Heat Chart: Monthly Average Global Temperatures Relative to 1881-1910

Image via Rosamond Hutt's World Economic Forum post "9 things you absolutely have to know about global warming." This heat chart is used to back up the statement "We’ve now had 627 months warmer than normal, when compared with an 1881-1910 base…

Image via Rosamond Hutt's World Economic Forum post "9 things you absolutely have to know about global warming." This heat chart is used to back up the statement "We’ve now had 627 months warmer than normal, when compared with an 1881-1910 baseline."

For pushback on this and other global warming evidence, see the discussion in the Storify story "Climate Change Science and Climate Change Orthodoxy."

James Hansen's Advice for Not Frying Our Planet

I highly recommend Jeff Goodell's interview of James Hansen, linked above. Jeff introduces James Hansen this way: 

... James Hansen became the first scientist to offer unassailable evidence that burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. In the decades since, as the world has warmed, the ice has melted and the wildfires have spread, he has published papers on everything from the risks of rapid sea-level rise to the role of soot in global temperature changes ...

It is clear from the interview that James is a no-nonsense guy. Here are some key passages:

1. I would also tell [the President] to think of what the energy sources of the future are going to be and to consider nuclear power. China and India, most of their energy is coming from coal-burning. And you're not going to replace that with solar panels. As you can see from the panels on my barn, I'm all for solar power. Here on the farm, we generate more energy than we use. Because we have a lot of solar panels. It cost me $75,000. That's good, but it's not enough. The world needs energy. We've got to develop a new generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fueled molten salt reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot have a meltdown. These types of reactors also reduce nuclear waste to a very small fraction of what it is now. If we don't think about nuclear power, then we will leave a more dangerous world for young people.

2. ... the fossil-fuel industry has made a huge investment in fracking over the past 20 years or so, and they now have created enough of a bubble in gas that it really makes no economic sense to reopen coal-fired power plants when gas is so much cheaper. So I don't think Trump can easily reverse the trend away from coal on the time scale of four years.

3. I think that our government has become sufficiently cumbersome in its support of R&D that I'd place more hope in the private sector. But in order to spur the private sector, you've got to provide the incentive. And that's why I'm a big supporter of a carbon fee. ...

[Jeff:] Let's talk more about policy. You're a big believer in a revenue-neutral carbon fee. Explain how that would work, and why you're such a big supporter of it.
[James:] It's very simple. You collect it at the small number of sources, the domestic mines and the ports of entry, from fossil-fuel companies. And you can distribute it back to people. The simplest way to distribute it and encourage the actions that are needed to move us to clean energy is to just give an equal amount to all legal residents. So the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money. And it doesn't really require you to calculate carbon footprint – for instance, the price of food will change as sources that use more fossil fuel, like food imported from New Zealand, become more expensive. And so you are encouraged to buy something from the nearby farm. ...
... our politics ... tend to favor special interests. And even the environmentalists will decide what they want to favor and say, "Oh, we should subsidize this." I don't think we should subsidize anything. We should let the market decide. ...

[Jeff:] I agree that a carbon fee could be an effective tool to cut emissions, but how do you get the politics right to get it done? I mean, it's one thing to...
[James:] Well, you have to make it simple. You can't do this 3,000-page crap, like they did with cap-and-trade in 2009. You gotta simplify it down to the absolute basics, and you do it in a way that the public will not let you change it. If the public is getting this dividend, they won't let you change it.

4. When I was working at NASA, I always felt I was working for the taxpayer. I was not working for the administration. ... When we have knowledge about something, we should not be prohibited from saying it as clearly as we can.

 

You, Too, Are a Math Person; When Race Comes Into the Picture, That Has to Be Reiterated

Link to the article above.

Link to the article above.

Noah Smith's and my Quartz column "There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't" was also published in the Atlantic online as "The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math.'" This is by more than an order of magnitude the most popular thing I have ever written. That might even be true for Noah. I followed up with the column "How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person'." Our message of "You, too, can learn math" should be clear enough, but such is the racism in our society, that when it comes to disadvantaged minorities, the message "You, too, can learn math" needs to be reiterated. Until we see the potential in everyone, regardless of race or household income, prejudice continues. 

