Let me politely suggest to replace Paul Krugman with a Black American colleague as columnist
@nytimes
. Paul had a great run there for more than 20 years. Let's thank him all for what he has done and move on.
@paulkrugman
: just graciously step down!
#ReplaceKrugman
Yiran Fan, one of our best graduate students, was shot yesterday about three blocks from where I live. One of our best and brightest, won the Lee Prize, was my TA, talked to him much about his research in fall. This is unbelievably sad.
Too bad, but
#blacklivesmatter
per its core organization
@Blklivesmatter
just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of
#defundthepolice
: "We call for a national defunding of police." Suuuure. They knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible Orwell 1984 of saying,
Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, co-founders of the “Weather Underground”, a far-left Marxist and “domestic terrorist” (FBI) group, smiling on the front page of the Chicago Tribune today, and celebrating the illicit encampment at the University of Chicago. This is messed up.
Fast testing Canea kit for
#Covid19
is now available for 30€ or 30$ in German pharmacies. Results within 15 minutes. Why not in the US, what is going on? Or is it available in the US too?
In Germany, covid test centers are everywhere, lines are short, fast tests are free. How so? Per policy: easy to set up & government-subsidized. Then economics does the rest. Easy money! The test shortage disaster in the US was entirely and easily avoidable.
them better. Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say
#defundpolice
and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter. Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don't break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.
Dear
@JustinWolfers
: I truly sympathize with how hard it is to choose words wisely on twitter. Despite our disagreements and whatever the language, I will staunchly defend your right to say what you wish to say. This is what freedom is all about. Respectfully, Harald
Update:
@haralduhlig
has offered what he understands to be an apology.
My reading: It's ass-covering, followed by him speaking on behalf of communities of color in a way he has no business doing.
His response does not allay my concerns about his judgment
oh, it just means funding schools (who isn't in favor of that?!?).But no, the so-called "activists" did not want that. Back to truly "defunding" thus, according to their website. Sigh.
#GeorgeFloyd
and his family really didn't deserve being taken advantage of by flat-earthers
Indeed. Advocating for equity is advocating for communism. So, either Kamala Harris is a communist or she doesn’t know she is advocating for communism. The latter may be worse.
If true, this is a disaster for the free speech University of Chicago. This is rewarding thuggish mob rule and appeasement under pressure, not the result of competing ideas advanced in mutually respected free speech. The students have every right to say what they wish to say.
NEW: Protestors at the University of Chicago say the university has agreed to one of their demands: a “Gaza Scholars at Risk Initiative” that will bring up to eight Palestinian scholars to the university for at least a year.
and creationists. Oh well. Time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all: e.g. policy reform proposals by
@TheDemocrat
and national healing. We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train
The pro-Hamas-camp at the University of Chicago has grown and been fortified over the weekend. The main passage way has been blocked. This is not free speech. This is bullying, this is illegal. The camp needs to be removed immediately: matters are only getting worse.
17 days ago, Feb 27, Italy had 655 confirmed coronavirus cases and 17 deaths ( and probably lax testing ), for 60 mill people. Multiply numbers with around 5 to compare to U.S today. The U.S. got an advance warning of 17 days: let’s use it well. Next 2 weeks will be important.
My tweets in recent days and an old blog post have apparently irritated a lot of people. That was far from my intention: let me apologize for that. Did I choose my words and comparisons wisely? I did not. My apology, once again. Let me also make clear that all these are just
It is deeply irresponsibly and ridiculous statements like those by
@DAcemogluMIT
, which lead to the poisonous political atmosphere today. No, democracy does not end, when a new president gets elected by democratic means: on the contrary. We all need to lower the temperature,
We dodged that bullet because civil society mobilized against him, he was generally incompetent, and he did not have competent loyalists around him. It is different now. The threat is much bigger today:
The UChicago Quad, after the camps have been removed. My praise to Paul Alivisatos for the textbook measured approach: first, let them. Later, warn them. Finally, act. I hope, names were taken, consequences follow and no concessions were made.
