Month: October 2014

Secular Stagnation

Princeps Cogitationis: If I am going to hold down my consulting and speech-making jobs, I need to understand what Larry Summers is talking about here:

Larry Summers: What to do about secular stagnation?

But it is too long! 3000 words! Help! What can I do?

Oeconomicarus: But I thought you read 300 books a year?

Princeps Cogitationis: I read the last chapter of 300 books a year. Then I read three short reviews of each. And then I opine fearlessly. Working through a difficult 3000-word argument and assessing it is not a good use of my time.

Oeconomicarus: So you want me to use my time enlightening you so that you can stamp your brand on my thoughts and make money off of them?

Princeps Cogitationis: Exactly!

Oeconomicarus: Were you not a literary figure of my rhetorical imagination, and did my Demiurge not have the opportunity to attempt to use twenty first-century communications technologies to leverage this dialogue across an audience global in scope, I would tell you to go where you deserve.

Princeps Cogitationis: But you won’t, will you?

**Oeconomicarus: No

Princeps Cogitationis: Well?

Knut Wicksell: You need to start by recognizing that financial markets powerfully influenced by central banks set the economy’s (safe) real interest rate; that when this market (safe) real interest rate is below the economy’s current “natural” interest rate we have (unexpected) inflation; that when this market (safe) real interest rate is above the economy’s current “natural” interest rate we have depression; and that when this market (safe) real interest rate is at the economy’s current “natural” interest rate we have prosperity (and stable inflation)…

Speculatoricus: And you need to start by recognizing that one factor that can raise the economy’s current (safe) “natural” interest rate is wild and enthusiastic financial overspeculation–but that such “bubbles” can do so only temporarily and unsustainably…

Accumulator: And you need to start by recognizing that no matter what it does the central bank cannot push the market (safe) real interest rate below -π, where π is the current rate of inflation. Because savers can always hoard goods or cash, the market nominal interest rate cannot fall below zero, which means the market (safe) real interest rate cannot be less than the rate of inflation.

Princeps Cogitationis: The four of you have lost me.

Oeconomicarus: (To Speculator, Accumulator, and Knut Wicksell) SHUT UP!! (to Princeps Cogitationis): The central bank controls the market interest rate, and needs to set it no higher than the economy’s natural interest rate to avoid depression. But when inflation is low, the natural interest rate may be so negative that even when the central bank pushes the market interest rate to zero it still doesn’t do the job! OK?

Princeps Cogitationis: OK. But what is this about bubbles and inflation?

Oeconomicarus: If the natural interest rate in terms of money is stuck at less than zero, a higher rate of inflation can raise it and bubble psychology can raise it–both make people less eager to hold cash and more eager to put their money to work, and so both raise the natural interest rate in terms of money, and then the central bank can do its job of avoiding depression.

Princeps Cogitationis: But?

Oeconomicarus: Bubbles are, by their nature, unsustainable–hence not a permanent solution–and disruptive. They are not a good answer to a situation in which the economy’s natural rate of interest is less than zero. Price stability–an inflation rate of 2%/year or less–is also a good thing to have: it makes business and other economic decisions more rational. Hence if at low inflation the non-bubble natural rate of interest in money terms gets stuck less than zero, we have a big macroeconomic problem. Larry Summers says that it is, and we do.

Princeps Cogitationis: So what is the way out?

Oeconomicarus: One way is a higher inflation target than our current 2%/year–or actually 1.75%/year–but Larry doesn’t like that for some reason. The second way is: “increased public investment, reduction in structural barriers to private investment… promot[ing] business confidence”. The third way is: “basic social protections so as to maintain spending power… reduc[ing] inequality… redistribut[ing] income towards those with a higher propensity to spend…”

Clio: Seems to me that I have heard of these three before…

Oeconomicarus: Yes. The third is basically J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism–that an unequal income distribution either required governments to dissipate huge amounts of wealth in conquest and colonization or suffer chronic depression. The second is, in a way, Hayek: that when the long-run rate of profit is not high enough to support the roundabout investments made, overaccumulation is inevitable, and it will then lead to necessary depressions. And the first is basically Friedman’s monetarist k%/year money-stock growth rule as a “neutral” monetary policy, with the in petto corollary that the money-stock growth rate has to be high enough to give enough of an incentive to spend liquid assets for monetarism to gain traction…

Princeps Cogitationis: So why is the problem showing up now?

