Category: Equitablog

Nicholas Bagley: Deferring to the IRS: “Given the Chief Justice’s near-silence at oral argument in King v. Burwell, much will be made of Justice Kennedy’s sensitivity…

…to the argument that accepting the plaintiffs’ interpretation of the statute would raise serious federalism concerns. That’s completely appropriate. But I want to call attention to a different question that Kennedy asked… whether Chevron should apply….

Well, if [the statute is] ambiguous, then we think about Chevron. But it seems to me a drastic step for us to say that the Department of Internal Revenue and its director can make this call one way or the other when there are, what, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of subsidies involved here?… And it–it seems to me our cases say that if the Internal Revenue Service is going to allow deductions using these, that it has to be very, very clear….

There’s an answer to Kennedy’s question. I drafted an amicus brief….

It is true–but irrelevant–that:

when an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate ‘a significant portion of the American economy’, this Court typically greets its announcement with a measure of skepticism.…

[Yet, f]ar from unexpectedly arrogating to itself regulatory powers on the basis of statutes enacted some decades earlier, Treasury has issued a predictable… rule…. It is unclear how Treasury could have implemented the tax-credit provision at all without first resolving whether tax credits were available in states that declined to establish their own exchanges.

Chevron deference is all the more appropriate when agencies confront big, difficult questions that arise in the course of administration:

It is then that the agency’s expertise and political accountability are most essential—and where the structure of the federal government most forcefully counsels judicial restraint.

The plaintiffs are also wrong to suggest that Chevron has no application where the statute in question involves tax credits… Mayo Foundation… v. United States…

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: Uncertainty means that the Fed should wait a while before shifting course. Given the current situation, this would mean waiting a while to raise interest rates and then rapidly raising rates when the time comes…”
• Whet Mozer: On Trevon Logan: Chicago: Highly Segregated By Any Measure
• Nick Bunker: “The U.S. tax code is now the main vehicle for social policy in retirement, college savings, and housing. How well has this ‘submerged state’ worked? At least in these three areas, the effectiveness of the tax code, via deductions and credits, is questionable…”
• Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: “Historians [will] look back on… ‘Obamacare’ [as] encourag[ing] a wave of innovation that gradually tamed the spiraling costs of a dysfunctional system, even as millions of previously excluded Americans gained access to health insurance…”
• “When 2,000 People Take a Daily Aspirin for Two Years: 1 Heart Attack is Prevented… about 3.6 people have heart attacks…”

 

1. Zachary Tracer: Hospital Stocks Surge After Justice Kennedy Criticizes Obamacare Challenge: “Tenet Healthcare Corp. and HCA Holdings Inc. led a rally among hospital companies as a Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare’s insurance subsidies drew questions from a pivotal justice. Anthony Kennedy… said Wednesday there is a ‘powerful’ point to the Obama administration’s argument that the health-care law would fall apart if the subsidies were ruled unlawful. ‘There is a serious constitutional problem,’ Kennedy said, if the court rules for the challengers’ attack on tax credits designed to help people afford insurance…. As of 11:28 a.m. in New York. Tenet was up 7.4 percent to $50.52, and HCA rose 7 percent to $75.71. Community Health Systems Inc. advanced 6.3 percent to $52.70.”

2. Martin Wolf: Riches and Perils of the Fossil-Fuel Age: “In 2035, emissions of CO2 are forecast [by BP] to be 18bn tonnes above levels suggested by the International Energy Agency’s ‘450 Scenario’…. Improvements in energy efficiency are a… more important driver of the relatively low growth in emissions than shifts in the fuel mix…. These forecasts… imply a faster rise in energy efficiency than between 2000 and 2013…. Could we do better?… We need an accelerated technological revolution…. The sense of the BP report… is that… obstacles are many: costs, technological limits, slow turnover of the capital stock, inability to implement policy globally and natural inertia…. If governments could agree to implement a tax on carbon, they would give a big impulse towards an energy future that is more efficient and less polluting…”

3. Douglas A. Irwin: Tariff Incidence: Evidence from U.S. Sugar Duties, 1890-1930: “Direct empirical evidence on whether domestic consumers or foreign exporters bear the burden of a country’s import duties is scarce. This paper examines the incidence of U.S. sugar duties using a unique set of high-frequency (weekly, and sometimes daily) data on the landed and the duty-inclusive price of raw sugar in New York City from 1890 to 1930, a time when the United States consumed more than 20 percent of world sugar production and was therefore plausibly a ‘large’ country. The results reveal a striking asymmetry: a tariff reduction is immediately passed through to consumer prices with no impact on the import price, whereas about 40 percent of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer prices and 60 percent borne by foreign exporters. The apparent explanation for the asymmetric response is the asymmetric response of demand: imports collapse upon a tariff increase, but do not surge after a tariff reduction.”

