Things to Read at Lunchtime on February 4, 2014

Must-Reads:

1. Harold James: Europe’s fringes appear determined to escape into the past: “Europe’s western and eastern fringes obsess about dates that recall their struggles with the core: 1914, 1815, 1709, 1707, 1704, and 1612, among others. By contrast, the European core is obsessed with transcending history, with working out institutional mechanisms for overcoming the conflicts that scarred Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The European integration project is a sort of liberation from the pressures and constraints of the past…. Is the European center currently too naive, or too idealistic? Is it really possible to escape from history? Or, on the contrary, is there something odd in the way that the European fringes obsessively resort to historical milestones?…. De Gaulle and Churchill knew plenty about war, and they wanted to transcend the blood-soaked legacy of Poltava, Blenheim, and Waterloo. They viewed history as offering concrete lessons about the necessity of escaping from the past. Today, Europe’s fringes, by contrast, appear determined to escape into it.”

2. Elias Asquith: The 1 percent’s most ruinous sin: How they sap our politicians of all decency: “‘Mitt’, Netflix’s recently released documentary… has, on the whole, been rather well-received…. Not everyone believes that the film succeeds in giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look… but most seem to have found it… a humanizing depiction of a seemingly decent man…. Even if the man in “Mitt” is not so charming and sympathetic a figure as to counterbalance the woeful policies on which he ran, there is the lingering question of why there is such a great distance between Candidate Romney and Mitt Romney. How could the same guy who at one point in the film acknowledges the immense privilege he was born into repeatedly insist, on the campaign trail, that he was a self-made man, a testament to the American meritocracy? How could the guy who infamously sneered that roughly half of the country were irresponsible, entitled, greedy moochers seem, in another context, to be kind, thoughtful, polite and fundamentally well-meaning?”

3. Paul Krugman: Demography and Employment: “A blog post reporting research by Samuel Kapon and Joseph Tracy of the New York Fed is creating a splash…. The aging of the adult population would have meant a considerable [i.e., 1.5%-point] decline in the employment-population ratio over the past 7 years even if the economy had remained near full employment…. [But their] other [claim]… far from obvious is that the economy was highly overheated in late 2007…. The actual decline was from 62.9 to 58.6, or 4.3 points…. [Their] small employment gap [today] isn’t mainly because of the demographic adjustment…. The dramatic-sounding result that we don’t have much labor market slack isn’t… unless you accept the idea that the U.S. economy was above full employment even during the early-Bush slump years, and that by late 2007 it was a highly overheated economy on the edge of major inflation.”

4. Nicholas Crafts and Terence C. Mills: Rearmament to the Rescue? New Estimates of the Impact of “Keynesian” Policies in 1930s’ Britain

5. Paul Krguman: The Great Recession: Lecture 1
6. Richard Startz : How Should an Economist Do Statistics?

1. Amanda Marcotte: Rand Paul Is Here to Micromanage Your Family Size, Ladies: “For individual women, Paul is so confident that it is no burden for you to have and care for children that he not only opposes abortion, but he has routinely advocated for cutting off taxpayer money that goes to preventing unintended pregnancy…. ‘My younger sister is an OB-GYN with six kids and doing great’. The implication:… If his sister can handle six kids, then the rest of you have no excuse. But… Rand Paul also believes that children are so incredibly expensive that women should be punished for having more than a ‘certain amount’…. ‘It’s tough to tell a woman with four kids that she’s got a fifth kid we’re not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through.’… The number of kids that is ‘too many’ if you receive assistance just happens to be five, one short of the six children that Paul applauded his sister for bearing. The most obvious explanation for why six kids is ‘doing great’ for one woman and evidence that you ‘shouldn’t be having kids’ for another has everything to do with the class assumptions he brings to the table—and, let’s face it, race assumptions…”

2. Felix Salmon: Viral math: “The key number here is S·F·C, or shareability times friends times clickbaitiness…. You can see that a relatively small tweak to the variables in the S·F·C formula can make a very big difference to your total pageviews… and, then, when S·F·C exceeds 1, you achieve escape velocity…. Getting S·F·C > 1… is the goal of all would-be viral content…. But… if you share an article on Facebook… that does not mean that your 100 friends are all going to see that article…. Facebook… decides whether the article you just shared is going to appear in your friends’ feeds or not…. As a result, the important formula isn’t S·F·C; rather it’s S·F·FBT·C, where FBT is the probability that the article you’re sharing is going to actually appear in your friends’ feeds…. Which brings me to Upworthy. We know that Upworthy spends a lot of time optimizing for maximum S and maximum C…. What’s less well understood is that there seems to be a direct correlation between C and FBT…. Facebook… wants to show its users more of what they want to see… [and] assumes that people click on exactly the material that they want to click on, and that if it serves up a lot of clickbaity curiosity-gap headlines, then it’s giving its users what they want. Whereas in reality, those headlines are annoying…. All of which is to say that the massive advantage which Upworthy has… is certain to go away…. Upworthy’s formula will work until it doesn’t.”