The article linked above, "How Does Race Affect a Student's Math Education" talks about racial obstacles to everyone getting the message that the ability to do math is as nearly universal as the ability to read. Letting someone believe they can't learn to do math is like letting someone believe they can't learn to read. Either is cruel in the extreme. 

Sometimes people don't realize that math comes slowly to almost everyone. Those who spend a lot of time thinking about math get good at it. On this theme, in addition to "How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person'," see 

Thanks to Richard Watson for pointing me to this article. 

Miles: I wrote a follow-up column "How to Turn Every Child into a "Math Person" that gives links to some of the reactions to "There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't" and many resources for math learning. Here are some links to posts on math learning that didn't make it into that column:

Also, here are some Twitter discussions on math learning:

David Brooks: The Crisis of Western Civ →

Also note the three links that David Brooks includes in the New York Times essay linked above. Quoting David Brooks,

For Twitter discussion around this essay, see my Storify story "Defending the Principles of Western Civilization While Excoriating Bad Behavior Then and Now." 

Leaving a Legacy

a. Link to the video the acoustic performance by Nichole Nordeman of "Legacy" above; b. Link to the official music video of "Legacy"; c. Link to the lyrics for "Legacy"

I am one of the relatively few nonsupernaturalists who regularly listens to Contemporary Christian Music. This past week, I listened repeatedly to Nichole Nordeman's song "Legacy" because of its resonance with the criticism I made a week ago in my post "Breaking the Chains" of careerism among economists and other academics. There I write:

For most who go into academia, the salary they will get in academia is lower than they could get outside. So most who go into academia make that choice in part out of the joy of ideas, a burning desire for self-expression, a genuine fascination with learning how the world works, or out of idealism—the hope of making the world a better place through their efforts. But by the time those who are successful make it through the long grind of graduate school, getting a job and getting tenure, many have had that joy of ideas, desire for self-expression, thirst for understanding and idealism snuffed out. For many their work life has become a checklist of duties plus the narrow quest for publications in top journals. This fading away of higher, brighter goals betrays the reasons they chose academia in the first place.  

Because I believe it has an important message, but don't believe in the supernatural framing of the message, I want to give a nonsupernatural, teleotheistic interpretation of the lyrics of "Legacy." If you click on the video above, you can hear the song while you read. 

What is Teleotheism?

I first need to define Teleotheism to make a bit clearer what a "teleotheistic interpretation" might be. Teleotheism is the belief that God comes at the end, not at the beginning.

As for the origin and history of the word "Teleotheism," when I wrote the Unitarian-Universalist sermon "Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life," I googled to find the preexisting word "Teleotheism" from the bvio.com post "Talk:-ism." But if you google the word now, you will find my blog post with the text of "Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life" as the top hit. The second hit is to a video of the second time I gave the sermon, at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Farmington. The third is Noah Smith's endorsement of Teleotheism. (For the word "teleotheistic," the top three hits are two for my post "The Teleotheistic Achievement of the New Testament" and one for my post "What If Jesus Was Really Resurrected?")

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin did not use the term "Teleotheism" (or at least the Wikipedia entry on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin makes no mention of it), but Teleotheism is a good description of his beliefs, and particularly of his views about what he called "the Omega Point."  

My Teleotheism differs from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Teleotheism by having God at the end only as a possibility, not as a foregone conclusion. Reaching God will require the best efforts of many. Here is the passage from "Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life" that best explains my version of Teleotheism:

The key difference between evolution as our creator and the god of the Bible is that with evolution the best comes at the end, not at the beginning.  There was no Garden of Eden—only primordial soup in a warm pond.   But heaven is still possible; we and our descendants just need to build it.  

