There is no cake-stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Here. Paul Krugman writes about the virtues of black forest cake versus regular vanilla sponge. While I disagree with Paul on the merits of chocolate chip distribution, I found this to be an enjoyable piece.
Caveat emptor, but do read the whole thing.
PS - Humblane S. Arcadian has written a beguiling book on the bakery practices in pre-industrial Abkhazia. Self-recommending.
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Comments
Scott Sumner: I thought we had all agreed that if you have not reached your cake eating target, then by definition you are not eating enough cake.
Aziz: In the future, all cakes will be produced using solar-powered 3-D printers.
Greg Ransom: Hayek believed that prices were important because they conveyed information. Note well, cake prices are prices in inter-temporal disequilibrium. Scott writes: "by definition you are not eating enough cake".
Noahpinion. Derpity derp derp. #kthxbye
Unlearning Econ: When you get down to it, Cake Libertarianism is just Cake Marxism without the good bits.
Brad DeLong: Niall Ferguson is the stupidest man alive. Yours, Brad DeLong.
Major Freedom: OMG. LOL. Krugman is such an idiot. He doesn't understand the... [several lengthy paragraphs later] ... human-action axiom.
Lord Keynes: Major Freedom is a risible liar. These figures from Davidson et al. show that Hayek failed in his account to justify a natural cake rising rate. C.f. The arguments of Sraffa (1932).
Major Freedom: LK, why do you hate freedom?
Blue Aurora: Dear Firstname Lastname, have you read Dr Michael Emmett Brady on optimal cake consumption? PS - Did you receive my email?
Bob Murphy: Whaaaat? This is a typical Krugman Kupkake Kontradiction. Look at this recipe from Martha Stewart (link). I'm not saying that the data say I'm right. I'm saying that the data say I'm not wrong in a way that says Krugman is not totally right.
Daniel Kuehn: I'm puzzled by the reference to Wicksillian cake recipes within a Kaleckian framework. This just seems an opportune moment for navel gazing by the Kaldorian's to me.
Steve Keen: What the neoclassical cake theory fails to acknowledge is that Hicks rejected his initial recipe formulation in later life. Minsky taught us that baking is de-baking. Also, I predicted the crisis.
Grant McDermott: It's such a pity to see people neglect the in situ evaluation of cakes. Just ask yourself whether "flour" is the same thing as "a flower"? The answer, I trust, is self-evident.
ECONOMISTHULK: HULK LIKE CAKE. SMASH NONCAKE. THINK WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHAT CAKE IZ BETER
ReplyDelete"Minsky taught us that baking is de-baking. Also, I predicted the crisis."
ReplyDelete:-) :-)
Nick Rowe: Imagine a pure service economy. I scratch your cake, your scratch mine.
Warren Mosler: Black Forest Cake is fixed exchange paradigm. See my Soft Cake Economics, MMT 1st Generation.
Asymptosis: cake is not added in Monetary aggregates. The Fed is not printing cakes.
Frances Coppolla: Cake making is deflationary #cakedebate
Morgan Warstler: I hate to cook my own cake but ... cook cook. Have you EVER seen a Vegas cake making operation?
Pawel Morski: Cake Making is not that simple.
Keep 'em coming! I had meant to do one's for Nick Rowe and Warstler, but don't think I would have improved on those :-)
ReplyDeleteIzabella Kaminska: Because of cake repos, there is a safe cake shortage. Also Zero Hedge was the last to get this point.
ReplyDeleteKaiser: Cake is the only way to escape the tyranny of paper-blinded FRANKEN-GOVERNMENTS. Also, I'm opening a chain of bakeries in the morning.
ReplyDeleteZero Hedge: The Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group are out to take your cake. Buy gold. Only gold can save you.
ReplyDeleteIf you fail to feed the cake maker,the flour maker or the chickens & cows then enjoy your last cake
ReplyDeleteCakebug: the government can print all the money it wants, but cake for the Romans is STILL CAKE.
ReplyDeleteTheStalwart: THESE 10 AMAZING ALTERNATIVE CAKE RECIPES WILL CHANGE THE WORLD OF CAKE-MAKING AS WE KNOW IT
ReplyDeleteDean Baker: Typical of our press to use experts who tell you which cake is best, without disclosing the expert's connections to the cake industry. Oh and btw, f-ck Robert Samuelson.
Martin Wolf: If some sector is eating more cakes than it is baking, another sector is baking more cakes than it is eating.
ReplyDeleteGavyn Davies: Lord Turner's idea of Overt Cake Making (OCM) is dangerous.
Greg Mankiw: My Harvard colleagues send an open cake to Paul. Update: Econbrowser bakes in.
CalculatedRisk: Cake production increased this week. Friday Release: Cake industry employment numbers.
Beowulf: According to § 5112 (k) of Chapter 51 of Title 31, Subtitle IV of the U.S. Code, the Treasury Secretary may mint any cake as the Treasury Secretary wishes.
ReplyDeleteEzra Klein: The Treasury won't mint the cake.
Bill Black: What all the pundits are missing is that this cake dilemma is really just flat out fraudulent criminal behavior that should be prosecuted.
ReplyDeleteYves Smith: The plutocratic cake eaters have no idea what it's like to make cake day after day, and it's the fault of this corrupt system where the elites eat the cake they want while the cake makers suffer.
The Limerick King: Krugman says "Let's all eat cake"/ We'll prosper the more that we bake/ Yes we'll get fat/ Don't worry 'bout that/ It proves that our growth isn't fake
ReplyDeleteIt would be really, really hard for cake prices to be in any kind of intertemporal disequilibrium to any relevant degree.