4. Heather Bushy: Taxes and Fairness in an Era of High Inequality: “(1) As inequality has increased, the tax code has not kept pace with this change. The tax code does less to reduce inequality than it did in the late 1970s. (2) Efforts to reduce inequality are not in tension with economic growth…. (3) There are policy options that can make the tax code more progressive that will have broad benefits for everyone…. There are many examples of changes that would be consistent with the literature. Two that are on the table right now would be Eliminating the “stepped-up basis” for taxation of bequests and expanding the Child Tax Credit…. Families passing along large estates to children… the potential damages that could have on the vitality of the economy… a loophole we should close… eliminating the carried interest loophole… transfer taxes, raising the ordinary income tax rates or limiting deductions and exclusions. We can also do a variety of things at the low end…. The Child Tax Credit… partially refundable for a set percentage of income (15 percent) over a set threshold (currently $3,000). The value of the tax credit has been increased and the threshold decreased, both temporarily, in recent years. I recommend making these reforms permanent…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Blake Hounshell: “Some A+ whataboutism here” https://t.co/XLTB8dG1me http://t.co/ysoKaQmruQ
• Susan Jacoby: The First Victims of the First Crusade
• Tadich Grill: Hangtown Fry
• South Coast Portuguese Fish Chowder Recipe
• Michael Tomasky: “[Michael Schmidt’s New York] Times piece… says that there were ‘new’ regulations that Clinton was supposed to abide by…. So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly?…. The [New York] Times has some questions to answer to: Did you know that the new regs went into effect after Clinton left office? And if you didn’t, why not? And if you did, why did you leave that fact out of the story?…”

 

1. Matthew Yglesias: Star Trek is great, and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was the greatest thing about it: “Spock was not only a hero. He was a particular kind of hero. Someone the wrong kind of people would call a villain. I am always struck, as a longtime Star Trek fan, by the fact that many media figures seem to think it’s a dis on President Obama to compare him to Spock. The ease with which some deride Spock makes him truly unusual for a television character. Spock is someone who some of us can eminently identify with, but also someone who others find so alien that they are compelled to castigate him. That, in turn, makes him a dozen times more relatable than a more conventional and universally admired hero.”

Glaukon: So: Blogging…

Sokrates: Indeed…

Hypatia: I would like to start by offering the floor to the Great and Good Felix Salmon:

Felix Salmon: To All the Young Journalists Asking for Advice…: I’m also very flattered by the lovely things you said… about how you’d love to have a career in journalism… do[ing] the kind of thing… I do. You won’t…. By the time you’re my age… you’ll… be doing something… nobody today… foresee[s]….The obstacles facing you are much greater than anything I managed to overcome…. The exact same forces which are good for journalism and good for owners are the forces which are bad for journalists….

I’m the happy recipient of a combination of luck and privilege… a long time paying my dues… very dry publications…. a decade learning about the real-world bond markets from the people who actually ran them…. When I found myself blogging the credit crisis, all that education paid off in spades. And the fact that I found myself blogging at all was itself an act of luck: I pretty much just happened to be in the right place at the right time… when the blogosphere was basically happy hour at The Magician….

There’s no particular reason to believe that the best route to success is to first get your foot in the door churning out listicles, and then somehow work your way up the ranks. That might have worked for a few early BuzzFeed employees, but they, too, were lucky…. There’s no particular reason to believe that the advice I’d give five or six years ago, which was basically ‘start a blog and get discovered’, still works. With the death of RSS, blogs are quaint artifacts at this point, and I can’t remember the last time I discovered a really good new one…

Hypatia: What is going on here?

