Things to Read on the Morning of February 6, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : “If the Fed is overly optimistic yet again… it could raise interest rates too soon… perhaps even create a stall…. Most… believe that the risks involved with raising rates too soon are much larger than the risks of patience…. Asymmetric risks… combined with the Fed’s tendency to be overly optimistic [make] the argument for a cautious, patient approach… stronger.”
- : “The ECB is acting far beyond its mandate in seeking to influence negotiations between Eurozone member states regarding the terms and conditions under which member states lend to their distressed partners…”
- : Your Right to Skip Shots Ends Where My Kid Begins
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: @tnielsenhayden: “If personal beliefs: were a valid basis for public-health-related behavior, there wouldn’t be a history of health & hygiene regs being laid down in legal codes around the world since law and writing were invented. They exist because personal preference doesn’t work. Typhoid Mary was sure she wasn’t causing typhoid outbreaks in households where she worked. 19th C. dairy farmers likewise knew that their unpasteurized milk wasn’t a problem. Every law prohibiting open sewers or toxic food adulterants is a monument to the existence of citizens who wouldn’t behave responsibly unless the law compelled them to do so.” -
: The Disruptive Potential of Online Learning: “What do we know about the performance of online education thus far?… The most basic question about online programs is whether they can actually reduce the cost of tertiary education…. Does the quality of education suffer when content is delivered online?… Two recent studies have found negative impacts of switching from in-person to online instruction on course final grades in an introductory economics class (Alpert et al. 2014, Joyce et al. 2014)…. For business job vacancies… employers strongly prefer applicants with degrees from (nonselective or selective) public institutions as opposed to applicants with degrees from for-profits. The biggest callback ‘penalty’ is imposed on the applicants with an online for-profit degree…. Online education… can succeed in cutting… costs…. But preliminary evidence suggests that–t least for the time being–the new technology comes at a cost of quality…” -
: Missouri State of Mind: Sutter Health vs. Blue Shield: War of the Gargantuas: “I like… increased health insurance literacy, price transparency, and the promotion of [consumer] competition in health care markets. But when I see consumers whipsawed as with the current War of the Gargantuas taking place in Northern California, I wonder if consumer activation alone will save us. In order to have been a savvy purchaser of health insurance… you would also have to have known something about the health insurance and health care services contracting world. Can we reasonably expect consumers to master this, to ferret out what they really need to know?… Northern California employers have a fall open enrollment period…. Here’s what your employer (or exchange) surely didn’t tell health insurance shoppers… this past fall: 1. Blue Shield of California is a huge insurance company, with about three million covered lives in California. 2. Sutter Health is a huge health care provider with, for example, over 4300 licensed acute care beds in California. 3. They bargain fiercely right through and past the open enrollment deadline over the next year’s contract rates. 4. Even a behemoth such as Blue Shield… has, historically, been unable to bring Sutter to heel…. 5. Decisions… [may be] made after the close of your open enrollment period…. 6. The decision by a major provider to exit an established health plan after the close of the open enrollment period is apparently not deemed a qualifying life event allowing for special enrollment under Covered California…. So the chat boards are lighting up. Can it be that a change in a health plan’s coverage options in a highly concentrated market such as Sacramento or the East Bay is not a a trigger for special enrollment rights? You mean you didn’t know all this already? Watch out where Gargantua steps.” -
: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Middle Class: “The problem, as Vox’s Ezra Klein recently wrote, is that the middle class is almost impossible to define. The obvious stumbling block is the variation in local living costs: ‘[T]he amount of money needed to feel middle class varies sharply across the country. Making $50,000 leaves you struggling in Manhattan and wealthy in Detroit…. But… is living in New York City a necessity, or is it a luxury good, much like buying a fancy car or a huge house?’… Middle class is more of a state of mind… means a feeling of being in a similar economic situation to the people around you, combined with a sense of overall optimism and security…. That’s why inequality kills the idea of a middle class, even if it improves people’s standard of living overall. When everyone makes $50,000 a year, it’s easy to tell that you’re middle class. If half of those people suddenly start making $150,000 a year, it’s no longer so easy. For the half of people still making $50,000, nothing has changed in terms of their absolute material standard of living…. But now they might think to themselves, ‘Have I failed in some way?… The idea of the middle class is dead. There is no going back in our lifetimes. We need to find a new way of thinking about broadly shared prosperity.” -
: Social Mobility Barely Exists, But Let’s Not Give Up on Equality: “We live surrounded by inequality…. The Conservative reaction, personified by David Cameron, is to promote social mobility and meritocracy. History shows… that social mobility rates are immutable, [thus] it is better to reduce the gains people make from having high status, and the penalties from low status. The Swedish model of compressed inequality is a realistic option, the American dream of rapid mobility an illusion…. An illustration of the power of lineage even in modern England comes even from the first names children receive at birth. Naming your daughter Jade means she has one hundredth the chance of attending Oxford as a girl whose parents chose for her Eleanor. Similarly for Bradley versus Peter. Is this just the survival of sclerotic olde England, where the dead hand of the past exercises an especially powerful grip? No…. Why is social mobility so resistant to change? The reason is the strong transmission within families of the attributes that lead to social success… policy can do no more than nibble at the fringes of status persistence. Marriage is highly assortative…. Create labour market institutions that compress wages and salaries…. Structure educational systems to narrow the social rewards to those at the top…. We cannot change the winners in the social lottery, but we can change the value of their prizes.” -
: Social Networks and Journalists: “Journalism needs a lot more journalists who are technically proficient, and the new gods, the platform companies, social networks and search engines, need to hire a lot more technologists who are proficient in news. Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us… we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop…”
Should Be Aware of:
- : “After sending Roger Vanderklok for… asking to file a complaint, Philadelphia… TSA supervisor Charles Kieser… lied… in court… fabricated an aggressive confrontation and a bomb threat, neither of which are in evidence on the CCTV footage or in the police report. His victim was help incommunicado in jail, panicking his wife who had no idea where he’d gone. Kieser gets to keep his job.”
- : The best way to win an argument
- Volunteer of the Month: Michael DeLong
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(2014): Reinventing the wheel: “Following up on my post this morning on the financing of the P-CARE proposal there is a significant change as the Republicans proposing this bill realize that they are proposing a massively expensive and disruptive tax hike that will impact middle class and upper middle class voters. Sen. Coburn’s office issued a “clarification” this morning: ‘Institute a modest cap on the exclusion for the most generous high-cost plans; specifically, cap it at 65 percent of the average market price for an expensive high-option plan.’ Hey numbnuts, there is already a 40% excise tax scheduled to go into effect for the most expensive plans. It is called the Cadillac tax and your f—ing campaign committees have been running against it for four years now. Why re-invent the wheel?” <– This is as much a question this year with this year’s Patient CARE proposal as it was last year with last year’s Patient CARE proposal.
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(1953): On Stalin <:– Given the context of discrimination and Jim Crow in W.E.B. Du Bois’s era, attachment to the only political party to make racial equality a goal that it tried to live every day is understandable, but he really should have known better than this by 1953.
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: Pope Francis Declares Oscar Romero a Martyr: “Pope Francis has declared Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered while celebrating Mass in 1980, a martyr…. The U.S. embassy had evidence that Roberto D’Aubuisson, an anti-Communist former army major whom Reaganites considered a Cold War ally, was behind the killing…” -
: Welcome to SubTropolis: The Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City: “Welcome to SubTropolis: The Massive Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City
More than 1,000 people spend their workdays in SubTropolis, an industrial park housed in an excavated mine the size of 140 football fields…”