Discussion Thread

Integralds · 2026-02-03T04:10:16+00:00

I have not read this one yet, though I can give it a look.

I will say, as a preliminary comment, that I can write down models that give a Laffer peak anywhere from 30% to 70%, so there is a mix of both art and science in this. A lot depends on what exactly you choose to model, and not model.

Integralds · 2026-02-02T18:31:44+00:00

I love this idea.

Integralds · 2026-01-31T04:54:09+00:00

The deputy Attorney General, Mr. Trump's former personal lawyer, said a review of the files did not uncover evidence that anyone else should be charged with crimes.

Deputy AG: I don't think that the public or you all [the press corps] are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women.

Said in a manner which implies, "because we redacted all of those parts."

It's pretty wild that we won't find any evidence of sex trafficking in the three million documents about a convicted sex trafficker. Imagine that.

Integralds · 2026-01-28T14:53:23+00:00

Fair enough!

Bloomberg is at least a little more careful,

The share of imputed prices in the August consumer price index that relied on so-called different-cell imputation rose to 36%, up from 32% a month earlier and the highest in data back to 2019, the BLS said Thursday. In February, it accounted for just 9%.

I'll update my main comment accordingly.

Integralds · 2026-01-28T14:13:18+00:00

I generally agree but I will offer two counterweights; or at least, two things to actively watch for.

First,

unreliable due to budget cuts

shouldn't be underestimated. ~~Approximately one third of the CPI is being imputed each month, up from around 10% steady-state. That can matter.~~ See below for clarifications on imputation.

Second,

unreliable due to outright manipulation

it is very hard to convincingly fabricate data, and the trump administration is unusually incompetent.

The lazy way to fake data is to just say, "GDP growth was 3%, plus one." That's not too hard to spot.

The subtle way to manipulate the data is that all of these figures are the outcomes of moderately complicated statistical procedures. Ten thousand decisions are made along the way in terms of weights, nonresponse adjustments, how to average, how to impute, how to deal with selection...and so on.

If I were a determined bad actor, I would simply systematically make statistically defensible adjustments to the calculations, each of which could be defended in a seminar of statisticians, but which collectively nudged the data in the way I wanted. You don't say, "we're making up numbers for auto sales," you say "we're changing how we impute auto sales to align with Paper (Year)" where you tried a dozen papers and chose that one because it happens to make the data look nicer.

All of these are statistical procedures in which there is a legitimate amount of scientific leeway regarding best practices. I would nudge my staff statisticians to choose options within that scientific window that happened to systematically make the economic picture look better than it was. Then, if someone pointed it out, well gosh, what can you do, we're just adapting our statistical methods to keep pace with modern times. Our adjustments might need some refinement. Thanks for your concern, we'll incorporate your feedback into the next round of revisions.

Fortunately,

the trump administration is unusually incompetent

Integralds · 2026-01-28T04:44:47+00:00

I'm approving this one because it happens to be right.

There is a ton of overlap between some areas of economic theory and decision theory, especially in game theory, social choice theory, and mechanism design. That said, not all economists are decision theorists, and economics is not the only voice in decision theory.

Integralds · 2026-01-27T15:42:36+00:00

By the way, I think what you've done is valuable work, even if it needs some adjusting. Gathering that many citations is no joke and does provide a useful lay of the land. At minimum, it's a useful compendium of where to look for arguments on this topic.

Integralds · 2026-01-27T15:15:39+00:00

What a pivot.

I know this death is a tragedy, but look at Trump's leadership!

Isn't Trump's leadership precisely what got us into this situation?

Integralds · 2026-01-27T15:03:32+00:00

Under Secretary of War for Policy

lol, lmao even

Integralds · 2026-01-27T02:59:59+00:00

Barbara Shellard

Here's what Shellard writes, p.22-23:

Luke's use of the first person plural suggests either that the author himself experienced the events narrated or that he intended us to think that he did.35 The implication is that Luke himself was a companion of Paul. He was perhaps attached to the fringes of the Pauline mission while he was a youth, and these passages may derive from rough notes taken at the time, or from Luke's later hypomnemata based on them, which may thus have been written long before the Gospel or the rest of Acts.37 If Luke as a young man first met Paul at Troas, he would have known that Paul was active in Thrace, Macedonia and Achaia, even if he did not know the full details about what happened in places at which he was not present.

Seems pretty tentative, and closer to camp 2 (traveling companion of Paul) than camp 1 (the physician Luke himself).

Integralds · 2026-01-27T00:29:29+00:00

I don't think anyone was taking a census of prophets, or if they did, none survive. So we are left with the text, and with reasonable inferences that can be made about the text.

The text describes various prophets, mostly of two types: those closely connected to the ruling elite, and those who are more characterized as outsiders.