Will we see a new global financial crisis? Or will this storm pass? The next few weeks will be interesting. A few remarks. 1. This is not a crisis of illiquidity ( which the Fed knows how to handle ): this is a crisis of insolvency. At SVB, once long term bonds are marked..
Sometimes, economists get it right. March 2022:
@BachmannRudi
,
@ben_moll
,
@MSchularick
and co-authors analyze the consequences of a stop of Russian gas imports. They predict a smaller GDP decline in Germany than many in the politics and media feared,
.
welcome sensible reform. The freedoms we enjoy were so hard to come by. Let us work so that all of us get to enjoy them. Apologies for this lengthy tweet: nuance is hard on Twitter. Perhaps this helps.
These people are desperate for a police that stands with them, supports them, ensures their freedoms. I believe that many in the police wish to do exactly that. They wish to separate themselves from those that violate their oath to protect and serve, and they
IMHO, the appointment of Dr. Lisa Cook to the
#FederalReserve
Board of Governors would be a mistake. The argument needs to be made with sufficient care and with more detail than can be done in a tweet. You find my arguments here . I hope some will read.
Today is my last day as lead editor for the
@JPolEcon
. I was truly fortunate to have worked with an outstanding team of fellow editors and an amazing office: thank you, all! Thanks to all you authors and referees too! You made a difference. I am proud of what we achieved.
BREAKING: The University of North Carolina Board of Governors has just voted to replace DEI with Equality and Nondiscrimination for the whole university system:
Germany: covid fast home tests in many supermarkets, for around three dollars. Great, if you want a test to protect your loved once. This could have been feasible in the US, with good policy.
Prices should be allowed to rise in response to demand, rather than letting some stockpile at low prices and leaving others empty handed. Allow markets to work rather than forbid "price gouging" and making matters worse.
My tweets and the controversy have received some attention in the press. There is an article in the
@nytimes
written by Jim Tankersley
@jimtankersley
and Ben Casselman
@bencasselman
.I have posted the full and unedited interview here
Today at the Free Speech University of Chicago: Jewish students and pro-Palestinian students each making their case in the main Quad. Agree or disagree, but allow them all to be heard. I say this, having zero sympathy for Hamas and their horrific, terrorist attack on Israel.
Sweden managed the
#covid
crisis remarkably well. Check the graph: flat, no new winter wave! Omicron may change that, but still: very impressive. The secret? No lockdowns. No mask requirements. Few restrictions. Good health care system. Achieving herd immunity. Plus vaccines.
Celebrating Bob Lucas with my paper "The Lasting Influence of Robert E. Lucas on Chicago Economics". Working paper versions: (free) and . Published version:
When people drive pickup trucks to smashed stores to clean out merchandise, when people bring tools to pry open cash machines, then this is planned theft, and not about some political cause. I wish
@donlemon
,
@chriscuomo
and other whitewashing journalists would finally wake up.
Bill Gates and Microsoft do not understand Windows computers. It’s not like physics. Will a reboot return my machine to normal, and if not, why not? You won’t get meaningful consensus of Microsoft technicians on your computer problems. But Bill Gates says
I just became aware of the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics,
@JCREcon
, , submissions per . Great idea! Grad students & colleagues: this is your chance. Go replicate, dig into published papers, and publish here.
That "temporary" inflation is now stubbornly persistent and too high. Higher inflation expectations are getting entrenched. Rather than worrying about climate change in 200 years etc., the
#Fed
needs to wake up, do its job and get inflation under control.
It is with profound sadness to hear about the passing of Ed Prescott. He was amazing and unique as a teacher and as a scientist. I learned so much from him. He was generous and kind, and he had a profound influence on me and the entire profession. Rest In Peace, Ed.
