JANUARY 22 2016

Olivier Blanchard, PIIE: The US Phillips Curve: Back to the 60s? Low unemployment still pushes inflation up; high unemployment pushes it down. Put another way, the US Phillips curve is alive. (I wish I could say “alive and well,” but it would be an overstatement: The relation has never been very tight.)The slope of the Phillips curve, i.e., the effect of the unemployment rate on inflation given expected inflation, has substantially declined. But the decline dates back to the 1980s rather than to the crisis. There is no evidence of a further decline during the crisis.

Robert J. Shiller, Project Syndicate: Economists on the Refugee Path. As President of the American Economic Association for 2016, I felt a moral obligation to use our annual meeting earlier this month as a setting in which to bring attention to serious economic problems. And the refugee crisis, whatever else it may be, is an economic problem. But a dearth of papers addressing it had been submitted to the meeting. So I decided to create a session entitled Sixty Million Refugees, and invited some of our discipline’s most distinguished scholars on migration. I asked them to describe the dimensions of the refugee problem in economic terms, and to propose some sensible policies to address it.

Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect: The New Inequality Debate. More and more mainstream economists have lately discovered a phenomenon that their discipline too often assumes away. They have discovered power. And this fundamentally changes the nature of the debate about inequality.

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist: The price of being female. Does a dollar in my pocket buy more than a dollar in my wife’s? It seems so, according to a report released just before Christmas by New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs, which was much covered in the US media. The DCA report found that men often paid less for clothes and items such as razor blades and shampoo. Even boys’ toys are cheaper than those aimed at girls. The report led with a striking example from a department store website: while a red “My 1st Scooter Sport” costs $24.99, a pink “My 1st Scooter Girls Sparkle” is twice as much. Beneath the paint job, the products appear to be identical — surely glitter cannot be that expensive?

Adam Ozimek, Moodys: Can Economics Change Your Mind? Economics is sometimes dismissed as more art than science. In this skeptical view, economists and those who read economics are locked into ideologically motivated beliefs—liberals versus conservatives, for example—and just pick whatever empirical evidence supports those pre-conceived positions. I say this is wrong and solid empirical evidence, even of the complicated econometric sort, changes plenty of minds. For one thing, it's changed my mind. Work from David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson has convinced me that in some local areas the job losses from free trade can be substantial, and that these communities have been slower to adjust than I expected. Importantly, the study is not simple and utilizes instrumental variables, representing the kind of econometrics that skeptics think can't convince anyone.

MIT Technology Review: How an AI Algorithm Learned to Write Political Speeches. The process of generating speeches automatically follows from this. Kassarnig begins by telling the algorithm what type of speech it is supposed to write—whether for Democrats or Republicans. The algorithm then explore the 6-gram database for that category to find the entire set of 5-grams that have been used to start one of these speeches. The algorithm then chooses one of these 5-grams at random to start its speech. It then chooses the next word from all those that can follow this 5-gram. “Then the system starts to predict word after word until it predicts the end of the speech,” he says.