Thrasymakhos: Two things are going on. First, the media bosses–capital–do not like weblogs precisely because weblogs are voices. Hence the bosses are interested in ironing out voices so when the voice moves on they can keep the traffic: Nick Denton establishes not Ana Marie Cox’s Wonkette but rather Wonkette. Marcus Brauchli establishes not Ezra Klein’s Weblog Table but rather Wonkblog. The idea of finding your voice, building an audience by developing a reputation as an effective and trusted (and amusing) information intermediary so that then you have valuable links with that audience that you can monetize in some way is anathema to the bosses who need to make money…

Sokrates: Let’s postpone that topic for a few minutes. Thrasymakhos: your second?

Thrasymakhos: I was just getting wound up! I have actually forgotten my second!

Omar Khayyam: Surely it was the Great Fragmented Specialization?

Glaukon: Ah yes! The Great Fragmented Specialization! Paging the extremely sharp Jason Kottke!

Jason Kottke: The Blog Is Dead: Long Live the Blog!: Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium…. Companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge…. The blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work. If you want something to cry about, cry about the decline of the open web…. I (obviously) think there’s a lot of value in the blog format… but… it’s difficult to ignore the blog’s diminished place…. I still read lots of blog posts… only when they… pop up on the collective radar of those I follow…

Thrasymakhos: I would point out that the decline of the open web is also in large part due to the fact that the bosses don’t want an open web: a sharing information ecostructure with lots of outlinks doesn’t keep the eyeballs on the site where they can be sold to advertisers. Media bosses not only want to keep their employees from developing portable reputations as effective and trusted (and amusing) information intermediaries, they also want to keep their webpages from reminding their readers from learning about E&T&AII outside their site…

Sokrates: Enough!! We will get to that later. The Great Fragmented Specialization! Mr. Thompson?

Ben Thompson: The Multitudes of Social: In the last two days I have used 10 apps you might characterize as “social”…. Twitter, for keeping up on news and commenting on tech and stratechery. Facebook, for posting personal status updates and checking in. LINE, for text messaging with my wife and friends in Taiwan. Snapchat, for exchanging photos with my wife. Skype, for instant messaging with my colleagues. Facetime, for talking with my wife and kids. Instagram, for posting cool photos. Email, for all types of content, both work and personal. Photostream, for sharing photos with my family. WordPress, for posting to this blog…. Apps: each of them has their own place. Some… for… friends-and-family, others for a[n] audience centered around my interests. Some… meaningful and permanent, others ephemeral…. Some… public… others… private. Some… photo-centric, others… text…. Hardly any overlap at all—and none with Facebook…

Hypatia: But this means that the conversation fragments, and individual voices vanish into the din. Isn’t that a major loss?

Sokrates: Indeed it is, and that is why Mr. Thompson believes that in the end the weblog will endure in spite of its defects:

Ben Thompson: Blogging’s Bright Future: The entire history of social media… is a story of unbundling the old-school blog. Twitter has replaced link-posts and comments, Instagram has replaced pictures, and Facebook has replaced albums and blogrolls; now Medium is seeking to replace the essay. None of this is a bad thing… the ease-of-use… characteristic of any service that seeks to focus on one particularly aspect of communication, a big contrast to a blog’s ability to do anything and everything relatively poorly…

Hypatia: But it is a bad thing! The conversation loses nuance, voice, context, and depth. In fact, it ceases to be a conversation–just a lot of stand-alone nuggets. That is not a well-functioning public sphere…

Thrasymakhos: But capitalism does not value a well-functioning public sphere. Capitalism values easily-replaceable labor in which media bosses have had to make only very small investments in human-specific firm capital. Capitalism values not intellectual engagement and thoughtful ideas but rather linkbait and eyeballs sold to advertisers…

Sokrates: Enough!

Glaukon: Perhaps we could let Mr. Thompson continue?

Ben Thompson: Blogging’s Bright Future: It’s fair to ask just what a blog is good for anyway…. Despite the great unbundling, the blog has not and will not die… to say someone follows a blog is to say someone follows a person…. Perhaps most importantly, I believe that more and more consumers are coming to grips with the reality of online media: when everything is free, you too often end up getting exactly what you paid for. If you consider the time wasted reading clickbait, a few bucks a month for content you trust isn’t such a bad deal. Forgive me if this article read a bit too much like an advertisement for Stratechery…. I believe that [Andrew] Sullivan’s The Daily Dish will in the long run be remembered not as the last of a dying breed but as the pioneer of a new, sustainable journalism that strikes an essential balance to the corporate-backed advertising-based “scale” businesses that [Ezra] Klein… is pursuing…

Aristokles: Hold it: Andrew Sullivan? Ezra Klein? Who are these people?

