Monday assorted links, comments, and jabs
1. A claim that we are in a new world of RBC theory.
2. Orson Welles on Woody Allen.
3. Indian books published in English translation in 2023.
4. By the way, the strongest movie actor GOAT contenders from abroad are Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, Mifune, Juliette Binoche, Isabel Huppert, Marcello Mastroianni, Klaus Kinski, and Max von Sydow. Chow Yun-Fat and Max von Sydow are my personal favorites, though I am not sure they are foreign winners in more objective terms. British people don’t count for this designation, though Charlie Chaplin is a good dark horse pick (though not the winner) for the broader designation. I can’t bring myself to mention the Putin lover from France. Mel Gibson is higher in the rankings than many people wish to admit, and he is Australian, sort of, though most of all a creature of Hollywood. Bollywood is a whole separate thing, but they have some definite contenders. As for Marlon Brando, I think too many of his performances now come across as excessively mannered. Where is his cult following? Somewhere in Osaka? He was very talented but seems of the past.
5. Any “very heavy” reliance on real shocks to explain the macro of the last two years has to account for why 2021 had high growth rates, in spite of supply chains then being quite tangled. And why prices haven’t gone back down to their original levels? And what happened to aggregate demand, once the Fed turned its attention to the problem? There simply was a huge, negative AD shock in recent times, at least under any non-tautological definition of aggregate demand. Why didn’t that crush us? Any account needs to address these issues.