflation debate over the past few months. Catching up now by reading @JosephPolitano and @employamerica. And what I'm learning is that the case that inflation was entirely a matter of transitory supply disruptions is even stronger than I'd thought.
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Just listened to @DougHenwood's interview of @jwdwerner of the Quincy Institute on US-China relations. A breath of fresh air and common sense in the midst of so much jingoistic hysteria.
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I wonder if all of those objecting to limits on food price increases also object to capping the price of insulin at $35. And if not, why not?.
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As I understand it, this kind of decentralized enforcement was critical to the success of WWII price controls.
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Even if, like me, you're more inclined toward a both-and, all-of-the-above response to current housing debates, you'll learn a tremendous amount from this thoughtful and deeply informed critique of the YIMBY position.
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The striking thing about AI, like crypto, is that it is a way of organizing the endless expansion of computer power for its own sake.
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There is one foreign government that is clearly interfering in US elections. And it’s not Russia.
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I have a new piece in Barron's, asking if people's unhappiness with the economy is all due to partisan bias and bad media coverage, or if there might be some good reasons for it.
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More to the point: Biden’s lies about seeing (nonexistent) pictures of beheaded Israeli children are no more forgivable than Trump’s lies in last night’s debate.
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Biden, Blinken and Sullivan are the dudes pressing the keys into the dead-drunk guy's hands saying, "sure, come on, you can drive fine." They're the crowd who keep yelling "fight! fight! fight!", whether their buddy is about to stomp someone's head in or to get stomped himself.
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If you are angry about the Chinese model of industrialization, if you think it is unfair, if you think it is something that demands retaliation from the US, what you are against is the largest rise in poor people's living standards over one generation in human history.
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Argentine province responds to austerity by planning to issue its own quasi-currency. No strong views on the merits of this, but surprised not to have heard more about it.
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If you took his formulation seriously, you would conclude that price changes are impossible in a market economy. Any change in price will, apparently, cause supply curves to shift until the old price is restored. Obviously he doesn't really think that. He is just bullshitting.
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This is the third time I have used Sven Beckerts' Empire of Cotton as the central reading for my economic history class. And I have to say, every time I am more impressed by it - especially compared with other big histories of capitalism that I've tried.
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One of the more striking things about economics is how little connection there is between mainstream policy views and orthodox theory.
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You could make a case that the central premise of Wealth of Nations is that production takes place under conditions of increasing returns.
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I'm nervous about posting this, but: I'm coming to think that opposition to congestion pricing is a sign it's the wrong tool to reduce driving. Seems at least plausible that arguments against carbon taxes as the main decarbonization tool apply to this particular form of them too.
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Macron called the election for “clarification.” Which is working - it is now clearer where people stand.
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"Anti-trust as allocator of coordination rights" is on the very short list of articles that have completely reshaped my thinking on something, such that it's now my default starting point on the topic. Super excited to read this one.
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Outstanding event. We desperately need more conversations like this.
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Not relevant to the specific point being made here, but this is in general a much better way to contextualize historical dollar figures than the usual approach using price indexes.
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The question around price-gouging has never been whether the government should limit price increases across the board, but whether it should limit price increases that are disproportionate to changes in costs. It's amazing how hard people work to avoid seeing this distinction.
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One way of looking at the work by Isabella Weber and her students on systemically important prices, is that it is formalizing and substantiating this insight.
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I admit I don't get Matt's point here. If it would be possible for a government-owned grocry store to operate successfully while limiting price increases, then it should be possible for private grocery stores to do so also.
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I'm seeing versions of this a lot in my feed, and I have to admit it confuses me. Isn't China part of the world? Does progress on transition to renewables only count if all countries are moving at exactly the same pace?.
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