How Having Negative Interest Rate Policy in Its Toolkit Would Make the Fed Braver in Confronting Inflation with Needed Rate Hikes—A Tweetstorm

DALL-E: "Federal Reserve in the style of Picasso" pic.twitter.com/HVX6mlMWBZ

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 29, 2022

Thanks, to Torsten Slok for highlighting that passage in Jerome Powell's remarks.

My prediction: when the Fed changes its inflation target many years from now, it will revise it downward, not upward. With a robust negative interest rate policy and a "Share Economy," 0 is best.

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 18, 2022

Other than the self-imposed zero lower bound or false "effective lower bound" on rates imposed by central banks on themselves & sticky wages unmitigated by Martin Weitzman's approach, there is no strong reason for any other inflation target than zero. Absolute price stability!

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 18, 2022

First, having barred itself from using negative rates, the Fed felt turned instead to "forward guidance" to provide pandemic stimulus. That is, it promised not to raise rates soon. Then to keep its promise, it didn't raise rates quickly even when inflation was ramping up.

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 18, 2022

On all of this, see:https://t.co/zXAx4ThVARhttps://t.co/YtT8DhjA4i

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 18, 2022

I've organized what I've written on negative interest rate policy here:https://t.co/Xz2vUwkPuS

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 18, 2022

A Wide-Ranging and Thorough Interview of Miles by K. V. Krishna →

Link to the YouTube video shown above

Measuring Progress & Well-being: Is GDP Growth Enough? →

Link to this video on YouTube

This discussion gives a good sense of the state of thinking on developing national well-being measures as a counterpoint to GDP.

'Expanded Contraceptive Access Linked To Increase In College Completion Among Women In Colorado'— Sara Yeatman, James Flynn, Amanda Stevenson, Katie Genadek, Stefanie Mollborn and Jane Menken →

Link to the page shown above. The article is ungated.

This seems like a nice example to illustrate to undergraduates one identification strategy.

Why the Number 0 was Banned for 1500 years—Up and Atom →

h/t Joseph Kimball

Mormons are the Most Conservative Major Religious Group in US—Frank Newport →

h/t Samuel Hammond

David Ludwig: Not 'Calories In Minus Calories Out Causes Weight Gain,’ but ‘Weight Gain Causes Calories In Minus Calories Out’ →

This is a great explainer. If you doubt the claim above at all, make sure to read this excellent, brief interview.

For more on these topics, see my bibliographic post “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.”

Miles's Tweetstorm of Favorite Passages from Noah Smith's Review of Brad DeLong's book ‘Slouching Towards Utopia’

https://twitter.com/mileskimball/status/1602332992231378945

"Brad DeLong has an encyclopedic command of modern economic history, and an inimitable writing style — it was his blog, back in the mid-2000s, that first inspired me to want to become an econ blogger myself."

Blog envy when Brad visited U of MI was a key inspiration for me, too

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

"Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin’s How the World Became Rich, Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth, Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, & Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth"https://t.co/FdXHnY67o0

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

"thanks to rapidly accelerating growth, humanity was rapidly confronted with newfound wealth beyond their previous imaginings, new possibilities for social organization, new problems, new opportunities, and new distributions of economic power."https://t.co/FdXHnY67o0

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

"Hayekian free markets create growth, but people want more — they want their Polanyian social protections. So they create systems like communism, fascism, or liberal democracy, designed to temper the market’s natural inequality and bring about a better society."

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

"DeLong’s vision of history is also a powerfully optimistic one. For many, it’s hard to look at the horrors of the 20th century — the concentration camps, the bombed-out cities, the despoiled landscapes — and not see a narrative of the Fall of Man."https://t.co/FdXHnY67o0

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

Dall-E https://t.co/Q5eij9zgGO AI stained-glass window of "Rough Beasts Slouching Towards an Industrial Utopia. pic.twitter.com/kPzqMsSN5a

— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) December 12, 2022

Global Population Density—Visual Capitalist

h/t Brad DeLong

How Can Professors Do Writing Assignments in the Era of ChatGPT?—Daniel Herman →

One idea I had was to have students write down the instructions they gave to ChatGPT, then the ChatGPT output and then critique the ChatGPT output. This raises the question: Can ChatGPT “critique” its own output as a second round thing?

Brad DeLong Boils Down the Spine of Economic History in One Table

Source: Brad DeLong

The Bulk of Agricultural Land is Currently Devoted to Not-So-Healthy Crops

Hat tip to Brad DeLong for this graphic

Grain is a huge fraction of US agriculture by land area. In general, grain has quite a high insulin index and so tends to lead to obesity in those who are genetically vulnerable—which is most people. See “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.” Oil is another big use for agricultural land.

Notes:

• Oats have one of the lower insulin indexes among grains.

• Among oils, sunflower oil, canola oil (=rapeseed oil) and peanut oil have a higher ratio of monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fat than soybean oil or corn oil. (See the table here.) There is a greater consensus for monounsaturated fat being healthy than for polyunsaturated fat being healthy.

• It is important to have young children eat peanut based foods as soon as they are eating solid food in order to help avoid peanut allergies.

• See more links on diet and health in “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.”