Oeconomicarus: Summers:

Slower population and possibly technological growth means a reduction in the demand for new capital…. Lower-priced capital goods means… given… saving… purchase[s] more capital…. Iconic cutting edge companies have traditionally needed to go the market to support expansion. Today leading edge companies like Apple and Google are attacked for holding on to huge cash hoards. Rising inequality… raise[s]… income going to those with a lower propensity to spend…. Greater risk aversion… and increased regulatory burdens… debt overhangs… increased uncertainty discourages borrowing… raise the wedge between safe liquid rates and rates charged to borrowers…

Jean-Baptiste Say: But the market can fix it, right? I mean, as long as there are any ways to durably store purchasing power, all you have to do is push the real interest rate below zero for long enough and demand for investment in such storage will rise to get us to full employment, right?

Oeconomicarus: Not if a lack of trust in financial markets creates a failure to mobilize the economy’s risk-bearing capacity…

Thrasymachus: How much would you trust Citigroup or JPMC right now if it told you it had a gold-plated risk-free profitable long-run investment vehicle that you could buy?

Princeps Cogitationis: So if we don’t fix this, what happens to us?

Oeconomicarus: Perhaps a 15% reduction in our prosperity relative to what we might have attained, followed by permanently slower growth thereafter:

Potential output has declined almost everywhere and in near lockstep with declines in actual output…. When enough investment is discouraged in physical capital, work effort and new product innovation… ‘Lack of Demand creates Lack of Supply’… potential declines, the [natural rate of interest] rises, restoring equilibrium, albeit not a very good one…

Princeps Cogitationis: Suppose I sign up for Summers’s “Third Way” policy of radical income redistribution on the first hand, restoration of business confidence and increases in the rate of profit via the government providing various puts to risk-takers and entrepreneurs on the second hand, and aggressive expansionary infrastructure-oriented fiscal policy on the third hand–and it doesn’t work. What is wrong with a higher inflation target?

Apollo: I must say, it does seem rather Delphic: Summers says:

Even if the zero interest rate constraint does not literally bind, there is the possibility that the positive interest rate consistent with full employment is not consistent with financial stability. Low nominal and real interest rates… increase risk taking as investors reach for yield, promote irresponsible lending as coupon obligations become very low and easy to meet, and make Ponzi financial structures more attractive as interest rates look low relative to expected growth rates…. Operating with a higher inflation rate target… or… finding ways such as quantitative easing that operate to reduce credit or term premiums… are also likely to increase financial stability risks…

Oeconomicarus: Perhaps it is best to say that effective price stability–the expectation of stable 2%/year inflation–is a very costly, hard-won, and valuable property of a market economy. It greatly reduces inflation-tax distortions and allows for more accurate economic calculation. It should not lightly be thrown away. And there is no reason to throw it away: progressive income redistribution, the proper mobilization of the economy’s entrepreneurial risk-bearing capacity, and a proper infrastructure-investment oriented fiscal policy can in all likelihood do the full job by themselves.

Princeps Cogitationis: You have just made me sit through a twenty-minute dialogue! I could have read Summers’s original piece in ten minutes!

Thrasymachus: But you wouldn’t have read it, would you? And if you had you wouldn’t have understood it because you would still be ignorant of the proper intellectual context.

Princeps Cogitationis: But how do I boil this down to soundbites? I need soundbites–preferably scary ones about risks that make people sit up and pay attention!

Oeconomicarus: Sorry. Can’t help you. The secular stagnation income has very high asset prices and healthy profits because the lousy labor market produces a depressed labor share. It’s not very good for entrepreneurs. But it’s not the kind of thing to scare the currently rich–that is one big reason we are right now in it.

Thrasymachus: If you want soundbites, go over there to practice “We just jumped the gun on our forecast of hyperinflation! Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight! Massive debasement from quantitative easing is still great threat! Lowering interest rates is a cause of deflation! The spike in the VIX this October proves it” with John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and company…

Princeps Cogitationis: Douglas Holtz Eakin?

Thrasymachus: Yep: Holtz-Eakin says he is going to declare victory, someday:

“The clever thing forecasters do is never give a number and a date. They are going to generate an uptick in core inflation. They are going to go above 2 percent. I don’t know when, but they will…”

plus:

There once was a Fed that did QE II
But got no growth for me and you
It then doubled its bet
Until it tapered out, yet
They still don’t know what to do

Oeconomicarus: (whimpering) But it was QE III, not QE II (sob)…

Apollo: What October 2014 spike in the VIX?

