DECEMBER 1 2016

Joel Mokyr, Project Syndicate: Is Our Economic Future Behind Us? In fact, pessimism has reigned over economists’ outlooks for centuries. In 1830, the British Whig historian Thomas Macaulay observed that, “[i]n every age, everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation.” Why, he asked, do people expect “nothing but deterioration”? Soon, Macaulay’s perspective was vindicated by the dawn of the railway age. Transformative advances in steel, chemicals, electricity, and engineering soon followed. When it comes to our technological future, I would expect a similar outcome. Indeed, I would go so far as to say, “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Technological advances will create a tailwind of hurricane-like proportions to the world’s most advanced economies.

Robert J. Shiller, Economic View: Trump, and Great Business Ideas for America. A businessman with a lifetime of experience in management has been elected president of the United States. Donald J. Trump’s administration may be viewed as an experiment — an opportunity to discover whether one particular businessman’s perspective and skills will be assets in governing a nation. A business-oriented president could be helpful in this intellectual world, too, by taking actions like doubling the budget for the National Science Foundation, which was created in 1950 when Harry S. Truman was president, and infusing the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities with more cash. In the best of outcomes, Mr. Trump will find a way to live up to this opportunity in the coming years, carefully fulfilling a promise to bring in the “best and most serious people” in the business community rather than the most loyal.

Eduardo Porter, NYT: Earth Isn’t Doomed Yet. The Climate Could Survive Trump Policies. It’s certainly possible that a Trump administration will drop the Clean Power Plan and renege on the Paris accord. But as long as it keeps the nation’s nuclear power plants online, continues tax incentives for wind and solar energy and stays out of the way of the shale energy revolution, the U.S. might outperform the commitments that the Obama administration made in Paris. For all his promises to bring back coal jobs in Appalachia, Mr. Trump might be drawn in a different direction by his own objectives of promoting natural gas and achieving energy independence. If he gives those goals high priority, he could well end up pursuing policies that would ultimately lower carbon emissions.

Justin Fox, Bloomberg: From Peak Oil to Peak Oil Demand in Just Nine Years. Simon Henry, the chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell, recently predicted a demand peak "between five and 15 years hence.” And as Bloomberg's Javier Blas and Laura Blewitt pointed out last week, even the IEA thinks that demand from passenger cars, long the biggest users of oil, has already peaked. So that's pretty exciting! The peaking of oil demand would mark a major historic turning point.

Ted Nordhaus,  Jessica Lovering, The Breakthrogh: Does Climate Policy Matter? The results as elaborated below have been decidedly mixed. For the most part, emissions signals from climate policies have consistently been overwhelmed by exogenous macro-economic and technological developments. The impact of climate policies has proven difficult to disentangle from other emissions drivers such as population growth, economic expansions and recessions, the collapse of the former Soviet Union, German reunification, the shale revolution in the United States and the shuttering of large nuclear fleets in Japan and Germany, to name just a few prominent factors and examples.

Nouriel Roubini, Project Syndicate: The Taming of Trump. But it is actually more likely that Trump will pursue pragmatic, centrist policies. For starters, Trump is a businessman who relishes the “art of the deal,” so he is by definition more of a pragmatist than a blinkered ideologue. His choice to run as a populist was tactical, and does not necessarily reflect deep-seated beliefs. Indeed, Trump is a wealthy real-estate mogul who has lived his entire life among other rich businessmen. He is a savvy marketer who tapped into the political zeitgeist by pandering to working-class Republicans and “Reagan Democrats,” some of whom may have supported Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. This allowed him to stand out in a crowded field of traditional pro-business, pro-Wall Street, and pro-globalization politicians. Once in office, Trump will throw symbolic red meat to his supporters while reverting to the traditional supply-side, trickle-down economic policies that Republicans have favored for decades.

Andrew Prokop, VOX: Will economic populism lead Democrats to victory? Senate results should make us skeptical. Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton. Russ Feingold underperformed Clinton by 2.4 points in Wisconsin, and Ted Strickland underperformed her by 12.8 points in Ohio. Feingold amassed a populist record of challenging big money and special interests when he was in the Senate, and Strickland harshly condemned trade deals during his campaign against Rob Portman (who served as George W. Bush’s US trade representative).

Kenneth M. Langa, JAMA: A Comparison of the Prevalence of Dementia in the United States in 2000 and 2012. The aging of the US population is expected to lead to a large increase in the number of adults with dementia, but some recent studies in the United States and other high-income countries suggest that the age-specific risk of dementia may have declined over the past 25 years. We used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative, population-based longitudinal survey of individuals in the United States 65 years or older from the 2000. The prevalence of dementia in the United States declined significantly between 2000 and 2012. An increase in educational attainment was associated with some of the decline in dementia prevalence, but the full set of social, behavioral, and medical factors contributing to the decline is still uncertain.

Jessi Hempel, Backchannel: According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem. But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly.

International Number Ones. Every country is the best at something: Even if it’s a bad thing, like murder, child marriages or spam email. The aptly-named Information is Beautiful website has sifted through piles of data from the UN, the CIA, the Guardian and a bunch of other places to compile a world map that awards a gold star to just about every country on the planet.