Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 10, 2014

January 10, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

 

  1. Raj Chetty:
    Behavioral Economics and Public Policy
  2. Andrew Kaczynski (2012):
    Mitt Romney’s Long, Careful Health Care Evolution:
    “Romney’s path… tracked a hardening Republican reaction… in real time…. January 30[, 2009] speech… [called for] market dynamics, free choice, and personal responsibility, a phrase typically used to refer to the individual mandate…. [On] February 27, Romney said: ‘We need to advance a conservative plan… based on free choice, personal responsibility, and private medicine… like what I proposed in Massachusetts… the plan is a good model.’… In May, Romney wrote an op-ed… largely based off his Massachusetts plan, including an individual mandate…. On June 1… Romney thanked Heritage for helping craft health care reform in Massachusetts…. On June 14 Romney… said the President could learn from RomneyCare, saying: ‘I understand the President considers his plan in respects following the model of Massachusetts. Let’s learn from our experience.’… [On] June 24 Romney said… of the President reviving the exchanges put in place in RomneyCare, ‘we put together an exchange, and the president’s copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that’…
  3. Paul Krugman:
    Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, Ideology:
    “I’m very much in accord with Simon Wren-Lewis on the remarkable unhelpfulness of recent heterodox assaults… misidentifies the problem… gives aid and comfort to the wrong people…. Standard macroeconomics does NOT justify the attacks on fiscal stimulus and the embrace of austerity…. Formal modeling and quantitative analysis doesn’t justify the austerian position; on the contrary, austerians had to throw out the models and abandon statistical principles to justify their claims…. So if you go around claiming that model-oriented, quantitative economics gave rise to austerity mania, you’re getting the story all wrong… [and] covering up for the austerians’ intellectual sins…”
  4. Nick Bunker:
    Weekend Reading:
    “Frances Coppola on the fiscal theory of monetary expansion… Ben Walsh argues that the boom in oil jobs… is over…. Shane Ferro reports that one million Americans are at risk of losing access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program…. The United States has the highest GDP per capita, but as Matt Bruenig shows, incomes at the bottom are higher in other developed countries…. What explains the decline in the labor share of income? Dylan Matthews looks into the competing hypotheses…. Cardiff Garcia lays out his observations from the annual Allied Social Sciences Associations meeting…. Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers… noticed that economists seem to be more engaged with policy.”
  5. Tim Duy:
    Wage Growth–Lack of–Continues to Surprise:
    “The December employment report… surprising combination of solid job gains and decelerating wage growth…. Overall, the story is one of ongoing improvement in labor markets…. Wage growth, however, nosedived…. If June rolls around with no inflation and no greater wage growth, the Fed will find it challenging to begin normalization…. The wage numbers present a dilemma for the Fed. Simply put, no wage growth means the Fed can’t be particularly confident that inflation will trend toward target…. The Fed is still looking at June, but they need some more help from the data. Of course, June is still a long way off…”
  6. Tim Worstall:
    Someone Needs To Tell Vox.com That Numbers Don’t Work Quite This Way:
    “A TEU being a twenty foot container equivalent unit, the standard measure of these things, half the size of the container you see on an 18 wheeler trucking rig…. You can get 30 cubic metres of packing peanuts into one and not have to worry very much about the weight. But 30 cubic metres of gold or lead placed on the back of a truck will have the axles exploding into metal shards pretty much instantaneously…. Less than half the density of water and it’s volume that is important. More than that and it’s the weight…. The larger picture about shipping and containerisation [is that] it’s almost certainly true that this one technology is vying with the mobile phone as being the most important influence upon our lifestyles since WWII. Certainly vastly more important than anything that has come out of Congress or the House of Commons in that time. If you want to know quite how much difference then I recommend The Box (although I think he manages to underplay the economic impact)….And both the Vox and BBC pieces are interesting as well. Even if MSC Oscar cannot in fact carry 900 million cans of dog food.”
  7. Mark Thoma:
    Retail jobs are better than you might think:
    “Many workers shy away from retail jobs believing they’re occupations with low pay, low benefits and low opportunity. Is this true? Are they mostly dead-end, minimum wage jobs?.. While these jobs do not pay as well as jobs in the manufacturing sector, large, modern, multi-establishment retail chains pay better than many people believe and offer better opportunities for advancement than many other occupations…. Retail pays better than service sector jobs: ‘…service occupations paid $13.97 and $11.15 for men and women, respectively, while retail occupations paid $16.28 and $12.79…’ In addition, although retail jobs pay less on average than manufacturing jobs, employment in manufacturing has declining, while the growth in retail has been ‘pronounced.’ In 1963, multi-establishment retail chains accounted for 20 percent of all retail. But by 2000, the share had grown to 35 percent, and it has continued to grow since. Furthermore, and importantly, retail jobs offer more opportunity for advancement than most other jobs due to the high rate of growth of retail establishments and the multi-tiered nature of these firms…”
  8. Mark Thoma:
    Economist’s View: The Mythical Confidence Fairy):
    “After harming the recovery from the Great Recession–and making it harder for the unemployed to find jobs–through austerity, blocking jobs bills, and standing in the way of additional stimulus measures, Republicans are trying to take credit for the recovery. They made things worse, and when they stopped doing harmful things, the economy improved and they want credit for that…. That deserves ridicule. Republicans were terribly wrong about Federal Reserve policy, just as wrong about austerity and the confidence fairy, yet here they are once again telling us that the confidence fairy rather than the end of their awful policy is responsible for the recovery.”

