Rather than obsessing about inflation, Fed chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues should be seeking to provide as much support as they can to the economy, consistent with preventing bubbles from forming in asset markets such as stocks, bonds, and, especially, real estate. That is where the threat lies, not in rising inflation.
.. the so-called NAIRU, or Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. Theoretically, the concept makes sense. Empirically, it’s extremely elusive, because it depends on many other things, such as the rate of productivity growth, tax rates, the labor-force participation rate, and the level of unionization.
Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others
Wilson is certain that it’s not by selecting for the fittest individuals within a group, as the popular picture of natural selection would suggest. The reason is simple. Tradeoffs are the norm in life and when individuals act to further their own interests they generally don’t further the interests of the group. Indeed individuals can often do best by cheating, that is by shirking their group duties and looking out for numero uno.
.. So then how can group function and altruism evolve? Simple, says Wilson: groups that include more altruists generally perform better as groups than groups that include fewer altruists. To return to our ants, a colony in which everyone selflessly plays their part is a healthy colony that functions, survives, and ultimately gives rise to a new colony more readily than would a colony that harbors selfish ants. In the language of biology, selecting for the fittest groups can increase the number of altruists through time.
.. Scientists, Wilson says, should be schooled in the idea of equivalence just as they are in hypothesis testing. This might well prevent scientists from wasting precious research time in futile debates over which bookkeeping scheme is fundamentally “correct,” a fate, he says, that plagued discussion of the levels of selection until recently.
.. Given its effectiveness in suppressing selfishness, Wilson, while a nonbeliever, appears respectfully tolerant of religious practice and distances himself from the heated rhetoric of “New Atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
.. He tells us about Ayn Rand’s economic fundamentalism and walks us through Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’s account of high-frequency traders on Wall Street. Recoiling in a mix of moral and intellectual horror, he announces that “it was a monumental mistake to conclude that something as complex as a large society can self-organize on the basis of individual greed.”
.. Indeed Wilson argues that the only legitimate version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand is one that moves at the level of whole societies, sorting those economic arrangements that work from those that don’t. Wilson provides no examples here but, from his tone, it seems likely that he’d include American capitalist markets among those arrangements that don’t work for the benefit of people generally.
.. This isn’t to say that Wilson is necessarily wrong here and economists are right. But it is to say that it’s easy to win a debate when the other side’s arguments don’t get a fair hearing.
IOT: The Wealth of Natures
Adam Smith was one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers, a moral philosopher and pioneer of economic theory whose 1776 masterpiece The Wealth of Nations has come to define classical economics. With Richard Whatmore, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews; Donald Winch, Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex; and Helen Paul, Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton.
Mercantilism (12 min)
Establishment Populism Rising
David Autor, a professor of economics at M.I.T., wrote in an email that Summers seems
to presuppose that we have entered an era of secular stagnation with perennially insufficient demand. I don’t share this pessimism, and I think many indicators point in the right direction: employment growth, wage trends, inflation, energy prices, even inequality.
.. Many of the policies outlined by Summers — especially on trade, taxation, financial regulation and worker empowerment — are the very policies that divide the Wall-Street-corporate wing from the working-to-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way, these policies divide the money wing from the voting wing.
Summers has forced out in the open a set of choices that Hillary Clinton has so far avoided, choices that even if she attempts to elide them will amount to a signal of where her loyalties lie.