The first task is to decide what we want.  The medieval theologian Anselm defined God as “that than which no greater can be thought” and proceeded to argue that God must exist since something that exists is greater than something that doesn’t exist.  Therefore, the greatest of all things must exist.   It is my understanding that modern philosophers reject Anselm’s argument on the basis that “existence” is not an ordinary attribute like being massive or being photosynthetic.  Existence has a special status in logic.  So let me do a riff on Anselm by defining God as “the greatest of all things that can come true.”  God is the heaven—or in Mormon terms, the Zion, the ideal society—that we and our descendants can build, and god is a reasonable description of the kind of people who make up that society.   But what does a heavenly society look like? 

Let’s start with the easier question of what an ideal human being looks like.   Here I look to Jesus.  Not the historical Jesus, but the imagined Jesus who is the projection of every good human trait, as valued by our culture.  It makes all the sense in the world to ask “what would Jesus do” even if one believes that the historical Jesus was only a man, since “what would Jesus do” is a good shorthand for what our culture thinks a good person would do.  This is an example of the way in which many of the highest ideas of goodness in Western Culture are embedded in religious language. 

A Teleotheistic Interpretation of Nichole Nordeman's Lyrics for "Legacy"

In her lyrics for "Legacy," Nichole begins by saying that a certain amount of ordinary ambition is OK:

I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me
And I enjoy an accolade like the rest
And you could take my picture and hang it in a gallery
Of all the who's-who's and so-and-so's
That used to be the best at such and such,
It wouldn't matter much.

I won't lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights,
We all need an 'Atta boy' or 'Atta girl'

But ordinary ambition can easily get off track. As I wrote in "Breaking the Chains" for the case of academics:

Treating publishing in top journals as the end itself is off target. It is the broad road that leads to the destruction of much of your potential for joy, self-expression, understanding and doing good in the world. Putting the higher, brighter goals first—with publications as only one of several tools for achieving those goals—is the narrow gate to joy, self-expression, understanding and doing good. 

Nichole expresses a corresponding idea this way:

But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world.

Without a God who currently exists, getting beyond "the temporary trappings of this world" is a matter of doing things that could withstand the judgment of history a long time from now, when people are much wiser than they are now.

I say "doing things that could withstand the judgment of history" because many of the good things we do will never make it into the historical record at all. And there is another big gap between the set of things that make it into the historical record for those who diligently seek the information out, and those things that any ordinary person will every hear or read about. For example, if you think fame is a reasonable goal for an economist, just ask your non-economist friends how many economists they can name whom they don't know personally. You may be surprised at how few that number is. As another example, even though economists think about Gross Domestic Product quite a bit, and a book exists about the origins of GDP, I think you could safely lay even odds that a randomly chosen economist could not name the economists who put together the conceptual and practical framework for measuring GDP. 

Because of the frailty of human memory and the difficulty of achieving any lasting fame, when Nichole sings

I want to leave a legacy,
How will they remember me?

I take her "How will they remember me?" as mostly literary license. Nevertheless, targeting what our friends who are the wisest and who care about the most people will think of us after we are gone is not a terrible proxy for "doing things that could withstand the judgments of history a long time from now, when people are much wiser than they are now." 

Nichole points to some clues for how to judge one's actions with one's legacy in mind (relative to the lyrics at the link, I moved the question mark from the second line below to the third to better match what I hear): 

Did I choose to love? 
Did I point to you enough
To make a mark on things?

"Did I choose to love?" needs no reinterpretation at all. 

As for the line "Did I point to you enough," given the conventions of Contemporary Christian Music, by "you," Nichole clearly intends "God." The meaning "God's name" for "your name" four lines down in "Who blessed your name unapologetically" is also clear. To give the teleotheistic spin to "Did I point to you enough" and "Who blessed your name unapologetically," consider my "Daily Devotional for the Not-Yet":

In this moment, as in all the moments I have, may the image of the God or Gods Who May Be burn brightly in my heart.

Let faith give me a felt assurance that what must be done to bring the Day of Awakening and the Day of Fulfilment closer can be done in a spirit of joy and contentment.