Thrasymachus: You need to look more closely:

or:

Princeps Cogitationis: But I don’t want my soundbites to be wrong! And I do need soundbites!

Oeconomicarus: Tough…

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1877 words

Matt O’Brien: This is why the economy has fallen and it can’t get up: “The chart… shows how much more pessimistic the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has become about the economy, revising its estimate of potential economic down in each of the last seven years…. This is scary stuff…. If it’s right, it means that the Great Recession has made us permanently poorer…. But why hasn’t this big crash been followed by a big comeback? Well, like everything else in economics, it comes down to two things: supply and demand. Larry Summers, who put this chart together, points out that the economy has needed lower and lower interest rates just to get enough investment to create jobs for everyone who wants one…. Not only that, but this ‘secular stagnation’ could turn deficient demand into deficient supply, too. It’s what economists call hysteresis, and the idea is that a long slump can hurt the economy’s productive capacity…. The economy can’t recover on its own, and if it doesn’t soon it might never be able to. We need more inflation, more infrastructure spending, and less tut-tutting about the deficit that… isn’t an urgent problem….”

Linda Greenhouse: The Roberts Court’s “Greatest Threat to Public Confidence”: “Late on a Friday night earlier this month…

…the Supreme Court voted in another case from Texas to permit the state’s voter ID law, the strictest in the country, to take effect… prevent as many as 600,000 Texans, 4.5 percent of all those registered, from voting next month. The impact, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos found, would fall disproportionately on black and Latino Texans. She ruled that the law violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965…. The six justices who let the stay remain in effect didn’t bother to explain themselves beyond the word ‘denied.’

That left it to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and two others, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, to explain in dissent what was wrong with that outcome…. ‘The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case,’ Justice Ginsburg said, ‘is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.’ A law, in other words, that in the full glare of publicity and on the verge of a highly polarized election, threatens destruction to the social fabric in the most dangerous way, by shutting thousands of citizens out of the democratic process of choosing their leaders.

‘There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders,’ Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court in April of this year. His subject then was the right to spend money in politics, not the right to vote. If people conclude that the current Supreme Court majority cares more about the first than the second–surely a logical inference–the court will have entered a dangerous place. And so–as a conservative justice once realized in another context–will the country.

Paul Krugman: Apologizing to Japan: “For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale…

an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy…. Western economists were scathing in their criticisms…. I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke… was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize…. Our economic analysis… look[s] more relevant than ever now that much of the West has fallen into a prolonged slump very similar to Japan’s experience…. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us….

Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010…. Or consider monetary policy. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has received a lot of criticism…. That criticism is fair, but Japan’s central bank never did anything as wrongheaded as the European Central Bank’s decision to raise rates in 2011…. And even that mistake is trivial compared with the awesomely wrongheaded behavior of the Riksbank….

As for why the West has done even worse than Japan, I suspect that it’s about the deep divisions within our societies. In America, conservatives[‘]… general hostility to… a government that does anything to help Those People. In Europe… the German public is intensely hostile to anything that could be called a bailout of southern Europe…. Japan used to be a cautionary tale, but… [now] it almost looks like a role model…

Jacob Schlesinger: The Kuroda Bazooka, Round Two: “Faced with fresh evidence that his bold campaign…

…to end deflation was losing steam, Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda Friday fired off a fresh round of ammunition from his famed money-spewing bazooka, shocking markets with a big increase in the central bank’s stimulus program. The impact was immediate, with the Nikkei Stock Average soaring more than 4% and the yen dropping sharply to a near-seven-year low against the dollar…. In sharp contrast to Mr. Kuroda’s first major easing announcement in April 2013, shortly after he took office, the central bank’s policy board was deeply split. Last year, he managed to get a 9-0 vote in favor of a policy that broke sharply with his more cautious predecessor. This time, the board voted 5 to 4…. Earlier in the day, the government had announced that the most closely watched gauge of inflation had fallen to 1% in September, having decelerated sharply from the 1.5% peak in April. That’s well below Mr. Kuroda’s 2% target, and showed the limited impact of the stimulus program to date….