Andrew Sullivan: A Note To My Readers: I’ve decided to stop blogging…. I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough…. I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again…. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book. I want to spend some real time with my parents, while I still have them, with my husband, who is too often a ‘blog-widow’, my sister and brother, my niece and nephews, and rekindle the friendships that I have simply had to let wither because I’m always tied to the blog. And I want to stay healthy…

Ben Smith: My Life in the Blogosphere: I first really understood the secret power of the early 2000s political blogosphere in February 2005, when Josh Marshall was hot in pursuit of then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay…. Josh [Marshall] really changed the politics of the mid-2000s with his intensely focused, crowdsourced, narrative-building single-minded crusades–the U.S. attorney scandal was the third–Andrew [Sullivan] was more esoteric, building long, iterative cases over time for everything from the distant dream of marriage equality to the beauty of bearded men and the real nature of Catholicism. He was a wonderful assignment editor… that question–what would interest Andrew?–was always a bit in my mind…. First, Josh Marshall made a rational decision that… ultimately undercut… [his] influence… building his own aggregation, and then reporting, operations, linking first to their own back page, capturing the audience, and sending a trickle rather than a flood of traffic to the aggregate…

Thrasymakhos: See? ‘I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But… individuals… are… embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests… relations whose creature[s] they socially remain…’ Josh Marshall had to make his nut, and that was inconsistent with the open blogosphere, and it will be inconsistent with the open web…

Sokrates: Sigh…

Ben Smith: Andrew Sullivan was one of the few who rejected the choice between being an influential portal and a more contained media company, staffing up in a modest way, linking out, and participating meaningfully in the national conversation…. Few blogs drive the traffic they once did, and reporters hope their stories will be widely tweeted, rather than linked…. Some bloggers have suffered from the same nostalgic attachment to WordPress that newspaper editors did to their printing presses. I share a lot of that nostalgia…. Here at BuzzFeed and at BuzzFeed News, we also try not to weep for the old blogosphere, and most (though by no means all) of our top editors have roots in it…

Kevin Drum: Blogging Isn’t Dead. But Old-School Blogging Is Definitely Dying: Professional blogs prefer to link to their own content, rather than other people’s. Josh Marshall’s TPM, for example, links almost exclusively to its own content, because that’s the best way to promote their own stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It makes perfect sense. But it’s definitely a conversation killer…. Most conversation now seems to have moved to Twitter… even more democratizing… often too fast, and when you combine that with its 140-character limit, you end up with a lot of shrill and indignant replies…. I miss old-school blogging and the conversations it started. But I also recognize that what I’m saying about Twitter is very much what traditional print journalists said about blogging back in the day…. As with everything, it’s a tradeoff…. The world moves on…

Omar Khayyam: It seems to me that Kevin has lost track of the end. The end is to have a vibrant, democratic, and informative public sphere. If a thoughtful blogosphere degenerates into tidal waves of llama tweets intermixed with twitterrage spasms, a great deal has been lost…

Hypatia: That Sullivan could not make it work–could not find a way to keep his network entity going into the future–is a point for Felix Salmon’s institutional pessimism about the future, I think…

Sokrates: But some of those who have benefitted most from the new social media internet ecology are trying somehow to push back–to restore voice, conversations, depth, and a situation in which one does indeed have the highest incentive to become an effective and trustworthy (and amusing) information intermediary:

Ezra Klein: What Andrew Sullivan’s exit says about the future of blogging: Andrew Sullivan is leaving blogging. Crap. Sullivan–alongside Josh Marshall–basically invented the political blogosphere…. Blogging isn’t dead. I know, because I read a lot of blogs these days, and they’re fantastic…. Daring Fireball, Slate Star Codex, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Freddie DeBoer, Noahpinion, Marginal Revolution, Elizabeth Stoker Breunig, Paul Krugman, Digby’s Hullabaloo, Jared Bernstein, Brad DeLong, The Incidental Economist, and Kevin Drum, to name a few…. The blogosphere lives…. But blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale…. social traffic… Facebook…. Blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral….