Let the gathering powers of heaven be at my left hand and my right. Let there be many heroes and saints to blaze the trail in front of me. Let the younger generations who will follow discern the truth and wield it to strengthen good and weaken evil. Let the grandeur of the Universe above inspire noble thoughts that lead to noble plans and noble deeds. Let the Earth beneath be a remembrance of the wisdom of our ancestors and of others who have died before us. And may the light within be an ocean of conscious and unconscious being to sustain me and those who are with me through all the trials we must go through.

In this moment, I am. And I am grateful that I am. May others be, now and for all time.

My post "Daily Devotional for the Not-Yet" gives a detailed teleotheistic interpretation of this devotional, but here what I want to emphasize is that even those of us who doubt that God currently exists can point to God in the sense of "The God or Gods Who May Be." That is, we should always point boldly and unapologetically toward the good and even transcendent things that are possible if people work toward those higher, brighter goals instead of a pitifully small and narrow conception of self-interest.

What your self-interest is depends on what you decide your "self" is. If you decide that your "self" has a part that extends to the end of time, and includes the welfare of the many human beings and other sophonts who exist now and will exist in the future, then your self-interest may tend toward God, or in my phrase, "The God or Gods Who May Be." 

Of course, even if you decide to take an expansive view of your own self-interest that encompasses the interests of many others, both now and in the (possibly distant) future, there are tradeoffs. But there are always tradeoffs. I like working on math problems and hate to stop when I am on a roll; but then that math might come at the expense of sleep. Similarly, tending our self-interest in the direction that encompasses the interests of others sometimes comes at the expense of other dimensions of our self-interest. So it is often appropriate to talk about making sacrifices in order to do good. As Nichole expresses it,

I want to leave an offering

The next line in "Legacy" adds in a different note: "A child of mercy and grace." Here is the context:

A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.

Teleotheistically, we are all children of mercy and grace in that we have all escaped the destructiveness of the cruel creator god, evolution. In the history of our planet, most genetic lines were wiped out. Our lines were not. That is mercy and grace. But it is not the mercy and grace of a benevolent god, but the grace of a terrible and brutal god, evolution, who brought us into existence by killing off many, many other experiments. We have been spared, not entirely capriciously, but not out of any kindness either. 

Still, a certain gratitude is warranted, or at least an appreciation of the chance that we have been given that only a vanishingly small fraction of all possible human beings (and an even tinier fraction of all possible intelligent beings) have ever had. Let us make the most of this chance that we have. 

To make the most of that chance, we need to steel ourselves for the needed sacrifices. One thought that helps is how short-lived some of the things we might need to sacrifice will be in any case. Nichole's next stanza goes

I don't have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthy list of all that I enjoy
It's an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.

That said, pleasures for ourselves and others are, in my view at least, an element of “the greatest of all things that can come true.” We should not sacrifice unnecessarily now pleasures that are part of our image of heaven in the future. The final words of my "Agnostic Invocation" are

And may we understand more fully the mystery of the humanity we all share, and act as one family to bring this Earth nearer to Heaven. Amen. 

Let us not begrudge ourselves a bit of Heaven now, unless it costs us Heaven later. 

Other than refrains, the final thought in "Legacy" is this: 

Not well-traveled, not well-read
Not well-to-do, or well-bred.
Just want to hear instead,
Well done, good and faithful one'

In itself, being well-traveled is good. Being well-read is good. Being well-to-do is good, if it doesn't come at the expense of other, more important things. And being "well-bred" in the sense of having parents who help one appreciate one's own potential is good. (See "The Unavoidability of Faith.") And for those of us who are academics, let me add to Nichole's list that having many publications and being well-cited is good, insofar as it is an indication of having done worthwhile investigations and having accurately and vividly communicated what one found. But we should not take too much pride in these good things if that pride distracts us from doing what needs to be done to further the cause of building the ideal society and making it possible for those who come after us to reach their full potential, which we now only glimpse "like puzzling reflections in a mirror" as the image of God. 

