Things to Read on the Evening of November 17, 2013

Must Reads:

  1. Ezra Klein: One senator’s lonely war against climate change: “Every week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse heads to the floor of the Senate, sets up an easel and some poster board and delivers a speech. He works hard on these speeches. They’re deeply researched and beautifully crafted. He delivers them with passion and fervor–to a mostly empty room. His colleagues figure they have better things to do than listen. But 100 years from now, when our grandchildren look back and try to understand what we were doing while the world burned, these speeches may well be some of the most famed rhetoric of the age. The speeches are on climate change. They range in tone from morally outraged to deeply wonky…”
  2. Thoreau: Vocation of the Elites § Unqualified Offerings: “The ideas in Twilight of the Elites…. We have an ostensibly meritocratic elite class, and they are legitimized in part by their test scores and educations. We therefore tell ourselves that the solution to inequality is through the education system.  We’ll just give everybody a shot… if they’re good enough they’ll ‘succeed’, and this legitimizes everything. When people notice that inequality persists, the schools can be… scapegoats or saviors, playgrounds for pet projects or distractions from bigger problems. Much of what drives me crazy in education (or, for that matter, much of what might drive anybody else crazy in education) follows from those games…”
  3. Daniel Drezner: Why Foreign Affairs Policymakers are More Prejudiced than Economic Policymakers: “Michael Desch and Paul Avey… find that senior foreign affairs policymakers are extremely dubious about the utility of political science scholarship…. They note at the end of their paper that an outstanding question remains: ‘why is it that policymakers are relatively tolerant of complex modeling and statistical work in Economics and survey research but not in other areas of political science and international relations?’…”

Should Reads:

  1. John dos Passos (1938): U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money “Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machine gun fire and arson, bankruptcies, war loans, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus: good growing weather for the House of Morgan.”
  2. Matthew Yglesias: Katrina vs. Obamacare: Here’s the difference: “1,833 people died during Hurricane Katrina…”
  3. John Cassidy: SIX REASONS THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT ISN’T HURRICANE KATRINA: “In writing about the rollout of the A.C.A., I, too, have used the term ‘disaster’…. But Hurricane Katrina? I can easily imagine why Republican politicians are making the comparison…. But does it really stand up? I don’t think so, and here are six reasons why: (1) Obama got out of Air Force One…. (2) Nobody’s been killed…. (3) This time, there is no ‘Brownie’…. (4) The war in Iraq is over…. (5) Despite it all, Healthcare.gov appears to be fixable…. (6) The ‘disaster’ narrative doesn’t yet represent the final cut: Once the Bush Administration had failed the immediate test of responding to Hurricane Katrina, there wasn’t much it could do to change the story. The victims were dead…”

Things You Should Be Aware of:

David Saha: Revisiting the case for rational expectations | Joseph E. Gagnon: Stabilizing Properties of Flexible Exchange Rates: Evidence from the Global Financial Crisis |

How the Victorians Wired the World: The TV Show on Youtube | Mark J. Perry: The era of the textbook cartel and $300 textbooks is ending | Neil Irwin: There is only one way to end Europe’s economic woes. Germany needs to buy more stuff |

November 17, 2013

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