As an editor, I miss blogging, too. Early in Vox’s life, we made a halfhearted effort at launching some. There was my Blag. Matt’s Live Journal. Dylan’s Xanga. As the names suggest, the experiment was drenched in nostalgia. But they weren’t really blogs and, for a variety of reasons, they didn’t really succeed. And I don’t really think the other efforts to bring blogs back to large organizations will succeed either. I don’t think blogs–at least in the 2005-era sense of the word, the conversational blogs Sullivan was the protector of–work in these large organizations. And I think this is a problem, or at least a manifestation of a problem…. At Vox, we have some cool ideas that we’re going to roll out in the coming months to try to chip away at this problem, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near a solution.

Glaukon: But there are young whippersnappers on the make who say that weblogging does too work these days:

Noah Smith: Blogging After Andrew Sullivan: What is dying is the idea of the blog as a news source…. Twitter has basically killed that…. With blogs, you can do something that news can’t easily do — you can carry on a conversation. Reading modern blogs, you see that back-and-forth dialogs are now a huge part of what bloggers do…. What this means is that more and more, bloggers will be specialists…. The trend toward longer blog posts and more specialization doesn’t mean that bloggers will  talk only about their fields of expertise. I’ve written posts about clinical depression, about the racial politics of the movie “Django Unchained,”  and about stereotypes of Japanese culture…. Blogging 2.0 will be more focused on longer posts, high-level discussions and specialized expertise, while retaining the focus on distinctive voice and free-wheeling subject matter that made Blogging 1.0 so fun. It’s a great time to have a blog.

Thrasymakhos: Noah Smith is an academic–U. Mich. Ph.D., tenure-track appointment at SUNY-Stoneybrook…

Glaukon: There are more:

Paul Krugman: Floor Waxes, Dessert Toppings, and Blogging: Ezra Klein… and others are offering various encomiums. You’ll pardon me…. I remember [Andrew] Sullivan declaring that the “decadent left” was poised to become a fifth column in the war on terror–and of course I remember the campaign of character assassination he waged against yours truly for daring to criticize his then-beloved George W. Bush and his wars…. What was interesting in Ezra’s piece was the suggestion that a golden age of blogging… has passed. That seems… incomplete…. One one side… you’re missing a crucial part… if you fail to acknowledge the importance… of right-wing warbloggers… where Sullivan started… cheering on the Rumsfeld doctrine and giving it to lily-livered liberals…. On the other side… there’s still plenty of room for independent bloggers who bring real expertise to bear….

Ezra suggests that social media have undermined the original version of blogging, in which a blog was a personal conversation between the blogger and his or her audience; now pieces have to be stand-alones…. But… it seems to me that there’s less conflict involved than Ezra suggests…. You can, with effort, maintain a blogging style that makes regular readers feel that they’re part of an ongoing conversation yet makes individual posts meaningful to people who aren’t reading everything you write… a floor wax and a dessert topping, if you work at it…

Thrasymakhos: Paul Krugman is not only an academic, but a tenured academic, with a large medal from Sweden and a perch at http://nytimes.com as well. His viewpoint is a rarified one…

Hypatia: Do you think he doesn’t know?

Paul Krugman: Now, econ bloggers may be something of a special case. All of us have day jobs; for all of us the payoff to blogging is somewhat hard to pin down, although having a blog that a lot of people in finance and government read has a very real impact on which doors open when you knock. But I don’t think the lesson is unique to any one field…. Think of this as a conversation with a few people I like and respect. There are lots of ways to do this thing well, but stuffiness and pretentiousness won’t fit into any of them…

Thrasymakhos: Again, that is very easy for him to say…

Hypatia: It could well be that thoughtful weblogging by those who want to become effective and trusted information intermediaries shrinks down to a core of tenured professors and others with independent incomes, while working journalists alternately compile listicles in the hope that one will become viral or go the extra mile to accommodate the quirks and bigotries of Rupert Murdoch…

Thrasymakhos: Or the financial interests of the oil-and-gas lobby…

Glaukon: If only there were some way to make weblogging not just full of voice and trust, but also social, so that maintaining a voice, being generous with outlinks and earning a living were not incompatible…

Sokrates: That, I think, is my cue to turn it over to the team of Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, of Twitter, and now of Medium:

Michael Sippey: Blogging on Medium: tl;dr: you can’t do it today. and i think you should be able to. Hi. My name is Michael, and I’m a blogger…. I’ve been trying to blog on Medium the past couple of months in Stating the Obvious. And while I’ve loved writing the weekly filtered pieces, it really hasn’t felt like blogging…. The fundamental unit of the blog is the stream…. I’m building a corpus of standalone stories, there’s no way to read them together and have that stream tell a story. So we started to brainstorm a bit about what blogging on Medium would look like, and how we could support both #longform and #shortform in one platform…. We started at the simplest place: the user profile…

Ev Williams: A Less Long, More Connected Medium: I love a professionally reported 17-minute article about an important and surprising topic. Or a 10-minute technical mystery by a professional designer. And who doesn’t enjoy a 91-minute interview between a media entrepreneur and a journalist? High-production value, lengthy stories are what Medium is best known for. And I’m glad we’ve provided a home to so many great ones. It was always our intention to create a platform that provides a superior creation and reading experience for meaty stuff…. It was not our intention, however, to create a platform just for “long-form” content or where people feel intimidated to publish if they’re not a professional writer or a famous person (something we’ve heard many times)…. That’s why, today, we’re making some pretty big changes…. Inline Editor: We wanted to make it easier to start writing whenever you have an idea — and also to make it feel like less of a big deal to do so…. The Stream: To complement the inline editor and make reading a more seamless experience, we redesigned post listings. Now you can start reading a post and get a better sense of what it’s about without having to click through…. Tags: Lastly, we’re introducing tags to help posts written by anyone be more easily connected and discovered…

Thrasymakhos: So what incentive will people have to spend time on Medium?

Sokrates: The same incentive people have to spend time editing Wikipedia…

Hypatia: So the idea is to combine the increasing-returns social features of Twitter with the voice-creation features of blogger and have a truly social weblogging platform in which the twenty-first century public sphere can flourish?

Sokrates: Perhaps…

Glaukon: How is it going?

Robison Meyer: What Blogging Has Become: For a couple years now, it was clear we were going to lose the reverse-chron, single-URL game…. But in return, we got Twitter and Facebook and whatever your other favorite social-media tool is…. The startups of the mid-Aughts figured out how to take the best parts of blogging and bring them together in one place, while cutting the parts that had made them so hard…. There have been side effects to corporate online consolidation…. In this future, what publications will have done… is take the grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet and consolidated them into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry….

Into that ecosystem enters the New Medium…. Ev Williams explains the changes by saying the company has become known for longer and well-produced stories and that, while that’s nice, it really wants to be a home for all kinds of writing — long, short, and, um, middle-length. That makes sense, but I think that’s the MacGuffin…. Collections… have been… rechristened Publications. And user profiles just look bloggier…. Medium feels more like a social network… a design-y Tumblr for people with startups….

Medium’s new product bets that there’s some juice left in the old voice-driven web. It’s a testament to how much the Internet has changed that I can’t tell if that’s a solid tactic or middle-aged nostalgia…. We still care about that old writer-driven web, though, and Medium seems to talk the same talk, so we keep coming back to it…

Zachary Tracer: Hospital Stocks Surge After Justice Kennedy Criticizes Obamacare Challenge: “Tenet Healthcare Corp. and HCA Holdings Inc. led a rally among hospital companies as a Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare’s insurance subsidies drew questions from a pivotal justice…

…Anthony Kennedy… said Wednesday there is a ‘powerful’ point to the Obama administration’s argument that the health-care law would fall apart if the subsidies were ruled unlawful. ‘There is a serious constitutional problem,’ Kennedy said, if the court rules for the challengers’ attack on tax credits designed to help people afford insurance…. As of 11:28 a.m. in New York. Tenet was up 7.4 percent to $50.52, and HCA rose 7 percent to $75.71. Community Health Systems Inc. advanced 6.3 percent to $52.70.”