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but if we could live that long, then we would see everything with perfect clarity,  just as God would then know me completely. (teleotheistic reinterpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:12, taking the New Living Translation as a starting point)

 

 

Restoring American Growth: The Video

Note: As the teaser for this video, see "Bonnie Kavoussi's Tweetstorm on 'Restoring American Growth'"

In Summer, 2016, I moved from the University of Michigan to the University of Colorado Boulder. This Spring, Nick Flores and Maria Oliveras organized an inaugural public lecture for me as the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics. I took on the tough question of how to restore American Growth, a question closely related my post two days ago, "Why Is Productivity Growth So Low? 23 Economic Experts Weigh In|FocusEconomics."

Watching a bit of the video, I am pleased with how the talk turned out. Restoring American growth is a tough problem, and I wanted to be clear, so the talk is a long one, but I think one that will reward well the time of those who watch it. If I were to write a book about restoring American growth, this is the outline I would begin with in figuring out how to write it. 

I have to apologize for the slides themselves being washed out in the video by the lighting in the room. I explain the point of the slides well enough, you should be able to follow anyway. But the ideal way to watch this is probably to have the video in one window on your computer and to have the slides open in another window. Or if you are lucky enough to have two computers of any form (or be able to borrow), you might want to have the video going on one computer screen and the slides open on another.  

Update: Tom Grey made a full document's worth of comments, which you can see here.

Since this talk, I have done a lot more studying and thinking about the obesity problem. Take a look at my posts on obesity:

Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see my post "A Barycentric Autobiography." 

Why Is Productivity Growth So Low? 23 Economic Experts Weigh In|FocusEconomics

FocusEconomics included me among the 23 experts asked the question "Why is productivity growth so low?" You can see my answer above and all of our answers at this link. Here is the list of economists offering their takes, in the order they appear in the article:

  1. Mike Norman
  2. Karl Denninger
  3. James Picerno
  4. Daniel Lacalle
  5. Alden Abbott
  6. Constantinos Charalambous
  7. Timothy Taylor
  8. Dean Baker
  9. Carola Binder
  10. John Cochrane
  11. Livio Di Matteo
  12. Colin Lloyd
  13. Elliott Morse
  14. Mike "Mish" Shedlock
  15. George Selgin
  16. David Andolfatto
  17. Jeff Miller
  18. Antonio Fatas
  19. Miles Kimball
  20. Neven Valev
  21. John Quiggin
  22. David T. Flynn
  23. Steve Keen

FocusEconomics sets up the question well at the beginning. 

 

Breaking the Chains

In his April 14, 2017 Wall Street Journal essay "The Profound Connection Between Easter and Passover," R. R. Reno wrote:

The Passover Seder recalls and celebrates the resurrection of the people of Israel.

Today we tend to think of slavery strictly as an injustice, which of course it is, and some modern Seders treat the Passover as the triumph of justice over oppression. But this is not the traditional view. In the ancient world, slavery was not just a hardship for individuals but a kind of communal death. An enslaved nation can survive for a time, perhaps, but they have no future. A people in bondage is slowly crushed and extinguished.

In section 17 of his 2d Treatise on Government: “On Civil Government,” John Locke makes the same comparison between being enslaved and death:

And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life: for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power without my consent, would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i. e. make me a slave. To be free from such force is the only security of my preservation; and reason bids me look on him, as an enemy to my preservation, who would take away that freedom which is the fence to it; so that he who makes an attempt to enslave me, thereby puts himself into a state of war with me. He that, in the state of nature, would take away the freedom that belongs to any one in that state, must necessarily be supposed to have a design to take away every thing else, that freedom being the foundation of all the rest; as he that in the state of society, would take away the freedom belonging to those of that society or commonwealth, must be supposed to design to take away from them every thing else, and so be looked on as in a state of war.

The deep reason that enslaving is like murder is that human beings have purposes. And those purposes are a large share of the meaning of their lives. Take away the freedom someone needs to accomplish and much of the meaning of their life is taken away.

Of course there are heroes of inner resistance who refuse to be slaves inwardly even when outwardly they are in chains. Some who were in Hitler's Concentration Camps managed to do this. Nelson Mandela managed to do this. And Jesus managed to do this. 