Behind the surprise may also lie a broader strategy of economic policy coordination with the government. Before the BOJ announcement, Japanese stocks were up sharply in anticipation of an announcement planned for later in the day that the giant government pension fund would reallocate its portfolio…. And, looming for Mr. Abe is a decision on whether or not to go forward with a plan to raise the sales tax next year to 10% from the current 8%. It was the boost earlier this year… that slowed Japan’s economy and seemed to derail Mr. Kuroda’s earlier success in battling deflation. Mr. Kuroda has been a staunch and public advocate that Japan needs to go forward with the tax hike in order to curb its mammoth sovereign debt. Friday’s move, by providing at least a short-term dose of growth, will likely make it easier for Mr. Abe to take that step.

And:

Jamie Chisholm: Wall St eyes record after BoJ boost: “A surprise fresh burst of stimulus by the Bank of Japan has electrified global markets…

…pushing Wall Street to a record and Tokyo stocks to a seven-year peak, battering the yen while boosting the US dollar, and hammering gold to its cheapest in more than four years…. The yen is slumping 2.6 per cent versus the buck to Y112.04, its weakest since January 2008…. The Nikkei 225 jumped 4.8 per cent to its best level since early November 2007…. In New York, the S&P 500 is up 19 points to 2,013, leaving it on course to close a volatile month at a new record. The FTSE Eurofirst 300 is climbing 1.6 per cent after both Shanghai and Hong Kong added 1.2 per cent. ‘So much for the end of QE! The Bank of Japan’s announcement today that is stepping up its asset purchases is a timely reminder that not everyone has to follow the Fed’, said Julian Jessop, chief global economist at Capital Economics. The impact of the BoJ move is rippling through other asset classes. The most notable victim is gold… [which] does not like a strong buck… $1,163 an ounce, a four-year low.

And:

Joshua Brown: When one door closes…: “This week the Fed ended QE…

…and the stock market has exploded to the upside. The one thing the policy bears may not have counted on was that someone else would cover the Fed’s back as it walked away. That someone else is the Bank of Japan, which shocked the markets this morning with an $80 trillion yen QE program that aims to triple the amount of Japanese equity ETFs and REITs it is buying on the open market. In addition, there is continued talk that the ECB will follow the Fed and the BoJ’s lead with a QE program of its own before too long.
I can’t tell you what these programs will do for the economies of these countries or for the wages and spending of their constituent workers. But it’s pretty clear what happens to their stock markets…. While QE is over for now in the US, it is just getting warmed up around the developing world in many respects…

Cardiff Garcia: Affordable Housing and the Legit Big-City Whinge: “When city-dwellers moan about their high cost of living…

…they often elicit the unsympathetic retort that they should shut up and praise the ghost of Jane Jacobs for the cultural vibrancy of their neighborhoods, the lucrative jobs, and the artisanal pizza: ‘Living in a great city is a consumption good, you whinging ninnies — you SHOULD have to pay for it! Why do you think you’re entitled to live wherever you want?’ Hey, fair enough. But there’s a difference between grumblings about $5 cinnamon macchiatos and the more useful outrage about meaningful troubles that can be solved — a difference between #firstworldproblems and the healthier expression of annoyed patriotism towards one’s habitat: ‘I like living here and want to keep living here, which is why the problems I complain about aren’t enough to push me out. I’d rather stick around and see the problems solved. But those problems suck, so let’s start doing something about them.’ To complain that rents, for instance, could and should be lower isn’t always a sign of yuppie entitlement. Nor is it mutually exclusive with appreciating the wonderful aspects of city life. Sometimes the gripe really is legitimate…

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Mike Konczal: It’s Essential the Federal Reserve Discusses Inequality | Next New Deal
• Gavin Davies: Stress tests alone will not bring the eurozone back to health
• Neil Irwin: Quantitative Easing Is About to End. Here’s What It Did, in Charts
• Lane Kenworthy (2011): How Rich Countries

 