3. Benjamin Wallace-Well: Ezra Klein on His New Vox Media Venture

4. Florian Scheuer and Kent Smetters: Could a Website Really Have Doomed the Health Exchanges? Multiple Equilibria, Initial Conditions and the Construction of the Fine

Woody Allen (1976): I’m open-minded about sex. I’m not above reproach; if anything, I’m below reproach. I mean, if I was caught in a love nest with 15 12-year-old girls tomorrow, people would think, yeah, I always knew that about him. Nothing I could come up with would surprise anyone. I admit to it all” | Richard H. Serlin: : Important Points that are Rarely Made on Income Inequality Statistics | Jérémie Cohen-Setton : The emerging market turmoil | Jonah Lee et al.: Unemployment Benefits’ Big Bang for the Buck | Benjamin Cole: FOMC’er Richard “Inspector Clouseau” Fisher and His Excellent Rare Book Price Clue to Proper Monetary Policy | Felix Salmon: Why the Post Office needs to compete with banks | | William Wirt: “Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance” | Nelson Schwartz: The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World |

Should Be Aware of:

1. Jamelle Bouie: Rage Against the Coke Machine: “Several singers perform a multilingual version of “America the Beautiful,” with verses in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It’s rousing, inspired, and deeply patriotic…. But, for a few loud conservatives… a smack in the face…. Allen West—the former Tea Party congressman—who wrote, in what I imagine was spittle-flecked rage, that ‘If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing “American the Beautiful” in English… we are on the road to perdition.’ (So far, on Facebook, this has been shared nearly 14,000 times.)… Todd Starnes, the mendacious Fox News host who complained that ‘Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border’…. Breitbart.com…. None of this was a surprise…. This year, right-wing Republican candidates—the kinds of people who would support the complaints of West or Starnes—will run in almost every competitive Senate race, and in places like Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, they’re likely to win.”

2. Matthew O’Brien: Why Do the Super-Rich Keep Comparing Obama to Hitler?: “Tom Perkins… had to speak out after he saw the appalling way the San Francisco Chronicle disparaged his ex-wife Ms. Steel’s plots, prose, and shrubbery…. Buyout-king… Steven Schwarzman has said that Obama’s plan to tax… is like Hitler invading Poland. And hedge funder… Leon Cooperman has pointed out that you know who else came to power amidst an economic crisis…. If it all seems historically illiterate and grossly short on perspective, here’s why 1 percenters are sure Obama is the new Hitler. 1. They Feel Powerless… the financial crisis gave Democrats big enough super-majorities to unmake Reagan’s world. And unmake it they did…. Sure, they saved the carried interest loophole…. But they can’t quite get Bowles-Simpson to fix the debt (and their taxes). 2. And They Might Not Ever Get Our Power Back. The tipping point might have already come and gone…. The 1 percent knows America is now a nation of takers. Obamacare pushed them over the edge from Social Darwinism into dependency…. 3. Now the Rich Are the Victims…. Think about it: the 99 percent persecuting a powerless minority. The leader scapegoating that minority and raising their taxes. And a bigger welfare state—because you can’t have national socialism without a proper helping of socialism. Yep, Obama’s America is basically the same as Hitler’s Germany. If only we could all go back to before World War I: before Obamacare, before Nazism, before constitutional income taxes. Ah, 1913. Never forget.”

And:

KYLE VANHEMERT: With Its New App Paper, Can Facebook Overcome the Burden of Being Facebook? | Kathleen Geier: G.O.P. lies about Obamacare, part the infinite | Paul Krugman: Delusions of Failure | Zele Miller: Social Security: Barack Obama Jason Furman Aide Hedges on CPI Adjustment for Social Security | IDS270 Institutional Analysis Workshop | Sarah Kliff: Seattle has a great football team — and an awesome Obamacare exchange, too |