Things to Read on the Morning of May 24, 2014

Should-Reads:

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations: “Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy…. Ben-Gurion said: ‘For the first time… a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For… a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled… a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.’ Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken…. In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated ‘Black Wall Street’…. A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004…. The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them…”

2. Douglas Holt-Eakin: “Many… [Republicans] are convinced [immigration reform is] bad [political] news [for them].: Right, and the sun revolves around the earth…. Conservative voters support the need for reform… the policies for reform… would not vote against someone with whom they disagreed on… reform…. [Republicans’] electoral future will benefit from passing an immigration reform. If the Hispanic vote migrates away from Republicans in states like Texas and Florida… these states will turn blue…. Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012) House Republicans may not be narrowly endangered, especially in 2014, but the larger political threat is real…. They do not have the luxury of waiting…. If they do not pass reform bills, the president will simply announce an executive order stopping or reducing deportations in August. Many Republicans will reflexively lash out at the administrative overreach, which the Democrats will quickly distort and paint Republicans as simply anti-immigrant. Voting on legislation of their choosing… is way better politics than doing nothing and playing on the president’s terms.  Good immigration reform will benefit the nation. It can also be better politics [for Republicans] in 2014…”

3. Jonathan Chait: What’s My Problem With Conservative Reformers?: “However loopy, bigoted, incompetent, or detached from the realities of economic life the Republican Party may be, it is always just one recession away from regaining political power. It is therefore of the highest importance that sane, non-sociopathic people regain some influence within the party for when that day arrives…. The deeper tension in the project lies between the political demands of the reform project and the demands of intellectual honesty. That’s the main tension I tried to highlight in a profile I wrote last year of Josh Barro, who simply grew tired of the contortions necessary for the far right. The contrasting point of view to Barro was supplied by Reihan Salam, who told me, ‘The truly public-spirited person is part of a team, and makes their team smarter and better to the extent they can’. Being part of a team means that, in the service of a noble and public-spirited political goal, you are engaged in some form of spin. Dionne’s essay describes how Republican reformers demonstrate their partisan bona fides by engaging in elaborately overstated denunciations of President Obama while refusing either to grapple with the party’s reflexive opposition or acknowledge the ways that some of Obama’s proposals were, are, or could be the basis for compromise…”

4. Greg Sargent: Obama slams ‘both sides to blame’ media: “At a fundraiser last night, President Obama unleashed a surprisingly spirited and comprehensive attack on ‘both sides to blame’ media coverage. While he has taken issue with Beltway coverage before, what was particularly noteworthy this time is that he made the case that ‘false equivalence’ coverage is fundamentally misleading in the sense that it obscures the basic imbalance that currently exists between the two parties…. I’m not sure Obama has ever gone so directly at the idea that today’s GOP has become what some of us have been calling ‘post-policy’; that the basic imbalance resulting from that is the primary cause of reigning Washington dysfunction; and that on a fundamental level, press coverage is failing to reckon with these realities. This will prompt the Green Lanternite pundits, who continue to trace the problem to Obama’s failure to move Congress, to argue that he is merely making excuses for failure. I would note, though, that in his remarks, he also said the only remedy for the problem is for Democrats to vote out Republicans, which is to say, it’s on Democrats to fix by winning elections…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Katie Lobosco: Army of robots to invade Amazon warehouses
• Ken French: Why you shouldn’t pay an active investment manager
• Barry Ritholtz: Geithner’s Stress Test Failure
• Mike Konczal: How Timothy Geithner failed his stress test
• Scott Andes and Mark Muro: China: A Manufactured Chimera?
• Paul Krugman (2010): Crises

And:

1. Simon Maloy: A party beyond reform: Why the right’s ambitious self-improvement plan is doomed: “This path forward for a new conservative economic agenda doesn’t say a word about immigration. But the lack of female input and immigration prescriptions aside, the document certainly doesn’t lack for ambition…. There’s a sect of Republicans who are desperate to distance themselves from the brand of politics that resulted in Mitt Romney’s defeat, having realized that their long-term outlook is bleak. The thing that’s keeping them from reforming Republican Party, however, is the Republican Party…. The friction comes from the reformists’ call to refocus the GOP attention from the wealthy to the middle class…. The Pew Research Center conducted a survey this past January that asked respondents what they thought would be the most effective way to combat poverty. A full 70 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans felt that ‘lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations to encourage investment and economic growth’ was the best way to help the poor and reduce inequality. Jonathan Chait notes that Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the higher-profile conservative thinkers attached to the project, argues for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit as a way for the GOP to show that it truly cares for the poor. The problem, Chait observes, is that Republicans are right now trying to slash the EITC…. Smart policy is a secondary consideration for a party that yearns for debt-limit fights and government shutdowns and Benghazi select committees and draconian Paul Ryan budgets…”

2. Quinn Norton: Everything Is Broken: “Every malware expert I know has lost track of what some file is, clicked on it to see, and then realized they’d executed some malware they were supposed to be examining. I know this because I did it once with a PDF I knew had something bad in it. My friends laughed at me, then all quietly confessed they’d done the same thing. If some of the best malware reversers around can’t keep track of their malicious files, what hope do your parents have against that e-card that is allegedly from you?…”

3. Richard Mayhew: Ignore the constants: “I need to respond to John’s post concerning Clinton Fatigue…. ‘Vince Foster or Benghazi or Hillary is a shrill lesbian who ordered her 30 something married daughter to get pregnant with a cute grandkid‘ are merely symptoms of a broken and crazy party. Since it is a symptom, treatment by avoidance does not solve the underlying problem of a bug shit insane party. I remember the great O-bot v Clintonista flame wars of ought seven…. One of the constant arguments was that Obama would not bring out the batshit insane elements of the Republican Party while it Clinton’s history guaranteed it. As an Obama primary supporter and voter, I thought it was a bullshit argument then as it misdiagnosed the problem. I thought that whomever the Democrats nominated in 2008, they would see wild, insane, violating the laws of physics and narrative consistency conspiracy theories and charges levelled against them. The superstructure… would vary… [but] the attacks, despire differing on the surface details, would be isomorphic manifestations of rage and otherness. The relevant question for supporters is not whether or not a Democratic candidate can do something to mollify the chain e-mail forwarded, Fox News viewer, Brietbart grunting conspiracy theorists…. It is whether or not they know how to ignore the stupid and counter-productive mud wrestling while only worrying about winning November instead of the morning. The crazification factor is a constant, and it should be ignored in any comparative decision analysis.”

