There are days when I wish Wordperfect 5.1 was still around

That is all.

Economists and the public are both right about free trade

Noahpinion has a nice post this morning on how the public doesn't trust economists.  Exhibit A:

"Free trade" is the one issue on which economists - at least, American economists - famously agree. And yet, substantial majorities of Americans think that free trade has hurt them. In the Zingales paper, trade was the issue where there was the greatest divergence between economists and the public. How can the common people disagree so sharply with the overwhelming expert consensus? Are the common people simply a bunch of flat-earthers who refuse to look at the evidence? Or do they have a point?

The workhorse model of trade is the Heckscher-Olin model.   The model predicts that trade leads to higher output for the countries that trade.  I actually think that this is hard to dispute.  But the model also predicts that when a country opens up trade, its scarcer factor of production winds up worse off.  In the case of a capital intensive country like the United States, Heckscher-Olin predicts that returns to capital will rise and returns to labor will fall.  The return to capital rising is greater than the return to labor falling, so the size of the pie increases.  Nevertheless, without redistribution, trade makes labor (particularly unskilled labor) in the US worse off.

When the US was going through the process of trade liberalization, workers were promised that the damage imposed on them would be mitigated by Trade Adjustment Assistance.  To say that the program is too small to be effective is an understatement.  The only way to effectively offset the harm done to workers via trade is with redistribution that leaves workers at least as well off as they were before trade liberalization.  Note that such redistribution would still leave owners of capital better off than they would be in the absence of liberalized trade.

I continue to have the view that on balance open trade is a good thing--among other things, it almost certainly reduces the probability of war breaking out, and this is pretty valuable in and of itself.  But when many Americans think trade has made them worse off, they are not being unreasonable.

Why Moneyball and Nate Silver work, but derivatives don't

I find Nassim Taleb's style annoying, and he often mischaracterizes the views of others.  But when I teach my mortgage backed securities course, I have my students read the Black Swan because of an important point he makes (over and over again): some things are well characterized by distribution functions with small numbers of sufficient statistics (such as mean and variance), while other things are not.

With baseball and politics, we can fully characterize the distribution of outcomes (or at least come close enough to doing so).  With financial markets, we really cannot.  What is sad is that many people disdain  the insights of statistical inference when it really works; others embrace such inference when it does not.

Will we ever learn?

Is allowing banks to count Mortgage Backed Securities as capital really a good idea?

The V-shaped nature of the Fiscal Cliff Fix

Here is a first approximation of the change in effective tax rates [for a single taxpayer] as a result of the deal (the effective rates   are based on changes in payroll and income taxes).

The builds in a 2 percentage point increase in payroll taxes us to the income cap of $110,100, and a 4.9 percentage point increase in marginal tax rates above $400,000.  The rates actually rise a teeny bit faster for those above the $400,000 threshold, because the tax on capital gains is increasing by 5 percentage points, but this doesn't change the basic point of the picture, which is that it is not until income reaches around $560,000 that the change in effective tax rates at the high end of the distribution match the rate at the low end. [note: y-axis is the change in effective tax rates].

In the glass half-full department...

(1) Grover Norquist must be pissed.

(2) If I understand the deal, Mitt Romney's taxes go up by about 33 percent.

[update: GN says he is happy because R's voted for tax cut.  Oh well].

How we are not all in it together in a small, but perhaps meaningful, way

The Rose Bowl is not longer on ABC, but rather ESPN, meaning that for someone to watch the oldest bowl game, they must be able to pay for cable TV.

One of the cliches about sports that I actually believe is that sports provide something the CEO and Custodian can talk about, thus producing social cohesion across economic classes.  But for this to be true, it need to be easy for everyone to watch.