Maurice Obstfeld,
IMF: Get on Track with Trade. Trade and
trade policies have not, however, been the only factors behind these
changes—they probably were not even the most important—nor are they the reason
for slower growth. Technological changes as well as idiosyncratic national
developments also have played major roles. The political consensus that drove trade policy over much
of the postwar period will dissipate without a purposeful policy framework that
spreads the risks of economic openness; ensures flexible labor markets
and educated, agile workforces; promotes job matching; improves the functioning
of financial markets; and directly addresses inequality of incomes. This same
framework is needed to address a range of other economic changes, which, like trade,
can harm some and require adjustment within the economy
Danny Leipziger,
VOX: Make globalisation more inclusive or suffer the consequences. Despite
lifting millions out of poverty, globalisation is facing growing political
opposition. This column surveys the successes and failures of globalisation,
and some of the critical policy implications. Globalisation has reached a stage where its benefits have
been captured but its costs have been largely ignored. Going forward,
governments need to address inequality and social inclusion, boost global
investment, and restore confidence.
Dani Rodrik,
Project Syndicate: Don’t Cry Over Dead Trade Agreements. We should not mourn their passing. What purpose do
trade agreements really serve? The answer would seem obvious: countries
negotiate trade agreements to achieve freer trade. But the reality is
considerably more complex. It’s
not just that today’s trade agreements extend to many other policy areas, such
as health and safety regulations, patents and copyrights, capital-account
regulations, and investor rights. It’s also unclear whether they really have
much to do with free trade.
Branko Milanovic,
globalinequality, Should some countries cease to exist? Pushing this logic further, and using the results of
the Gallup poll that show the
percentage of people who desire to move out of their countries, we find that in
the case of unimpeded global migration some countries could lose up to 90
percent of their populations. They may cease to exist: everybody but a few
thousand people might move out. Even the few who might at first remain,
could soon find their lives there intolerable, not least because providing
public goods for a very small population may be exceedingly expensive. So,
what?—it could be asked. Would not disappearance of countries also mean
disappearance of distinct cultures, languages and religions? Yes, but if people
do not care about these cultures, languages and religions, why should they be
maintained?
Eduardo Porter,
NYT: Where Were Trump’s Votes? Where the Jobs Weren’t. Only 472 counties voted for Hillary Clinton on
Election Day. But according to Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, they
account for 64 percent of the nation’s economic activity. The 2,584 counties
where Mr. Trump won, by contrast, generated only 36 percent of America’s
prosperity. The political divide between high-output and low-output parts of
the country also meshes with the
cleavage between urban America — largely won by Mrs. Clinton — and the vast,
less-populous rural stretches where Mr. Trump racked up large numbers of votes.
Christopher
Ingraham, Washington Post: Today’s teens are way better behaved than you were. Teen
drug and alcohol use has fallen to levels not seen since the height of the drug
war in the 1990s, according to new federal survey data. The Monitoring
the Future survey of about 50,000 high school students found that “considerably
fewer teens reported using any illicit drug other than marijuana in the prior
12 months — 5 percent, 10 percent and 14 percent in grades 8, 10 and 12,
respectively — than at any time since 1991.” The survey's third full year of
data since the first recreational pot shops opened in 2014 shows that changing
attitudes toward marijuana appear to have little effect on teens' inclinations
to use the drug.
Jorge Luis García,
James J. Heckman et al., HCEO: The Life-cycle Benefits of an Influential Early
Childhood Program. This paper
estimates the large array of long-run benefits of an influential early child-
hood program targeted to disadvantaged children and their families. It is
evaluated by random assignment and follows participants through their mid-30s.
The program is a prototype for numerous interventions currently in place around
the world. It has sub-
stantial beneficial impacts on (a) health and the quality of life, (b) the
labor incomes of participants, (c) crime, (d) education, and (e) the labor
income of the mothers of the participants through subsidizing their childcare.
There are substantially greater monetized benefits for males. The overall rate
of return is a statistically significant 13.0% per annum with an associated
benefit/cost ratio of 6.3. These estimates account for the welfare costs of
taxation to finance the program. They are robust to a wide variety of
sensitivity analyses. Accounting for substitutes to treatment available to
families randomized out of treatment shows that boys benefit much less than
girls from low quality alternative childcare arrangements.
MIT Technology
Review: AI Machine Attempts to Understand Comic Books ... and Fails. The results are eyebrow-raising. While humans can predict the
next piece of text or the next image correctly more than 80 percent of the
time, the machines never come close to this level of accuracy. “None of
the architectures outperform human baselines, which speaks to the difficulty of
understanding comics,” say Iyyer and co. “Image features obtained from models
trained on natural images cannot capture the vast variation in artistic styles,
and textual models struggle with the richness and ambiguity of colloquial
dialogue highly dependent on visual contexts.”
Eugene Soltes, The
Atlantic: The Psychology of White-Collar Criminals. Two leading executive headhunters once wrote a book
called Lessons From the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders
that celebrated 50 titans of industry. Readers were encouraged “to learn from
and pattern themselves” after the leadership qualities displayed by these
executives. Yet within a
few years of the book’s 1999 publication, three of those 50 were convicted of
white-collar crimes and headed to prison, and three more faced tens of millions
of dollars in fines for illicit activity. It was an extraordinary rate of
failure for executives once deemed the “very best—and most successful—business
leaders in America.” I’ve spent much of the last seven years
investigating why so many respected executives engage in white-collar crime.
Why is it that fraud, embezzlement, bribery, and insider trading often seem
like disturbing norms among the upper echelons of business?
John Danaher, The
New Rambler: The Shame of Work. Review of The Refusal of Work: The Theory and
Practice of Resistance to Work, by David Frayne. If ever a book was designed to help you question the value of the work
ethic and look anew at our modern obsession with productivity and promotion,
this is it. Frayne has accomplished something worthy of admiration. He has written the best primer
and introduction to the anti-work philosophy; a fascinating ethnography of
people who actively try to resist work; and has married this to some original
and provocative insights into the contemporary workplace. What’s more,
he has done all this without resorting to the stodgy, jargon-laden prose that
is common among left-wing critics of work. It is all conveyed in a fluid and
assured manner.
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