4. Michael Tomasky: The Roots of the GOP’s Race Problem: “TFifty years ago Thursday, Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at the University of Michigan and first uttered the words ‘great society’…. What if there had been no civil-rights revolution, and we’d taken conservatives’ advice? This question struck me as I was reading through a Great Society-at-50 assessment by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute…. He ungrudgingly acknowledges… [that] ending legal segregation really did take a massive effort, one that could only have been led by the federal government. The country was largely united behind this effort by 1964. But not conservatives. Of course, most of those conservatives were Southern Democrats. Not all of them, though. 1964 was the year of Barry Goldwater…. Today, Goldwater is a hero of the conservative movement. Here is how he thought segregation could be ended in the United States, in a quote from his famous 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative: ‘I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.’ Incredible. ‘The people directly concerned’. That was the whole problem—they were handling it, in their inimitable way.  Those sheriff’s deputies turning dogs and fire hoses on children—why, they weren’t being racist at all. They were dethroning tyranny. Barry Goldwater is not merely one guy among many guys Republicans kind of like from the past. He is conservatism’s great hero! Goldwater had a long history of racist positions, going back to his opposition to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. The American people largely thought him a crazy man in 1964, and of course he lost to Johnson by titanic proportions. But let’s just say he’d won. What might have happened, had we followed his suggested path?”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Lawrence H. Summers: The Inequality Puzzle: “I have serious reservations about Piketty’s theorizing as a guide to understanding the evolution of American inequality…. Piketty[‘s]… rather fatalistic and certainly dismal view… presumes, first, that the return to capital diminishes slowly, if at all, as wealth is accumulated and, second, that the returns to wealth are [nearly] all reinvested…. Neither of these premises is likely correct as a guide to thinking about the American economy today…. Most economists would attribute both it and rising inequality to the working out of various forces associated with globalization and technological change…. Piketty… recognizes that at this point the gains in income of the top 1 percent substantially represent labor rather than capital income… a separate issue from processes of wealth accumulation…. So why has the labor income of the top 1 percent risen so sharply relative to the income of everyone else? No one really knows. Certainly there have been changes in prevailing mores regarding executive compensation… plenty to criticize in existing corporate-governance arrangements…. I think… those like Piketty who dismiss the idea that productivity has anything to do with compensation should be given a little pause…. The executives who make the most money are not for most part the ones running public companies who can pack their boards with friends. Rather, they are the executives chosen by private equity firms…. This is not in any way to ethically justify inordinate compensation-—only to raise a question about the economic forces that generate it…. And there is the basic truth that technology and globalization give greater scope to those with extraordinary entrepreneurial ability, luck, or managerial skill. Think about the contrast between George Eastman, who pioneered fundamental innovations in photography, and Steve Jobs…. Eastman Kodak Co. provided a foundation for a prosperous middle class in Rochester for generations, no comparable impact has been created by Jobs’s innovations…”

2. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Europe’s centre crumbles as Socialists immolate themselves on altar of EMU: “By a horrible twist of fate, Europe’s political Left has become the enforcer of reactionary economic policies. The great socialist parties of the post-war era have been trapped by the corrosive dynamics of monetary union, apologists for mass unemployment and a 1930s deflationary regime that subtly favour the interests of elites. One by one, they are paying the price…. Contractionary policies are poisonous for countries leveraged to the hilt…. One can understand why the Left in small countries may feel too weak to buck the EMU system. The mystery is why a French Socialist president with a parliamentary majority should so passively submit to policies that are sapping the lifeblood of the French economy and destroying his presidency. Francois Hollande won the presidency two years ago on a growth ticket, vowing to lead an EMU-wide reflation drive that would lift Europe out of slump. He promised to veto the EU Fiscal Compact. He asked to be judged on his record in ‘bending the curve of unemployment’, and to his chagrin the people are holding him to his word…”

3. Antonio Fatas: The US labor market is not working: “The US has gone through a major crisis after 2008 with devastating effects on the labor market but so have other countries. In fact, most European countries have done much worse than the US in terms of GDP growth during the last 6 years. In fact, with the exception of Portugal, Greece and Ireland, the US is the country with the worst labor market record for this age group if we compare the 2012 to the 2000 figures…”

4. David Dayen: Congress Is Blowing a Huge Opportunity to Rebuild America: “The days of cheap borrowing have returned. Yields on the 10-year Treasury bond, a good benchmark for determining government borrowing costs, have fallen to the lowest level since last year’s government shutdown…. The economy remains sluggish enough to keep a lid on interest rates. Demand remains well below trend, the housing market has grown weaker, and inflation has not approached the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target…. This confluence of factors has led to the re-emergence of the biggest bargain in America, an opportunity we have squandered amid years of low interest rates. Once again, we have a chance–perhaps the last chance–to use cheap borrowing to invest in priorities that will never be this affordable again…. Taking advantage of low rates and enacting a large infrastructure program would actually save money in the long-term, while strongly supporting economic recovery right now…”

5. Matt Yglesias: “(mattyglesias) on Twitter: Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t look like a huge disagreement: http://pic.twitter.com/FO7V93tuXG” Chris Giles: Piketty findings undercut by errors