Things to Read on the Evening of Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Must Reads:

• Brian Buetler: How the media is blowing the Obamacare rollout
  <-How insurance companies are unreliable narrators on health-insurance “rate shock”, and how the ObamaCare rollout badly needs some truth-in-insurance-advertising to make health insurance companies act like the public utilities they always should have been…

• Christina Romer: Monetary Policy in the Post-Crisis World <- “I remember vividly being at a meeting of central bankers… in September 2009. All of the talk was: ‘We have stopped the crisis. Now what we need to do is go back to [being] prudent… [and] worrying about inflation’. Yet unemployment was still risin–it would hit 10% in October 0f 2009. Every inch of my body wanted to scream… ‘Oh no, you are not done!’ Monetary policymakers, unfortunately, did take a break from aggressive action in 2010 and 2011…”

Should Reads:

• Michael Stillman, M.D., and Monalisa Tailor, M.D, of the University of Louisville Medical Center, on the blockages to health-care access that are killing one of their patients with colon cancer <- A horrifying story to put anecdotal flesh on the quantitative bones of how inadequate our health-care safety net truly is right now, and why we as a nation get so little bang in health indicators from the mammoth bucks we commit to the sector.

• Carmen Reinhart making the case that we should be really worried about debt accumulation <- She, in my view at least, demonstrates that that case is quite weak as long as interest rates remain low.

• Jon Cohn: So you ended up XY instead of XX. Get over yourself <- Once you start saying women should pay more than men because of their genes, what justification is there for any form of social insurance against having failed to choose the right parents?

• Jim Tankersley: The brutal economies of hard-line Republican districts <- Not good in relative terms at generating jobs, not good at generating incomes.

• Brad Plumer: How the world is failing at its climate goals, in one giant chart <- Will we keep the global warming rise to less than 3.6F? No.

• Robert Gordon: Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds <- “Even if innovation were to continue… at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds… demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of… debt… suggest[ing] that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades…”

Should Know Exists:

• Pat Kline and Enrico Moretti: People, Places and Public Policy <- When place- rather than person-based equality-promoting policies actually promote equality–and efficiency too…

• Dave Reifschneider, William Wascher, and David Wilcox: Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy <- The fact that our cyclical unemployment is turning into structural unemployment means the urgency of demand-boosting policies is very great; the fact that all of it has not yet so turned means that there is still time…

• Marc Labonte: The FY2014 Government Shutdown: Economic Effects
  <- Yes, we will be between $50 billion and $150 billion poorer when the effects of the October government shutdown have worked their way through the system. Why do you ask?