RIP Ed Prescott, a giant in macroeconomics over the past 40 years. Whether you think this period marked the right turn in methods or not, undeniable that almost every macro calibration today has its roots in seminal papers like Kydland and Prescott (1982)
For the record, here is my speech today at the meeting of the Council of the Senate of the
#UChicago
, concerning the proposal to create a Department for Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (a link is on ), arguably galvanized by the .
and can live unafraid. All of you do not sympathize with gang warfare, illegal drug sales or looting of stores. The southern part of Chicago suffers from all this in particular, and it pains me deeply. These people are not against the police.
As usual,
@JohnHCochrane
is spot on, throwing cold water on the latest „climate risk is very important for monetary policy!!!“ craze, calling it for what it is: unelected central bankers go „ultra vires“ & impose policies undemocratically. Stop this! Read
BREAKING: Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has eliminated the use of DEI statements in hiring.
Applicants are now asked to submit a “service statement” detailing “efforts to strengthen academic communities, e.g. department, institution, and/or professional societies.”
my views, not pronouncements by the JPE and most certainly not the
@UChicago
or my department: a bastion of free speech, where we disagree all the time and where surely a considerable number of my colleagues passionately disagree with things I said. I said what I said because
Cool paper by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (U Penn) and Charles Jones (Stanford), estimating the
#covid19
dynamics with the popular SIR model: check out their predictions ! Econometricians and economists are good at estimation: virologists, take note!
My take on the proposed firing of tenured professor Joshua Katz
@Princeton
. In short: the board should not go through with it. I agree with the description by
@bariweiss
.
Thank you, Alan Blinder: indeed. The assets of Credit Suisse are around 3/4 of Swiss GDP. Try bailing out that one! Contagion spreads, large deposits are withdrawn instantly, banks retrench.Are we witnessing the beginning of a new world wide financial crisis? Where did we fail?
Princeton University Professor of Economics Alan Blinder: "Credit Suisse is a big, big deal. And they don't know at this point how much damage that's going to do to not just the Swiss economy, but the European"
Thank you,
@TuckerCarlson
, for your reporting on crime in Chicago: it was spot on. I wish that other news outlets had the guts to speak the truth, like you do. via
@YouTube
The
@BeckerFriedman
Institute at the
@UChicago
has launched a Covid-19 web page, with lots of resources already and more to come, . This will be a highly valuable site, going forward! Please advertise and share!
The reality of anti-Asian hate crime: two Asian U Chicago students got killed in Hyde Park this year. Can one hate more than the murderers killing these peaceful scholars? Either way: this is supremely sad. My heart goes out to the families and friends.
neighborhoods are safe, that schools are decent, that opportunities are plenty, that the color of the skin should not matter, that the law is upheld as stated in the constitution, that the police do their job to do so and go protect your rights, that you and your family are free
The passing of Emmanuel Farhi is unbelievably sad, indeed! So shocking, such a loss to our profession. My heartfelt condolences to all who were close to him.
Very sad today as my Harvard Economics colleague Professor Emmanuel Farhi died unexpected yesterday.
His work was very wide ranging, including writing important papers on financial stability.
Here is another pointless, clueless, pompous rant about the supposed failure of economic experts by the journalist
@martinwolf_
. Shouldn't journalists find out about economists and their research and report to the public? Rants are simpler. Sigh.
A cool paper! It looks like the QJE lowers its standards for authors with ties to Harvard and MIT. Not true at the JPE for authors with ties to Chicago.
New IZA DP on home bias in top economics journals:
"... median article quality is lower in the
#QJE
if authors have ties to Harvard and/or MIT than if authors are from other top-10 universities, but higher in the
#JPE
if authors have ties to Chicago."
👉
Lisa Cooks nomination hearing was today. She accused me of “spreading hate” in 2020 and wanted my speech restricted, see screen shot. Why? Was she referring to my tweet back then, where I took the position that defunding the police is absurd. Care to clarify, Lisa Cook?
