Monthly Archives: May 2010

Nice post by Brad DeLong on the Fed, Bernie Sanders, and Obama

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Excellent post, that I agree with, by Brad DeLong on the Fed, Bernie Sanders' amendment to the Dodd financial regulation bill, calling for regular GAO audits of the Feds deliberations and communications related to setting and implementing, and transactions implementing, monetary policy.

Delong writes "...I am willing to defer to President Obama's judgment that the Federal Reserve's desire for a modicum of central banker privilege is worth respecting, and that the Sanders amendment is the wrong treatment for the disease. I am willing to do so, in large part, because I think the problems are not those that detailed routine investigations of staff communications would solve: the staff of the Federal Reserve do, it seems to me, overwhelmingly have a reality-based vision of the economy, conduct thorough and appropriate analyses of risks and scenarios, and understand the Federal Reserve's dual mandate."

The problem according to Brad is rather that "I do not think that the dominant views of monetary policy in the FOMC right now are informed by American values and a reality-based assessment of the state of the economy.  [...] a good many of the people speaking and voting in the FOMC are the wrong people".

And Obama hasn't done enough to fix this, with five of the seven seats on the Fed's Board of Governors that have opened up while he's been president still unfilled (and one filled by reappointing Ben Bernanke, a decent centrist choice who Brad thinks shouldn't be the left wing of the FOMC at this point.

Too much conventional supposedly-conservative "wisdom", in other words, too much coziness with financial institutions and, I guess, too much worry about inflation even in the depths of recession, from this Fed Board.

Weighing on the other side of the Sanders amendment issue, perhaps, is this via Paul Krugman.

Good recent quantum information, computation, foundations talks

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I must store some references to good recent talks, in part so I don't forget them:

Two talks by Tsuyoshi Ito:  an IQC theory lunch talk about how the complexity class defined by interactive proof systems with two provers who may share *arbitrary non-signaling correlations* (rather than just quantum ones) with each other, turns out to be PSPACE.  Communication between verifier and provers is classical.  This is the same class as that defined by quantum interactive proof systems (for any fixed number of provers, but *without* shared correlations, quantum or otherwise)---a result due (at least the hard direction, that PSPACE is contained in QIP) to Jain, Ji, Upadhyay, and Watrous).  Very nice stuff.  (Note that as far as I know it doesn't imply that two-prover proof systems with classical communication between verifier and provers, but verifiers sharing quantum entanglement, is in PSPACE.  Although this latter model gives the verifiers, collectively, strictly less power, the reduction in their collective power could increase the power of the proof system:  crudely speaking, the provers might have less power to attempt to coordinate in bamboozling the verifier into wrongly accepting.

The really kooky, like me, might ask, what if we allow the communication between verifiers and provers to involve exchanging the kinds of systems involved in the provers' shared non-signaling correlations.  "Popescu-Rohrlich bits", or generalizations involving larger numbers of outcomes per measurement, and larger numbers of measurements.  (States of "semiclassical test spaces", in a different lingo.)

Tsuyoshi's other talk was an informal one at the quantum information group meeting at PI, about XOR games with more than two players.  More on it later.

A few weeks ago Stephanie Wehner gave us a lovely informal quantum foundations seminar on a recent paper she wrote with Jonathan Oppenheim, whose thesis is that if quantum theory were more nonlocal it would violate uncertainty relations.  The uncertainty relations involved are a new type she (and Andreas Winter?) introduced, called "finegrained uncertainty relations".  I'll try to summarize this talk in a later post, too.