On the other hand, there are many who are outwardly free, but inwardly are in chains. There are many dramatic examples of this, but I'd like to talk about a more quotidian example of inner chains I see regularly in everyday academic life among the Econ. 

For most who go into academia, the salary they will get in academia is lower than they could get outside. So most who go into academia make that choice in part out of the joy of ideas, a burning desire for self-expression, a genuine fascination with learning how the world works, or out of idealism—the hope of making the world a better place through their efforts. But by the time those who are successful make it through the long grind of graduate school, getting a job and getting tenure, many have had that joy of ideas, desire for self-expression, thirst for understanding and idealism snuffed out. For many their work life has become a checklist of duties plus the narrow quest for publications in top journals. This fading away of higher, brighter goals betrays the reasons they chose academia in the first place.  

For those who are still nearer the beginning than the end of the gauntlet of graduate school, getting a job and getting tenure, please make a plan for how you will keep alive through the years ahead the joy of ideas, the desire for self expression, the thirst for understanding, the idealism that burn bright within you now! Do what you need to for your career, but promise yourself that your concessions to the system will be temporary. Don't lose your soul in the process of fulfilling degree requirements, getting a job and getting tenure. 

For those of you who already have tenure, and can recognize your worklife even a little bit in the description "a checklist of duties plus the narrow quest for publications in top journals," please find a way to break your inner chains before time makes them thicker and stronger! Then help others to break their chains or to steer clear of these inner chains altogether. 

It is not as if publishing in top journals is in the opposite direction from the higher, brighter goals we had at the start, but as Jesus said:

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. (Matthew 7:13)

Treating publishing in top journals as the end itself is off target. It is the broad road that leads to the destruction of much of your potential for joy, self-expression, understanding and doing good in the world. Putting the higher, brighter goals first—with publications as only one of several tools for achieving those goals—is the narrow gate to joy, self-expression, understanding and doing good. 

Update April 30, 2017: I wrote a follow-up post, "Leaving a Legacy."

Quality Repartee: Louis Brandeis

My new colleague at the University of Colorado Boulder, Philip Graves, pointed me to this wonderful snippet. I can't vouch for its truth, but I want it to be true:

Louis Brandeis graduated from the Harvard Law School at age 20 with the highest grade point average in that school’s history and, after other academic triumphs, was appointed Supreme Court justice. When Brandeis was studying law at Harvard, an anti-Semitic professor by the name of Peters always displayed animosity towards him. One day Prof. Peters was having lunch at the University dining room when Brandeis came along with his tray and sat next to him. The professor said, “Mr. Brandeis you do not understand. A pig and a bird do not sit together to eat.” Brandeis looked at him and calmly replied, "Don’t worry, professor. I'll fly away," and he went and sat at another table.

Peters, decided to take revenge on the next test paper, but Brandeis responded brilliantly to all questions. Unhappy and frustrated, Peters asked him the following question: "Mr Brandeis, if you were walking down the street and found a package, a bag of wisdom and another bag with a lot of money, which one would you take?" Without hesitating, Brandeis responded, "The one with the money, of course." Peters, smiling sarcastically, said, “Just like a Jew. Unlike you I would have taken the wisdom." Brandeis shrugged indifferently and responded, "Each one takes what he doesn't have."

Prof. Peters hate for the Jewish student came to a finale when he scribbled on his student’s final exam the word "idiot" and handed it back to him. A few minutes later, Louis Brandeis got up, went to the professor and said to him in a dignified but sarcastically polite tone, "Prof. Peters, you autographed the exam sheet, but you did not give me a grade...”

Reiko Sakurai Interviews Chris Sims about Japanese Fiscal and Monetary Policy →

The title to this post is a link. Via Makoto Shimizu, who has translated many of my posts on monetary policy into Japanese here. Be sure to read my post "Negative Rates and the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level" in conjunction with this interview. For more background, see "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide," which in addition to links about negative interest rate policy generally, contains several links to posts about Japan's policies.