Things to Read at Lunchtime on May 18, 2014

Should-Reads:

1. Kara Swisher: Dear Jill: From One Pushy Media Dame to Another: “Let me be perfectly clear when it comes to ousted New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson: She has, on some occasions I have spent time with her, scared the bejesus out of me. That said, it was in a very good way. I am not sure whether it was her unusually focused stare, which can be unsettling. Or her supernatural ability to be completely still when listening to you…. Or even her bone-dry wit, which can be sharp but in a manner that is, to my mind, brilliant. That steel-backed ability to communicate an aura of toughness and command has never been a minus to me, and, I would assume, not at the pinnacle of American journalism…. This is the big leagues, right, where there is no crying in baseball…. Let’s also be clear, since too many people — both men and women — don’t seem to be able to grok this too well, despite it being obviously obvious: Phrases like ‘crazy scary’ are often meant to send women quickly back behind the be-nice-ladies line and tap into the societal pressure for females to tamp down their confidence or package it in a more attractive way. Other words that are also used: ‘Loud-mouthed.’ ‘Jarring.’ ‘Strident.’ ‘Shrill.’ ‘Overbearing.’ ‘Bossy.’ ‘Bitchy.’ And, of course, pushy — which is in many ways, the worst of them, as it is defined thusly: ‘Excessively or unpleasantly self-assertive or ambitious.’ That is the word that has now been stuck like glue to Abramson, who was very famously fired last week by publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr…”

2. Greg Robb: 5 things you won’t learn from reading Geithner’s book: “The Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX…. What did the New York Fed know about Bear Stearns and when did they know it?… Where… was Barack Obama?… A recent report by the New York Times and ProPublica said that in 2009 a top Treasury official told Lanny Breuer that an indictment of HSBC ‘could cause broader problems for the financial system’. ‘Was Geithner the one telling them’, Kauffman asked?… What went wrong?… ‘If you read the book and didn’t know anything about the crisis, you’d have no idea what caused it’, said Gerding…”

3. Paul Krugman: Unemployment: It’s Not Personal: “Matt O’Brien has an interesting if depressing piece… making the point that long-term unemployment is basically bad luck: if you got laid off in a bad economy, you have a hard time finding a new job, and the longer you stay unemployed the harder it becomes to find work… decisively refute[s] the alternative story, which is that the long-term unemployed are workers with a problem…. Read between the lines of a lot of commentary on the unemployed–especially from those eager to slash benefits–and you’ll realize that something like this is the implicit underlying theory. But here’s the thing: the association between worker quality and unemployment should be much stronger in a good economy than in a bad economy. In 2000, with labor scarce, there probably was something wrong with many people who got laid off; in 2009, it was just a matter of being in the wrong place. So… being unemployed should have mattered less for job search after the Great Recession than before. What we actually see, of course, is the opposite… one more reason failure to provide more stimulus is a crime against American workers…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Blake Harris: The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits
• John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli: The top ten global warming ‘skeptic’ arguments answered
• The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British Pound
• Mathias Döpfner: Why We Fear Google
• Diane Coyle: Humans or Freaks?
• Tara Culp-Ressler: The Poorest Americans Are Still Locked Out Of Obamacare

And:

1. David Runciman: Think Like a Freak by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner: “Freakofatigue: this latest book from the Freakonomics pair has a couple of compelling stories but is evidence of the overextension of the brand…. As with many brands that expand too quickly, what all this frenetic activity has done is dilute what made the original so successful…. Now there is too little of Levitt and far too much of Dubner…. Without the hardcore economics, thinking like a Freak just means being willing to think outside the box, and there are plenty of people doing that already…. Where the Freakonomics formula still works is when Dubner picks up on some interesting recent research and weaves a compelling story around it…. Nigerian email scams…. By choosing Nigeria they are importing a gullibility-testing device into the original pitch to discover the vanishingly small number of people who still don’t know…. Roland Fryer… why African-Americans were so prone to fatal heart problems… a genuinely unconventional and deeply uncomfortable explanation…. Fryer’s is highly controversial and it has been widely challenged. But it certainly makes you think. Unfortunately, in this book that is the exception. The bulk of it is taken up with Dubner overstating the significance of more routine findings and building up his own part in the process… too much of what’s true here is old news and too much of what’s new isn’t actually true…. I imagine that what [David] Cameron was really thinking was: if these are the clever people, spare me from the stupid ones.”

2. Richard Disney et al.: House Price Shocks, Negative Equity, And Household Consumption In The United Kingdom: “We examine the impact of unanticipated housing capital gains on consumption behavior using data from the British Household Panel Survey and county-level house price data…. We find little evidence of heterogeneity in responses of young and old homeowners, but differences between owners and renters. We also find asymmetric behavior between house price rises and falls, and a disproportionate impact on saving if the household had negative housing equity at the start of the period…”