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.”
#NobelPrize
Those who warned about inflation were right, those of us who downplayed the risks were wrong. But the details remain inconsistent with a simple "too much spending" story
these are difficult, but important matters to speak up about and we all should engage, and not because of my professional expertise. How can one watch what happened to George Floyd and not speak up?
@imbernomics
(as one among the many irritated voices: I thank him for letting
Such a sad day. Bob Lucas, the most important economist in modern macroeconomics, and certainly the most important economist in my life, died today. He was such a deep and honest thinker. He was such a helpful and caring mentor. I owe him so much. Farewell Bob. Thank you.
Cool and beautifully clean paper, solving for the optimal lock-down policy, written by Maryam Farboodi, Gregor Jarosh and Robert Shimer: as
@BeckerFriedman
WP or as part of the
#CEPR
#covid19
series, vol 9
Lots of store signs “Black owned ... don’t”. Store owners apparently assume that looters are also racists, willing to inflict damage on white owners just because of the color of their skin. Looting is wrong. Racism is wrong.
My paper with Pierpaolo Benigno and Linda Schilling on „cryptocurrencies, currency competition, and the impossible trinity“ is available online with open access. Enjoy reading!
It infantilizes people with genuine concerns that should be addressed through civil policy discussion."Thank you
@imbernomics
for these remarks.The concerns are genuine and they are genuine to me.There are many thoughtful and sensible voices on what needs to be done, for example
It turns out, they were right. If anything, they were too pessimistic. Congrats to these authors for an excellent showcase for how good economics based on frontier research can help understand the world. Time for a victory lap, and
1/2 Excellent new research by
@GregWKaplan
,
@ben_moll
and
@glviolante
on the "Pandemics According to HANK". These authors analyze the tradeoffs between prosperity and lives lost for policy options in the current crisis, emphasizing in particular the distributional consequences.
The U of C student Max Solomon Lewis was killed July 1st, . So sad. My heart goes out to the family. Juneteenth:the U of C Provost recommends a keynote by Marxist Angela Davis, , who gleefully endorsed defunding the police. So wrong.
Like
@RepBrianFitz
, I call for the immediate and unconditional surrender of Hamas. It is the fastest way to end the suffering on the West Bank. The
#ceasefire
begins, when Hamas stops firing.
I'm proud to lead this bipartisan resolution calling for the immediate and unconditional surrender of Hamas and condemning their use of human shields in their brutal attacks on innocent Israelis.
Read more:
Faculty at Stanford, Chicago, Texas, Princeton, Wharton and more call for the restoration of academic freedom and merit. Add your name to their growing numbers and sign the Academic Freedom Declaration. Do not let academic freedom DIE!
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." Martin Luther King.
@haralduhlig
@FedericoGanz
You're putting preventing small amounts of looting ahead of everything else. That's a choice. I'm choosing to put the ability of people to choose where and when to protest first. It's a question of values.
Studying the neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic income risk and aggregate risk in which risk sharing is endogenously constrained by one-sided limited commitment, from Yoshiki Ando, Dirk Krueger, and
@haralduhlig
Lisa Cook has been nominated for the Federal Reserve Board. Thus, surely good to know what she stands for. Here is a sample of her taking a stand against free speech and for defunding the police.
Thank you,
@IvanWerning
, for noting the latter. I found the first part comical.I value freedom of thought and expression.The U of C is the stalwart for allowing dissenting opinions.I think the world of
@Simon_Mongey
,and grateful for his disagreement and discussion. Way to go!!
, , . If you read those description carefully, they are largely about truly reforming police. They may actually result in increased funding for the police, to accomplish it all: "defunding" is an odd term
Could we have gotten
#COVID19
#vaccination
since nearly a year ago? It appears so. What are the trade offs here? Are all the lives lost due to going through the required approval steps worth it? Do it again in the future?