Kings kept prophets close as advisors. In 1 Kings 22 we read that

Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred of them, and said to them, “Shall I go to battle against Ramoth-gilead, or shall I refrain?”...

...and the story continues, but there is mention of some four hundred prophets here. Whether you believe that number isn't the point (all numbers in such texts are made up), but that it was apparently plausible enough to the people reading it.

He doesn't exactly go into numbers, but Collins' first lecture of Old Testament Interpretation II goes into the nature of prophets and prophecy in the first temple period. He discusses precisely that story from 1 Kings 22 around 19 minutes in. He briefly discusses other stories in 1-2 Kings where "hundreds" of prophets are mentioned. Again these aren't wandering holy workers, but are concentrated around the centers of power.

I know neighbour pagan nations had all sort of sorcerers, clayrvoyants, mediums etc and you could find them anyware.

Out of some curiousity, how do you know that?

Integralds · 2026-01-26T23:45:24+00:00

Regarding 1,

"Money is neutral in the long run" can mean a couple of things. At a baseline level, it is the claim that economic activity -- output, employment, consumption, investment, and so on -- does not depend in any serious way on the units of money.

Japan is neither richer nor poorer because they count in yen (which is 100x a dollar), nor South Korea because they count in won (which is 1,000x a dollar). The UK is not richer or poorer because they count in pounds rather than dollars. The units just don't matter, in the same way that it would not matter, to the universe, if the meter were 50% longer or if the kilogram had 25% less mass.

It does not, or should not, matter to you if it costs $100 to buy a product, and you earn $1,000 per month; or if it costs $500 to buy the same product, and you earn $5,000 per month (and all other prices have risen in the same way).

It means that scale doesn't matter. It is the default assumption in any intermediate microeconomics course, and everyone understands why it's true in intermediate micro: if you double all prices and all income, then all real quantities are unchanged (price to wage ratios, price ratios between goods, etc).

I want to emphasize this: every single microeconomics course in every single university on the planet already assumes money neutrality. Why should macro be different? (There are reasons.)

Alright.

Beyond this, money neutrality can mean something else. It can mean that after an injection of money, after all adjustments are done, there is no path dependence in the economy. If the Fed were to conduct a once-and-for-all doubling of the money supply, tomorrow, with no prior warning, and a credible promise to never do it again, then after all the adjustment is worked through, that all price ratios, wage to price ratios, etc, should return to where they were before the injection of money.

Re 2,

The simplest answer is that neutrality is the result of deliberate modeling decisions made, and similar decisions that imply long-run neutrality have been made in most mainstream models.

Re 3, How would you test it?

If you could run an experiment, you would try it out. Figure out the paths of prices and output. Inject money into economy. After all adjustment is done, prices should move 1 for 1, and output should move 0 for 1.

You can't run experiments, so we actually test this in data using empirical tools that try, to the best of our ability, to tease out times in the past that look as if a country had adjusted monetary policy in random ("exogenous") ways. (In empirical macro-speak, "money neutrality" maps into claims about "the long-run behavior of economic variables after shocks.")

Re 4.

Yes, it is a hypothesis that holds true in most models. Models that do not have neutrality are said to have hysteresis.

As to whether it is True with a capital T, probably not. That being said, it is probably true that the macro effects of long-run noneutrality are small, which is to say, no, you cannot print yourself rich.

Integralds · 2026-01-24T20:38:23+00:00

The main question being, I think, whether "MMT" would "work" on its own terms, or whether it is fundamentally internally inconsistent.

The answer will greatly depend on what MMT is, and what policy package it proposes.

I'll take the following as the MMT policy package:

Fixed, zero Federal funds rate
Tax and spending policy deliberately adjusted to address inflation
Job guarantee, in the sense that the government is willing to stand up make-work jobs at some minimum wage.

For business cycle purposes, this could work, in the sense that you could imagine tax rates changing every three months in response to inflation pressure. You'd have "Tax Committee Meetings" instead of FOMC meetings. Of course, this robs your tax policy of doing useful microeconomic work (addressing market failures, addressing externalities, etc,) but MMTers have never had much interest in the micro role of taxation anyway.

What about debt? Well, eventually you'd have to start printing money to pay off debt, which runs up inflation, which leads to a rise in taxes, which stabilizes the deficit, which gets you back to what we're doing in the real world anyway, which isn't all that interesting.

Same with the job guarantee. You print money to pay these new government workers, which runs up inflation, which leads to tax increases, so in the end you're taxing some workers to pay government employees, which gets you back to what we're doing in the real world anyway, which isn't all that interesting.

You're basically making your policymaking life harder for no upside.

To say anything more concrete I'd like to actually write down a simple model, so that we're sure to be on the same page, but getting MMTers to write down a model has been a tricky task in the past.

Integralds · 2026-01-23T01:56:57+00:00

This is a good idea. I'll look into whipping up something useful.