Ezra Klein, one of the viri illustres making us hope that the press corps over the next generation will actually be a net plus to the nation (cough, Judy Miller of the New York Times; cough, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post) has a good post that, I think, misses one important point:

Ezra Klein: Republican States Suffer If Obamacare Loses at the Supreme Court: “For Republicans, the challenge to Obamacare’s individual mandate made good political sense…

…if the mandate was repealed, it would cripple the law…. The White House would have to agree to… at least root-and-branch reform. The challenge to Obamacare’s subsidies makes less political sense: if the subsidies are ripped out of federal exchanges, it will only cripple the law in red states… [which] will be left with a policy disaster–and a hefty bill…. Republicans in those states will still be paying the taxes and bearing the spending cuts needed to fund Obamacare. They just won’t be getting anything back. So the Republican plan… to fight Obamacare is for Republicans to rip themselves off…. This is why the GOP’s political strategy is so bizarre…. The GOP is taking its own voters-—along with million of poorer people who live in Republican states–hostage…. Democrats might want to deal on Obamacare because they want, as a moral matter, to cover poorer people in red states. But on a practical level, the post-King status quo is a much bigger disaster for Republican states than Democratic ones.

All this makes sense. But what it misses is that the original Republican challenge to ObamaCare was two-pronged: an attack on the mandate and thus on the functioning of the exchanges, yes; and also an attack on the Medicaid expansion. The attack on the mandate failed. The attack on the Medicaid expansion succeeded.

This then left Republican governors and legislators in red states with a big problem: if they used the freedom John Roberts had given them when he rewrote the law from the bench to accept the Medicaid expansion, they became complicit in the implementation of the hated ObamaCare (never mind that it was really just the loved RomneyCare with the serial numbers filed off). If they rejected the Medicaid expansion, they taxed their own people in order to pay for health treatment for the poor and working poor, for topping-off hospital budgets, and for raising doctors’ incomes in blue states. The Republican governors and legislators of the red states have already fixed the question of whether their strategy to fight ObamaCare is simply to rip the people they represent off. And they have, for the most part, with some hesitation, already decided: “Yes it is.”

From the perspective of any state-level decision-makers, both the Medicaid expansion and the exchange subsidies are free money for their constituents. And both are free money for a wide range of constituencies within their states.

• One-third of Medicaid-expansion dollars are spent on providing extra health care for the poor (who in red states are, I must note, 70% white)
• One-third are spent on hospitals (which then flow to all hospital stakeholders, from patients and nurses to doctors and administrators and health-insurance companies).
• And one-third boost the incomes of doctors.

It is even more such the case as far as the exchanges are concerned: As best as I can figure out, the benefits from having the exchanges up and running flow:

• about one-third to middle-class residents who do not work for large bureaucracies and thus benefit from a well-functioning marketplace,
• one-third to the working poor recipients of exchange subsidies,
• and one-third primarily to the insurance companies that receive the subsidies and secondarily to other health-sector providers.

It is from a political-economy standpoint very strange. “We bring home free money from the feds for our state” is not a losing argument for any state-level politician. Maybe you could argue against accepting free money from the feds if it all went to “moochers”. But insurance companies and doctors are not usually thought of as core Democratic Party constituencies.

Yet the fallout from King v. Burwell may well make them so…

More often than I would have thought likely, people ask me: “We’re thinking of having a conference about economic inequality What should be on the agenda?”

My standard answer makes three points:

1. Have the conference about not inequality but equitable growth. “Inequality” automatically forces you into a partisan political frame, and you may want to get there at the end of your conference but you probably do not want to start there.

2. Focus down: you cannot cover the whole topic–you need to pick one or two or three subtopics if you are going to get anywhere.

3. Have a balance between people who summarize past literatures and people who break new ground.

But often they ask for more: a list of what the topics and issues are.

So here it is: my Equitable Growth Conference in a Box: Topics

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Equitable Growth Conference in a Box

The Race Between Education and Technology

How good a strategy is more higher education for overall economic growth, for raising middle-class standards?

• College funding and college attendance
• College funding and college quality
• College completion
• New modes and orders in college education
• How much of a difference does our losing the race between education and technology make, and where in the distribution does it make it?

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The Dilemmas of K-12 Education

Is there low-hanging fruit in institutional or funding reform for K-12 education?

• Getting the K-12 schools that we need: exit, voice, and loyalty in the school district
• Getting the K-12 teachers that we need after the decline of sex discrimination in employment
• Getting the K-12 students that we need
• Getting the parents of the K-12 students that we need

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Social Equality, Diversity, and Economic Distribution

we need to integrate our understanding of the decline in discrimination with our understanding of economic inequality

• Was America in the 1950s a more equal place than today, really?
• Feminism, read families and blue families, and their discontents.
• Family planning, reproductive rights, and inequality.
• Disparate impact: The rising salience of class and the declining salience of race.
• Mass incarceration, militarized policing, race, and inequality.