1. Simon Wren-Lewis: In praise of Macroeconomists (or at Least One of Them)): “One of the architects of that macroeconomic mainstream is Lars Svensson… key papers… maths and rational expectations… member of Sweden’s equivalent of the Monetary Policy Committee from 2007 to 2013…. Svensson… argued that there was still plenty of slack in the economy, and raising rates would be deflationary, so that inflation would fall well below the central bank’s target of 2%. By the end of 2012 inflation had indeed fallen to zero, and since then monthly inflation has more often been negative than positive. It was -0.4% in September. This week the Swedish central bank lowered their interest rate to zero…. Deviating from what mainstream macroeconomists in general advocate (and what one in particular recommended) has proved a costly mistake. (Svensson estimates it has cost 60,000 jobs.)… I am certainly not claiming that mainstream macroeconomics is without fault, as regular readers will know (e.g.) However it is important to recognise the achievements of macroeconomics as well as its faults. If we fail to do that, then central banks can start doing foolish things, with large costs in terms of the welfare of its country’s citizens…”

2. Emmanuel Saez and Laura Tyson: Income Inequality in the Twenty-First Century:

3. Jonathan Chait: Yellen Mentions Inequality; Right Scandalized: “Even the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain, a moderate, wrote that Yellen is now ‘in danger of becoming a partisan hack.’… The parties don’t merely disagree about the merits of inequality, they disagree about the merits of even acknowledging it…. Remember Mitt Romney conceding that inequality should only be discussed in ‘quiet rooms’?… Merely by stating facts about inequality in public, even without taking a stand on it, Yellen has placed herself on one side of a partisan divide. It’s like saying ‘Jehovah.’ What Strain does not mention is that Yellen is hardly alone among Federal Reserve chairs…. Hardly a week went by without Greenspan interjecting himself into the political debate. And Greenspan, a former follower of Ayn Rand with staunchly conservative views, had none of Yellen’s careful reserve…. Is the new rule here that, starting now, the Federal Reserve chair has to stay completely out of partisan politics? Or is the rule that they need to stay out of politics unless they’re conservative?”

4. Matt O’Brien: Why the Fed Is Giving Up too Soon on the Economy: “Two years and $1.7 trillion later, the Fed’s latest round of bond-buying, or QE3, is officially over. What did it get us?… The best answer is what it didn’t get us: a recession in 2013…. ‘Fiscal cliff’, ‘sequester’, and ‘debt ceiling’ might be hazy memories from a time when [the Republican House] Congress[ional Caucus] was doing its most to sabotage the recovery, so here’s a refresher…. There’s been an awful lot of austerity the last few years. Enough that the economy should have slowed down quite a bit…. But that’s not what happened…. QE… is the Fed’s way of printing its money where its mouth is when it says rates will stay low for a long time. That’s why, as economist Michael Woodford argued, QE works better when it’s used with forward guidance that makes the Fed’s promises about future policy more explicit. The question, then, is what message the Fed is sending now…”

5. Jon Hilsenrath: Fed Critics Have Been Wrong About QE’s Most Ill Effect: “In an open letter to former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in 2010, a group of prominent academics and hedge fund managers urged the central bank to stop its bond purchases known as quantitative easing…. With the Fed set to end its bond-purchase program today, it is clear those warnings were wrong…. The critics also argued the QE programs distort financial markets. It is hard to prove or disprove that point. Stock market price-to-earnings ratios look stretched by some measures, but not so stretched by others. Junk bond and leveraged loan issuance has taken off, but corporate balance sheets relatively healthy…. But it is easy to see what didn’t happen. Inflation hasn’t taken off and there has been no currency debasement. Perhaps it will happen someday, but the Fed has been experimenting with QE since 2009 and it clearly hasn’t happened yet. At some point, you need to declare the debate over…”

6. Jordan Weissman: Don’t Let Anyone Blame Single Mothers for Economic Inequality: “Conservatives… aren’t… comfy discussing… skyrocketing CEO pay and Wall Street lucre…. They are, however, extremely at home talking about… single mothers…. In that vein, the American Enterprise Institute has released a new report…. I’m… skeptical… turn[ing] the inequality debate toward single mothers and absent fathers…. As Tim Noah wrote in Slate years ago, the biggest changes in American family structure took place in the ’70s and ’80s, and they help explain why, for instance, the ratio between the 90th percentile of earners and 10th percentile is higher than it was 30 years ago. But the shift away from two-parent households doesn’t really factor into the concentration of wealth among the 1 percent. And the rise of the 1 percent, and the 0.1 percent for that matter, is the real story when it comes to how income inequality is evolving today…”