3. Kathleen Geier: What Piketty’s Neoliberal Critics Get Wrong: “Conservative reviewers have made it clear that they believe that inequality is not a major problem in this country, and that anyone who worries that it might be is a freedom-hating Marxist…. Until recently, however, there was one major group that hadn’t visibly weighed in on Piketty’s brilliant and disturbing book, and that is the neoliberal policy elites that dominate the Democratic Party establishment…. The biggest failure of all in Furman’s speech… is his set of policy recommendations for addressing inequality. Among them are honorable causes… raising the minimum wage… expanding access to preschool. But… free trade agreements are on Furman’s inequality-busting agenda…. Cutting corporate tax rates and enacting more corporate tax breaks are on his wish list, as well…. Furman doesn’t breathe a word about… global tax on wealth… confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes… reining in rent-seeking elites by reforming the financial sector or intellectual property law… not a word about how to empower working people. Rather than proposals for making it easier to join a union, or creating a full-employment economy…”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Jonathan Chait: Obama’s Moment of Environmental Decision: “On June 2, President Obama will personally announce new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on existing power plants, which will be the policy centerpiece of his second term. Nobody knows how these rules will work or how ambitious they will be…. He wants them to effectively reduce carbon pollution, he wants them not to cost consumers too much, and he wants to be sure they can survive legal challenge. The trouble is that he can only pick two of these. And the primary question weighing on administration regulators as they make their decision will be how to read the mind of Anthony Kennedy…. The Natural Resources Defense Council… [proposes] a regulatory scheme that would mandate that every state reduce its emissions…. The NRDC plan is clever because it allows every state to find the most cost-effective way to meet its emissions targets…. It has all the market-based benefits of cap-and-trade, in other words. The risk is that… it leans on defensible but untested applications of the Clean Air Act. If the Supreme Court decides to invalidate the plan, he’ll be left with nothing. The alternatives would be either to write a weak regulation… or… an extremely strong regulation that imposes very high dislocation costs on states that rely heavily on coal-powered electricity. Both… would… run less risk of being overturned. Effective, legally safe, and cheap–Obama has to pick two. The legal risk can itself be boiled down to the risk that Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s swing justice, will overturn the regulations…. Kennedy… had a prominent role in the Supreme Court case that authorized the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, which might make him hesitant to slap down the agency for carrying out his ruling. He has continued to display a preference for regulations that meet his own sense of practicality…. The mysterious workings of the mind of Anthony Kennedy have perplexed a generation of legal scholars. In this case, the outcome may literally determine the fate of the world.”

2. Matt O’Brien: It’s Not Personal: “Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap that, even in the best of times, is difficult to escape. And it’s a trap that you can get stuck in for no reason other than bad luck. Today, there are still almost 3.5 million people who have been out of work for six months or longer and are looking for work. There isn’t a more urgent crisis, and there are three things you should keep in mind about it… the long-term unemployed aren’t much different from the short-term unemployed… The long-term unemployed have a hard time getting companies to even look at their job applications, let alone hire them…. There’s never been this much long-term unemployment before…. Long-term unemployment isn’t a story about lazy people choosing to live on the dole instead of getting a job. It’s a story about people who want a job not being able to find one, because there aren’t enough of them—and then falling to the back of the jobs line. That is, it’s a story about macroeconomic bad luck. Think about it this way. We know that companies discriminate against the long-term unemployed. That’s why their ranks have been so slow to come down. But we also know that the long-term unemployed are like the short-term unemployed in every way except for how long they’ve been out of work. So we don’t know why so many more short-term unemployed people are becoming long-term unemployed today than in the past—unless it’s the economy, stupid. And it is the economy. Ben Casselman of 538 has already shown that the best predictor for how long you were unemployed was the unemployment rate when you lost your job…. There’s no reason to think that the long-term unemployed are necessarily lazy or lacking skills…. The lesson here is that we need stimulus…. Nobody should lose their career because they lost their job at a bad time.”

3. Neera Tanden, Zeke Emanuel, and Topher Spiro: A New Management Structure for a New Phase of the Affordable Care Act: “A CEO of marketplace health insurance who would oversee the federal marketplace, the state marketplaces, and insurance oversight and regulation… the single leader accountable for all of implementation… a background in health care issues, as well as private-sector experience, and should be appointed for the remainder of the administration…. An advisory board composed of the secretary of health and human services—who would serve as the chairperson—the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and two private-sector individuals… free from conflicts of interest…. A technical advisory committee composed of representatives from the IT general contractor, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Office of Immigration Statistics, the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, state Medicaid agencies, state insurance commissioners, and insurers…. A a work plan that prioritizes and schedules the long list of tasks… within specific timeframes. This plan should be made transparent to stakeholders and the general public.”

4. Felix Salmon: Tim Geithner as Unreliable Narrator: “Geithner makes simple declarations which are easily fact-checked. So let’s turn to pages 79-81, where Geithner is covering his early tenure as the president of the New York Fed…. “In my very first public speech at the New York Fed in March 2004, I tried to push back against complacency, telling a room full of bankers that the wonders of the new financial world would not necessarily prevent catastrophic failures of major institutions, and should not inspire delusions of safety on Wall Street. I even cited my favorite theorist on financial irrationality, the leading promoter of the idea that periodic financial crises are practically inevitable. ‘These improvements are unlikely to have brought an end to what Charles Kindleberger called “manias and panics”‘, I said. ‘It is important that those of you who run financial institutions build in a sufficient cushion against adversity.’…” This is Geithner at his most prescient and heroic. He enters a hidebound wood-paneled institution where coffee is brought to his desk on a silver tray while briefings involved precious little discussion or debate; and in his very first speech he… speak[s] truth to entrenched financial power… ‘push[es] back against complacency’ and warn[s] against the rise of the shadow banking system…. But here’s the thing: we can read the speech…”