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The Business Cycle and the Income and Wealth Distribution

Moving beyond the false assumption that business cycles are simply fluctuations around stable and unaffected trends

• Hysteresis.
• The business cycle in the labor share: how much of a point did Kalecki have?
• The political economy of austerity.

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Taxes and Transfers and the Level and Distribution of Well-Being

What have been the effects of the lowered marginal tax rates starting in 1980?

• What, really, has happened to the progressivity of the tax-and-transfer system since 1980?
• what, really, have been the supply-side effects of reduced marginal tax rates on economic activity?
• How have declining marginal tax rates and other shifts altered the balance of bargaining power among stakeholders of corporations?
• what should the tax-and-transfer system look like?

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Institutions, Globalization, and the Bargaining Power of America’s the Working Class

• How much of the decline in unions has been a reaction to rather than a cause of declining working-class bargaining power?
• How much of the decline in working-class bargaining power has been due to globalization, really?
• What is the proper role of labor unions in the twenty-first century?
• Why have attempts to envision alternative economic arrangements to the for-profit corporation controlled by shareholders not had greater success?

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Rents and Quasi-Rents in the American Economy, and Their Division

Will wealth be invested in productive capital or in rent-seeking capital…

• NIMBYism
• “Oil and gas” and other rent-seeking sectors and lobbies.
• The financial octopus.
• Intellectual property, the information economy, and rent seeking.

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What Special Factors Are at Work in Finance, Takeovers, Private Equity, and CEOs?

How did CEOs become the owners of 20% of the equity value of the corporations they run anyway?

• The old-school corporate structure of the 1970s and its incomes.
• Takeovers, private equity, and the overclass.
• Financial deegulation and financial sector compensation.

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What Special Factors Are at Work in the Information Economy?

Technological change used to produce not just technoplutocrat but middle-class prosperity, didn’t it?

• Why did the technological advances that produced Kodak generate middle-class prosperity for Rochester while the technological advances that produced Hollywood generate stars and superstars?
• What is the balance between consumer surplus and factor cost in the information economy, and how should that affect our perceptions of economic growth?
• What is the proper role of the government in the information economy?
• Accept for the moment that the rise of the robots will put downward pressure on both prices of consumer goods and services and wages. How would we know whether this is a process that should worry us?

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The Political Economy of Gilded Ages: Does Piketty Have It Right? And If Not Him, Who Does Have It Right?

What is the “natural” distribution of wealth and inheritance in industrial societies? Gilded Age or Social Democratic Era?

• Land rents and inequality in historical perspective.
• Rates of profit and rates of accumulation.
• How strong is the tendency for wealth to concentrate?
• Piketty-World or its inverse? Rule of a plutocratic overclass or “euthanasia of the rentier“?

Martin Wolf: Riches and Perils of the Fossil-Fuel Age: “In 2035, emissions of CO2 are forecast [by BP] to be 18bn tonnes above levels suggested by the International Energy Agency’s ‘450 Scenario’…

…Improvements in energy efficiency are a… more important driver of the relatively low growth in emissions than shifts in the fuel mix…. These forecasts… imply a faster rise in energy efficiency than between 2000 and 2013…. Could we do better?… We need an accelerated technological revolution…. The sense of the BP report… is that… obstacles are many: costs, technological limits, slow turnover of the capital stock, inability to implement policy globally and natural inertia…. If governments could agree to implement a tax on carbon, they would give a big impulse towards an energy future that is more efficient and less polluting…

Douglas A. Irwin: Tariff Incidence: Evidence from U.S. Sugar Duties, 1890-1930: “Direct empirical evidence on whether domestic consumers or foreign exporters bear the burden of a country’s import duties is scarce…

…This paper examines the incidence of U.S. sugar duties using a unique set of high-frequency (weekly, and sometimes daily) data on the landed and the duty-inclusive price of raw sugar in New York City from 1890 to 1930, a time when the United States consumed more than 20 percent of world sugar production and was therefore plausibly a ‘large’ country. The results reveal a striking asymmetry: a tariff reduction is immediately passed through to consumer prices with no impact on the import price, whereas about 40 percent of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer prices and 60 percent borne by foreign exporters. The apparent explanation for the asymmetric response is the asymmetric response of demand: imports collapse upon a tariff increase, but do not surge after a tariff reduction.