7. Paul Krugman: When Banks Aren’t The Problem – NYTimes.com: “Sometimes it seems to me as if economists and policymakers have spent much of the past six years slowly, stumblingly figuring out stuff they would already have known if they had read my 1998 Brookings Paper (pdf) on Japan’s liquidity trap…. Huge confusion about whether Ricardian equivalence makes fiscal policy ineffective, vast amazement that increases in the monetary base haven’t led to big increases in the broader money supply… and… here we go with another: the role of troubled banks…. In the 90s it was conventional wisdom that Japan’s zombie banks were the problem, and that once they were fixed all would be well. But I took a hard look at the logic and evidence for that proposition (pp. 174-177), and it just didn’t hold up…. It has been really frustrating to watch so many people reinvent fallacies that were thoroughly refuted long ago…”

8. Vauhini Vara: The Lowe’s Robot and the Future of Service Work: “Lowe’s plans to release several OSHbots into one of its Orchard Supply Hardware stores (the ‘OSH’ in OSHbot) in San Jose, California. The robots’ job will be to greet customers, help them find what they need, and guide them around the store. In a typical interaction, Nel told me, an OSHbot would roll up and greet you as you walked in: ‘Hi, can I help you? What are you looking for today?’ You might answer that you need to replace some plumbing pipes, prompting the OSHbot to ask whether you’ve got the original pipe. If you had it, you would put it in front of a viewfinder, and the robot would scan it, identify it, and direct you to the item in the store. It could even guide you to the place where the item is stocked. The OSHbot will be conversant in English and Spanish, to start…. Because the OSHbot’s skill set sounds at least a bit like what an Orchard salesperson typically does, a perennial question has arisen: Are robots coming for our jobs? In fact, they began stealing our jobs a long time ago…. Even if the Lowe’s OSHbot isn’t meant to replace workers, retail executives are surely aware of the opportunities to lower costs that robots could bring. ‘That is probably the most important economic phenomenon of the past decade or so,’ Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me…. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned that, during the rise of automation in manufacturing, people were encouraged to turn to service work. I wondered aloud where service workers might go if their positions, too, were to be eliminated in favor of automated replacements. ‘That is a great question,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I know the answer. Technology has always been destroying jobs.’ He added, on a somewhat more optimistic note, ‘I think a lot of the jobs of the future have titles that we haven’t even thought of yet.’…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Scott Lemieux: A Disgrace Even By Roberts Court Standards
• Libby Nelson: How Kentucky became a rare Common Core success story – Vox
• E-Gear 30 Day Lantern
• Chris Mooney: Climate scientists aren’t too alarmist. They’re too conservative
• Greg Sargent: Architect of Democratic strategy for keeping Senate is hopeful, but realistic
• Clay Shirky: Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away

 

1. Anne Laurie: Long Read: “Can Scott Walker Unite the Republicans?”: “Robert Draper’s GQ profile… reads as though Draper couldn’t get a grip on his subject because Walker is that genuine political rarity: a pure sociopath, uncomplicated by the usual attendant narcissism…. From the outside, it looks like Scott Walker has prospered mightily by selling other peoples’ assets to any robber baron who made an offer, with a total lack of concern for even his closest allies and associates, enabled by a shrinking but still-powerful bloc of noisy racists and aging low-information voters. But, then, nobody said sharks aren’t dangerous!”

2. Jonathan Chait: McConnell Afraid to Vote to Repeal Obamacare: “Mitch McConnell… asked if Republicans… would vote to repeal Obamacare… was revealingly evasive. First McConnell conceded that the Senate wouldn’t bother passing repeal because ‘Obviously, he’s not going to sign a full repeal.’ But then McConnell [said]… ‘There are pieces of it that are extremely unpopular with the American public that the Senate ought to have a chance to vote on: repealing the medical device tax, trying to restore the 40-hour work week, voting on whether or not we should continue the individual mandate, which people hate, detest and despise,’ McConnell said. ‘I think Obamacare is the single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years…. I’d like to put the Senate Democrats in the position of voting on the most unpopular parts of this law and see if we can put it on the president’s desk and make him take real ownership of this highly destructive Obamacare.’ It is true that Obama would never sign a full repeal of Obamacare. He would never sign a repeal of the individual mandate, either…. [So] why won’t Republicans force Obama and Senate Democrats to defend the law as a whole? The answer is that McConnell realizes that repealing Obamacare is unpopular…”