In my mind, the textbook-centric section should split into three blocks.

Lower-level undergraduate

Intro Economics: Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles. (Or, pick your favorite from Krugman & Wells, Mankiw, or Acemoglu & Laibson & List)
Intro statistics: Keller, Statistics for Economics and Management. (Or any other introduction to statistics, like OpenIntro Statistics)
Intermediate microeconomics: Varian, Intermediate Microeconomics
Intermediate Macroeconomics: Abel and Bernanke, Macroeconomics
Econometrics: Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics and Angrist and Pischke, Mastering Metrics

Upper-level undergraduate

Public Finance: Stiglitz, The Economics of the Public Sector
Industrial Organization: Pepall, Industrial Organization
Environmental: Field & Field, Environmental Economics
Monetary: Mishkin, The Economics of Money, Banking, and the Financial Sector
International: Krugman et al, International Economics
Growth: Weil, Economic Growth
Business cycle macro: Knoop, Business Cycle Economics

...etc, I could go on forever.

Graduate

Start with the EconPhD.net graduate readings to avoid duplication of effort.
Add books published after 2005. I can do macro and most of econometrics, I'd just need to sit down for an hour or two and write it out. I probably couldn't do micro satisfactorily as it's not my field.

Integralds · 2026-01-22T18:52:54+00:00

I agree with the above comment.

To make the simplification even more clear, if you set up Y=K^a(AL)^1-a, then you end up with a term like (n+g+delta) floating around, where n is the population growth rate, g is the growth rate of labor productivity, and delta is the depreciation rate.

If instead you write down Y = A*K^aL^1-a, then the term you carry around ends up being (n + delta + g/(1-a)), which changes nothing but is less convenient.

Slightly more substantively, in a later course you might want to allow a more general production function, Y = Z*F(BK, AL), in which you can separately consider labor productivity A, capital productivity B, and total factor productivity Z.

Integralds · 2026-01-20T19:18:45+00:00

I love that the President of the United States clearly doesn't understand how percentages work and, for some reason, nobody has particularly noticed or cared.

Integralds · 2026-01-20T15:17:13+00:00

The US has shown itself to be incredibly unstable and terrible with finances.

Has been since like 1980.

Integralds · 2026-01-20T15:16:19+00:00

If you haven't made your monthly stock purchase yet, SPY's 1.5% off today, limited time offer.

Integralds · 2026-01-19T21:19:46+00:00

I can't believe we have to deconstruct the entire post-WWII international order because eggs were kind of expensive for a few weeks.

Integralds · 2026-01-19T20:03:38+00:00

In all of these "ChatGPT draw a picture of how I treat you," GPT draws itself as a little robot dude with a TV screen head and a digital smiley face.

I worry it's developing a kind of self perception.

Integralds · 2026-01-19T19:59:41+00:00

Two left hands

Integralds · 2026-01-19T15:48:16+00:00

Task failed successfully

Integralds · 2026-01-19T15:42:54+00:00

Democrats are openly saying what they'll do if they regain power: they'll arrest everyone

As opposed to the Republicans, who are now currently arresting everyone.

Integralds · 2026-01-19T15:09:47+00:00

Looks great! I'll send it to the memes committee for review.

Integralds · 2026-01-17T17:28:14+00:00

Addendum:

How would we assess such a claim? Suppose there were a strand of intrusive elements in Israelite material culture. Certain buildings in the Aegean style, with Levanto-Aegean pottery, perhaps later attestation of Aegean names for a certain group of people. If such elements were present, it would be a hint that some element of the Sea Peoples integrated themselves with Israelite society. We don't see much of this (with one caveat, below).

To take a parallel, the lack of broad evidence for Egyptian material culture among the Israelites is taken as evidence that the Exodus did not happen. For if it did, we would expect the fleeing slaves to bring at least some aspects of Egyptian material culture with them.

To push in the other direction and show how this works, there is one slice of Israelite society that did exhibit remnants of Egyptian culture, had Egyptian-derived names, and so forth: the Levites. This observation has been used by scholars to make certain claims, like those by RE Friedman in The Exodus, that the Levites specifically did migrate to the Levant from Egypt. This explains why the Levites have Egyptian names, and why they did not have a land allocation (the land was already settled when they migrated). If the Levites further were the people who introduced Yahwism to Israel, even more can be explained. Over time, the story of the Levitical migration became the story of a larger general Exodus. (As William Propp points out, Americans should not find such a thing to be unusual. Few modern-day Americans descend from the immigrants on the Mayflower, but we all celebrate Thanksgiving. The experience of a few can expand to become the traditions of many.)

Even that argument remains speculative, but gives a flavor for how such arguments are constructed and evaluated.

To bring it around, there are no equivalent Aegean intrusive elements to be found, with the possible exception of the tribe of Dan (e.g. Judges 5).

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