Links (6/14/19)

• Is Labour’s fiscal policy rule neoliberal? - mainly macro That is the charge some on the left, particularly followers a movement called MMT, have laid against Labour's Fiscal Credibility Rule (FCR). MMT stands for nothing very informative, but it is a non-mainstream left-wing macroeconomic school of thought. Bill Mitchell, one of the leading lights of MMT, has run a relentless campaign against the FCR through his blog. As my own work with Jonathan Portes helped provide the intellectual foundation for the FCR, I will try and explain why I find the neoliberal charge nonsensical. ...
• Bill Mitchell's fantasy about Labour's fiscal rule - mainly macro My last post about outlandish attacks from some MMTers on Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule (FCR) was designed to be read by non-economists, and I didn’t want to bore them or waste space with all the fantasies Bill Mitchell has spread about the rule. But as I’ve had one of those fantasies tweeted back to me many times in response, I want to lay it to rest here. ...
• The Economist Who Helped Me Find My Calling - Larry Summers Martin S. Feldstein was a great economist who changed the world through research, teaching, public service, hundreds of op-eds in these pages over 40 years, and leadership of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ...
• Paying for the Welfare State Without Raising Taxes - Roger E.A. Farmer Despite the old economic adage that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is a way for governments to finance social-welfare programs without imposing a higher burden on taxpayers. National treasuries should establish Social Care Funds that borrow money at low interest rates and invest the proceeds in the stock market.
• Still Less Transitory Than Persistent - Tim Duy The soft CPI numbers for April throw some cold water on the Fed’s expectation that recent weak inflation data will prove to be transitory.
• What Automation Means for the Gender Gap - Laura Tyson & Mekala Krishnan Within the next decade, rapid advances in artificial intelligence and automation will radically upend the labor market, replacing millions of jobs with new occupations that will require new technical skills. For women, the challenge is especially acute, because they will still face all the usual obstacles to gender parity at work. 
• Teaching Introductory Economics - IGM Forum Question A: The first required class for undergraduate economics majors at my university accurately reflects the way that economists think about a range of economics problems. Question B: The first required class for undergraduate economics majors at my university addresses the most pressing economic issues in the US.
• More Tributes to Clive Granger - Dave Giles As a follow-up to my recent post, "Clive Granger Special Issue", I received an email from Eyüp Çetin (Editor of the European Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics). ...
• Summer Reading!  - Economic Principals Economic Principals is not exactly a model of modern online journalism. It is instead a simulacrum of what went on at the old Boston Globe (for a real-time jolt, see It must have been moonglow, by Mark Feeney, the newspaper’s chief arts critic.) As an early immigrant from print to bits and pixels, EP was too well habituated to writing newspaper columns during the week and books on the weekends to want to do anything else. As the world changed around it, the way EP allocates its time has gradually reversed, but little else is different. ...