Things to Read on the Evening of February 13, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : Yes, Yellen Can Have It All as She Gets Ready to Raise Rates
- : “Simon Wren-Lewis… how successful mainstream Keynesian macro… has been…. That’s exactly right…. In a rational world these past five years would be viewed as a triumph for mainstream economic analysis; the world has behaved the way the models said it would. And in the long run I think it will be seen that way…”
- : Benefit of ECB’s Bond Buying: Fiscal Breathing Room
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: The Recent Rise and Fall of Rapid Productivity Growth: “Information technology fueled a surge in U.S. productivity growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s…. The exceptional pace of productivity growth has disappeared, returning to roughly its pre-1995 pace…. The important factor after 2003 is slower growth in innovation…. Fernald (2014a)… finds that the slowdown was in sectors that produce IT or use IT intensively….One slice of the data focuses on the “bubble” industries of the mid-2000s, that is, construction, real estate, finance, and natural resource[s]…. The contribution of bubble industries to overall TFP fell–becoming more negative–between the 2000–04 and 2004–07 periods. But the contribution of the remaining three-quarters of the economy fell even more…. The non-bubble industries are divided into three mutually exclusive groups: IT producers, intensive IT-users, and other industries that do not use IT intensively…. The TFP slowdown is concentrated in industries that produce IT or that use IT intensively…. Three out of the past four decades have seen business-sector productivity growth near 1½%. We could well see future growth in that range. Of course, such a forecast would completely discount the fast growth of 1995 to 2003…. Pessimists argue that IT is less important than great innovations of the past that dramatically boosted productivity, such as electricity or the internal combustion engine. Optimists point to the possibilities offered by robots and machine learning…” -
: ‘Mega-Drought’ Risk in 21st-Century Western U.S.: “Currently the western United States has been experiencing a drought for about 11 of the past 14 years…. ‘I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be,’ said co-author Toby Ault…. ‘We are the first to do this kind of quantitative comparison between the projections and the distant past, and the story is a bit bleak,’ said Jason Smerdon…. ‘Even when selecting for the worst mega-drought-dominated period, the 21st century projections make the mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden.’… Researchers applied 17 different climate models to analyze the future impact of rising temperatures on regions from Mexico to the United States and Canada…. ‘The results… are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,’ said David Stahle… who was not involved in the study…” -
: Health Care Spending by Those Becoming Uninsured if the Supreme Court Finds for the Plaintiff in King v. Burwell: “We estimate that there would be 8.2 million more uninsured people if the court rules in favor of the plaintiff, including 6.3 million people losing tax credits for Marketplace coverage, 1.2 million people purchasing nongroup coverage without tax credits and 445,000 enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), all of whom would become uninsured…. Under the current law, these 8.2 million people will spend an estimated $27.1 billion on health care in 2016, with $11.1 billion spent on hospital care, $4.5 billion for physician services, $5.3 billion for prescription drugs and $6.2 billion for other health care. If these people became uninsured, they would spend $5.3 billion on their own care; another $12.0 billion in uncompensated care for this population would be provided if governments continue to fund such care at historic rates and health care providers continue to make in-kind contributions to the uninsured at the same rates as they have in the past…. This significant decrease in expenditures and the rise in the demand for uncompensated care would adversely affect both the amount of health care received by those losing coverage and health care providers’ revenues. This is particularly true for hospitals because the ACA reduces Medicare and Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments, which are historical sources of funding for uncompensated hospital care…” -
: To all the young journalists asking for advice….: “I spent a long time paying my dues at a series of very dry publications…. Only then did I start blogging professionally: first for Nouriel Roubini, then for Condé Nast Portfolio, then for Reuters…. Old-fashioned trade-magazine economics… allowed me to make a good living writing one or two articles per month… constituted a very high-level education in debt capital markets…. [So] when I found myself blogging the credit crisis, all that education paid off in spades. And the fact that I found myself blogging at all was itself an act of luck: I pretty much just happened to be in the right place at the right time… when the blogosphere was basically happy hour at The Magician…. Nouriel Roubini decided that he needed a full-time blogger at almost exactly the same time that Euromoney decided that it couldn’t afford to keep on paying me…. That gig… lasted long enough for me to get noticed by Jesse Eisinger…. Obviously, that kind of career path isn’t replicable…. It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, your success, in this industry, is always going to be governed in large part by luck…. There’s no particular reason to believe that the advice I’d give five or six years ago, which was basically ‘start a blog and get discovered’, still works. With the death of RSS, blogs are quaint artifacts at this point, and I can’t remember the last time I discovered a really good new one…”
Should Be Aware of:
- : “Francis Sempa made a go at rehabilitating the reputation of James Burnham…. What’s odd… is that very few try to resurrect the reputation of… the people who argued that the only problems with the war in Indochina are that the United States didn’t squander enough blood and treasure and didn’t slaughter enough Asians. America’s historical memory has struggled to flush such voices from its consciousness, and has largely succeeded. It also bears note that the National Review itself rarely enjoys being reminded of the sort of sentiments it published during the 1950s and 1960s…”
- Saint-Julien-Beychevelle
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: How Does This Keep Happening): “Maybe the only way to win is not to play? ‘Nick Rasmussen, who directs the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate intelligence committee that Yemen’s American-funded army failed to oppose advancing Houthi rebels in the same way the U.S.-supported Iraqi military refused to fight Islamic State militants last year. What happened in Iraq with the onslaught of the Islamic State group “happened in Yemen” on “a somewhat smaller scale,” he said. “As the Houthi advances toward Sanaa took place … they weren’t opposed in many places. …The situation deteriorated far more rapidly than we expected.”‘Let’s just keep adding weapons, arming whichever ‘side’ John McCain thinks are the good guys who want guns. It always works!” -
: Tor.com Explains Why Novellas Are The Future Of Publishing: “Carl Engle-Laird explains. When asked why Tor.com is focusing on publishing shorter works as e-books, Engle-Laird tells io9: ‘When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation. Enter the novella, an old form with a new lease on life. We expect that the reader who has to fit their reading into their daily commute will appreciate a novella they can finish in a week, rather than a year. We’ll be releasing books that can be begun and completed on just one of those rare evenings of uninterrupted reading pleasure. And we think this will resonate especially with those readers who have so much reading to do that they’ve compressed their habit into a portable device. Of course, Tor.com won’t just be a science fiction publisher. Our fantasy sensibilities insist on reminding you that novellas aren’t just the future of genre, they’re also our past. Science fiction and fantasy were born in penny dreadfuls, came of age in magazines, and novellas have been essential to their development, from The War of the Worlds to The Shadow Over Innsmouth to Empire Star. Tor.com wants to carry that fantastical history into a future that is beginning to outgrow its magazine predicates, but has no need to outpace its love of excellent stories at the length in which they were meant to be told.'”