The "Defund the Police" craziness has hurt everyone. Finally, people everywhere, including the
@NAACP
of Oakland, speak up against it. In 2020, I was attacked for speaking up against it by
@paulkrugman
,
@SecYellen
, and these signatories . Times change.
Oakland NAACP calls on local elected officials to declare a state of emergency around crime. Almost too many noteworthy lines to choose from:
"Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney's unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who
Is it good journalistic practice and normal for
@NYtimes
to keep changing headlines and contents of previously published stories? Here are two screen shots of the headline for the
@paulkrugman
Oct-22 OpEd: see any differences? I start to wonder what else gets kept revising.
Higher
#inflation
is becoming more persistent, more worrisome. Some claim it is transitory. It is time for the
#Fed
to publicize several scenarios for this year and next. When will they raise rates and by how much? Tell us! Commit to it! Foggy monetary policy is bad policy.
Prigozhin is in Belarus, the Wagner troops „invited“ to go there. It is a 2.5 hour drive from the southern tip of Belarus to Kiev. Is it too crazy to consider that the rebellion was merely theatre and a cover to stage a Wagner group attack on Kiev from Belarus?
reform to the policing system as it appears you do -but the tone you are setting in your discussion is insulting to many (myself included) and dangerous to the profession as it sends signals of hostility to the ideas and people who support them and says they are not welcome here.
12. Janet Yellen and the Biden administration saved SVB and First Republic — why? Perhaps some large depositors were big Dem donors? The Biden admin appears to be corrupt or incompetent: take your pick. Or both. 13. Let’s not use tax payer money to solve this.Too much already.
Shaoxiang's mother today at Rockefeller Chapel: "We ... call for severe punishment for the murderer. ... I strongly urge that the safety of every international student be protected so that the tragedy will not happen again". Moving. So true. Thank you. My heartfelt condolences.
Chicago Tribune:”Alton Spann, 19 … was charged with first-degree murder” of Shaoxiong Zheng.Spann “is on parole and has an ‘extensive’ juvenile record including aggravated battery, carjacking and fleeing police … Spann was in a stolen car.”
@KimFoxx
: please explain that to us!
Andreu Mas-Colell is not only one of the most eminent economists alive, he also has founded the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and served in the Catalan government. An all-around amazing and kind person. His treatment now, described by his son
@AlexMaxPton
is a disgrace.
Normally I would not be posting personal developments on this website, but in this case I have a pressing concern. My dad, Spanish economist Andreu Mas-Colell, is dealing with an incredibly difficult and unjust situation. 1/
Allow me make a bit of advertisement for
@TheFIREorg
, an organization promoting and defending free expression and academic freedom at America's colleges and universities, and that I hope you will support. If you are a faculty member, you can sign up here
As I get this question quite a bit and to clarify: my JPE term ended 06-30-2021, on schedule, as agreed with the board in Feb 2019, after eight years as lead editor and a total of 9 years (a long time!), not as "consequence" of 2020. Still handling all "old" papers in my queue.
Today is my last day as lead editor for the
@JPolEcon
. I was truly fortunate to have worked with an outstanding team of fellow editors and an amazing office: thank you, all! Thanks to all you authors and referees too! You made a difference. I am proud of what we achieved.
was trying to make fun of that radical and untenable view of massively cutting funding of police departments. Wrong words, mea culpa. But we all share the same goal.
To my colleagues, students, neighbors and friends of color. All of you that I have met over the years want that
rest of us, whether paying via collected insurance fees or tax payer money ( the distinction is small, anyways ). 7. Do not be afraid of bank failures. Bad banks die. Good banks will expand. That’s what we want. 8. Regulators need to tell us assets, marked to market, vs…
for that. I am with Rep James Clyburn who "bitterly complained ... about those trying to 'hijack' the swelling movement with calls to defund the policy" (NYT today). I was therefore frustrated with
@Blklivesmatter
, a movement that is sorely needed now and applauded by so many,