Should Be Aware of:

 

  1. Jack Baruth:
    Why Chrysler’s rotary gear selector is the way of the future: “Your parents went on month-long roadtrips carrying only a crumpled map and a classical education but you have to take five electronic devices and three food items just to pick up your 0.8 children from their aftercare program. There’s no room for any of it in your car. It’s one thing to put up with this indignity so you can drive a Dodge Viper TA 2.0, but are you really willing to deal with having a 2.1-amp-rapid-charged iPhone 6XXS raising the temperature between your legs to Death Valley levels all day because your center console is devoted to pretending your mid-priced sedan or luxury-equipped CUV has a fake stick shift?…”
  2. Glenn Fleishman:
    The Software and Services Apple Needs to Fix: “Marco Arment’s excellent post on Apple’s current state of development has this pithy sentence: ‘The software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future.’… None of us think Apple will go out of business. Rather, that we will lose the reasons we have selected using Apple’s products over those of other companies…”
  3. Rebecca Schoenkopf:
    Inside The Collapse of The New Yorker’s Inside The Collapse of The New Republic: “We haven’t had much–or anything?–to say about the mass hissyfit at The New Republic, because, honestly, how could we care? But that was before we read Ryan Lizza’s Inside the Collapse of The New Republic at the New Yorker, to which we could only sit at our kitchen table and moan OH SAVE US SWEET JESUS. Lizza, a TNR alumnus who points out he is hardly an impartial observer–which is fine!–paints the whole wretched episode in gleaming detail. But the details he unearths–how to put this–make his colleagues and cohorts look like a bunch of petty children so insulated in their shiny, important workplace they’ve forgotten how the rest of the world, not to mention journalism, works…”
  4. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:
    How the Catholic Church made its peace with Charlie Hebdo – The Week:
    “At the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church… accept[ed] religious freedom and pluralism. But let’s face it: the Catholic Church fought liberalism, and lost. I love the Catholic Church more than anything in the world, and I hope I would die for her if I had to–but I am glad she lost. Charlie Hebdo reminded me that… I am also a man of Enlightenment liberalism…. An attack against people with whom I disagree on almost everything [is] an attack on my values, on what I believe in and cherish. That is the value system that any civilization worth cherishing must incorporate–and that is the value system that we must defend against these jihadi barbarians.”
  5. Paul Krugman:
    Deflation As Betrayal:
    “Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that Europe’s slide toward deflation amounts to a ‘betrayal’ of Southern Europe. This sounds over the top, but it is the simple truth…. The ECB should have been aggressively expanding as soon as it became clear that inflation was sliding. There should have been a determined effort to offset fiscal austerity in southern Europe with expansion in the north. Instead, inflation and deficit obsession were allowed to rule for years; and now the situation is very close to irretrievable. The market clearly thinks the cause is almost lost. German 5-year bonds are yielding zero; index bonds of the same maturity are yielding -0.2. That’s an implied forecast of just 0.2 percent inflation over the next five years, which means intense deflationary pressure in the south. Really not good.”
  6. Jim Henley:
    Jim’s Rule of Buts:
    “The most obvious example of the power of Jim’s Rule of Buts is the classic apology. Compare, ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you, but what you said made me really angry.’ and ‘What you said made me really angry, but I’m sorry I yelled at you.’ As a coordinating conjunction, ‘but’ joins independent and theoretically equal clauses. But in practice, what follows ‘but’ always dominates what precedes it. So if you really want to apologize, and really want to mollify your interlocutor, you really want to make sure the apology itself is in the dominant position. Otherwise, you’re not apologizing; you’re excusing…. If you really want to soothe rather than rile, learn Jim’s Rule of Buts today! It will do you good for many days to come.”

January 10, 2015

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