ReplyDeleteAlso, prices do *not* convey information in the sense of univocal 'given data' that moves in a ribboned box from one place to another. That's why prices are mere signals, not boxes of 'information'. Different individuals judge signals individually based on individual understandings of local conditions and networks of price relations -- prices don't send everyone univocal "information" in ribboned boxes.
OK, this is a MUCH better Greg Ransom parody than in the OP.
DeleteGreg, this is either some ridiculously good meta trolling or...eh...
DeleteOut-Ransomed by Ransom!
DeleteThere are many superb additions to my initial list (e.g. "TheStalwart" and "Dean Baker" by Unknown above). Still, this contribution is probably my favourite.
Mattias Vernengo: Traditional cake models have been shown to be logically and empirically irrelevant by Turner (1973), who showed that total factor caketivity is really just the weighted average of the ingredients and does not explain a statistically significant amount of the variation in cake making.
ReplyDeleteRobert Vienneau: A lot of ignorance on display in this thread. Nick Rowe would do well to read, for example, McGregor and Watt (1996) who showed that cake equilibrium is only stable under restrictive conditions. We might also consider the relevance of egg-switching, which can be shown to disrupt even basic models.
For those who know it, a typical Naked Capitalism thread:
F. Beard: the bankers and government are in a cake counterfeiting cartel. Fortunately there is a solution: the government can produce its own UNFLAVOURED cake backed by taxes, then we can have a free market in other types of cakes.
Some guy: the cake is not cooking properly because we have a kleptocracy. The kleptocratic elites have looted all the ingredients and now kleptocracy kleptocracy.
Skippy: cake eh? Guess the chickens are coming home to roost...or is it bake?
skippy...cake's for the little people...cook it til you forget it all
Barkley Rosser: It's all Obama's fault but we'd better vote for him. Also, stronger unions.
ReplyDeleteBrenda Rosser: Civilisation is doomed.
Peter Dorman: Something basically sensible about the Euro that is considered completely outrageous by German politicians.
Sandwichman: this 18th century pamphlet explains why the lump-of-labour fallacy is Hitler and isn't a fallacy. Listen to me!
Fair enough.
ReplyDeleteThe cake is a lie
ReplyDeleteMark Thoma:
ReplyDeleteHere are 40 links to cake!
James Hamilton: The recent rise in cake inventories in Cushing, Oklahoma combined with the ongoing negative premium on West Texas Chocolate vs Brent Sponge suggests cake prices will remain depressed for some time.
ReplyDeleteDave Giles: I disapprove of the "cookbook" approach to baking cake.
Peter Schiff: The Fed's QCB (quantitative cake baking) is just rampant cake printing and will lead to a total U.S. bakery collapse. Send your cakes to my firm and we'll invest them somewhere safe. Or maybe eat them, mmmmm.
ReplyDeleteThomas Herndon: In their seminal paper, "Cake in a time of debt", Reinhart and Rogoff have mislead their readers by intentionally excluding cakes with sprinkles from their data set. In addition, they appear to have inadvertently excluded nearly 13 (A Baker's Dozen) bakeries through a formula error in their spreadsheet. As a result, their conclusion to shift fully to cupcake production is not supported by their data and many bakeries have mistakenly shifted production, some even to cookies.
ReplyDeleteAnat Admati: The size of cakes has grown to large - they need to be cut up.
ReplyDeleteJanet Yellen: Reducing the problem of obesity is complex. Ending obseity will require steadfast implementation by global regulators over the next few years of the work already in train. Some have proposed sweeping ideas, such as making portions smaller. I am not pursuaded that this is the most efficient way to address the problem. It may be appropriate to increase the tax on large cakes forcing gluttons to internalize the cost of their subsequent obesity.
Joe Scarborough: The cake is being cut into too many pieces and if we don't stop, the whole thing will crumble.
ReplyDeleteMika Brzenzki: um. Oh.
Prof Sinn: The German Bakery risks losing all cake claims on foreigners.
ReplyDeleteKarl Whelan: Prof Sinn is wrong. What happens is that cake is settled via the TARGET2 mechanism and the German exporter receives payment in his bank [....]. Watch out for cake hypertemperatistas in comments below mine.
FT Alphaville: "The" presentation on German Bakery (refering to Karl Whelan).
George Soros: The German Bakery has 6 weeks left. Germany should move forward in baking Euro cake bonds.
Perry Mehrling: What we need to understand is the metalist view versus the cake view. There should be a baker of the last resort in the markets.
Slackwire: From an income-expenditure perspective, saying future cake digestion effects have an effect on cake baking is a strong assumption.
Roubini: German cakes will soon sell in V-shapes, W-shapes and Square-root shapes.
Winterspeak: Don't understand the cake debate. Loans create deposits. Period.
Felix Salmon: I like Tumblr cakes. Hblodget's cakes are over-aggregated cakes.
Henry Blodget: Here is the picture of the cake from my flight to Geneva.
Clive Crook: Krugman has all the chocolate, but it's unsweetened. The white cake eaters will never join him for desert.
ReplyDeleteOh come now, someone has to do a Menzie Chinn.
ReplyDeleteThis is just brilliant. All of it!
ReplyDeleteGreg Mankiw: The 12th edition of my favorite textbook is updated with cake pics
ReplyDeleteDavid Brooks: Each cakes knows its place in the social hierarchy