Marginal Revolution

Right now, I only have subscriptions to the NYTimes (US) and FT (international). But mostly I find out interesting stuff from https://marginalrevolution.com/ (which usually have links to FT, Bloomberg, WP, WSJ, etc.)

I was once a New Yorker subscriber, but I no longer have patience for long form writing.

I also once had subscriptions to the Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail, which were pretty good for local and domestic news respectively (but only if you're Canadian). I also once subscribed to the Walrus when Jonathan Kay was editor, but it was too boring (it's Canadian, I'm Canadian, but I don't relate to anything they write about -- but I think they've gotten more interesting since).

The Economist -- I'm torn. A lot of the writing sounds smart, but many of the articles are written by young Oxbridge PPE grads who can turn a phrase but don't have a lot of real world experience. The Economist seems to be read by people who want to seem smart, who want to hold an elite-certified opinion, but don't seem to want to to do the work to actually go deep on topics and would rather outsource their opinion formation to the Economist.

I also once had a subscription to Foreign Affairs. Excellent long-form articles that I no longer have any patience for. You do get the occasional long form article that is so relevant and engaging that you're forced to read it to the end, but these are few and far between.

I've gone back to reading books.

This piece is an op-ed, not straight reporting.

Tyler Cowen, its author, is a noted economist (with libertarian leanings), and he favors competition in many forms. Anyone curious about him and his views should read his blog Marginal Revolution and listen to his podcast. They're both smart:

https://marginalrevolution.com/

https://conversationswithtyler.com/

Tyler has written extensively about stagnation in the American economy. Part of that stagnation is the decreasing mobility of Americans.

I very much agree with him that governments should compete for residents, especially the right kind of residents.

It takes hard work to build a successful city.

If we look at San Francisco, we see a city that has done everything it can to drive away many residents, and in so doing, destroyed its tax base, leading to a budget crisis. A great lesson in what not to do!

Why should there not be a market for talent, where the towns and cities of America compete to make themselves more livable, better centers of serendipity, better providers of public services? That sounds great to me.

In an earlier America, some cities took this mandate very seriously. For anyone curious, Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus tells the story of about the leaders of Dallas deliberately made it attractive to early residents in order to build their town. His biographical book is called "Minding the Store."

You are correct about the dynamics of wage labor during the industrial revolution. However, I can't say I agree with this:

> Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.

Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.

It seems likely that it’ll be a V-shaped recession, sharp drop followed by sharp recovery, unless there’s a complete mess made of economic policy like when the Fed turned a normal economic contraction into the Great Depression. Lots of people getting temporarily sick and permanently dead doesn’t destroy much physical capital and the casualties are disproportionately borne by those least engaged in the workforce.

> The 1957 Asian Flu Pandemic killed around 70 to 100 thousand people in the United States (the 57 flu was not as infectious or deadly as COVID-19). In the last quarter of 1957 the growth rate (on an annualized basis) was -4% and in the first quarter of 1958, -10%, the largest such decline in post WWII history, bigger even than in the financial crisis. By the third and fourth quarters of 1958, however, the growth rate had surged back up to nearly 10% and for the year as a whole GDP declined by less than 1%–a bad recession, 3rd worst by depth in post WWII history, but not unprecedented.

https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=1957+flu

I recommend against books; they're expensive and typically the page count is too high for the number of ideas unless you are really interested in the academics of it. I get a lot more out of Wikipedia [0], blogs and YouTube (although the quality of information on YouTube is typically low).

That being said, if you want some recommendations I'd suggest Tyler Cowen [1] as a good clearinghouse for topical ideas and John Cochrane [2] as an interesting read. I picked an article from the last 7 days where you can see the ZIRP in the graphs, it is all the points where US Fed Funds rate was at 0.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/

[2] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/inflation-and-the-macroeconomy?utm_source=publication-search

> This seems like part of the general trend to value the "rock stars" of every field while diminishing the field in general.

This is precisely the topic of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over[0]:

> Cowen forecasts that modern economies are delaminating into two groups: a small minority of highly educated and capable of working collaboratively with automated systems will become a wealthy aristocracy; the vast majority will earn little or nothing, surviving on low-priced goods created by the first group, living in shantytowns working with highly automated production systems.

Cowen's blog, Marginal Revolution[1], is also worth a read.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over

1: http://marginalrevolution.com/