Category: Equitablog

I think Paul Krugman is wrong here. It is true that the rich do have more nominal assets than liabilities (not all of those Treasury bonds are held by the PBoC, after all). But it is also true that America’s rich have a lot of real assets whose value depends on a strong and growing economy.

I find it implausible to claim that the net gain is positive when we net out the (slight) real gain to the rich from lower inflation with the (large) real loss to rich from lower capital utilization.

It’s not a material interest in low inflation that we are dealing with here…

Paul Krugman: Class and Monetary Polic: “If we only look at interest-bearing assets…

…even the top group [of those with more than $500,000] has more liabilities than assets…. But the S[urvey of ]I[ncome and ]P[rogram ]P[articipation] top [starting at $500,000] isn’t very high; in 2007 you needed a net worth of more than $8 million just to be in the top 1 percent [of wealth]. And since the ratio of interest-bearing assets to debt is clearly rising with wealth, we can be sure that the truly wealthy are indeed in the category where they have more to lose than to gain by a rise in the price level…. It’s also clearly true that the elderly rich are especially likely to own lots of bonds and not have much debt….

Struggling middle-class retirees living on the interest on their CDs?… There aren’t many of them and they’re less middle-class than you think.vBasically, inflation redistributes wealth down the scale of both wealth and age, while deflation does the reverse. And therein lies the deep explanation for inflation hysteria. The Fed’s efforts to boost the economy haven’t had the disastrous effects the usual suspects predicted, but it’s nonetheless true that this is no policy for rich old men (ROMs?). And playing to the paranoia of the ROMs is basically what the WSJ editorial page, Fox News, etc. is all about.

Should-Reads:

1. Nick Bunker: What the Beveridge Curve may tell us about the U.S. labor market: “Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland used historical data on printed job advertisements to create a jobs opening rate for years prior to 2000. And if you look at their Beveridge Curve for economic recoveries going back over 60 years, you see the current shift is actually quite typical. The curve appears to shift quite a bit (up and over to the right) after large recessions and shifts back (down and over to the left) after the labor market recovers from the large shock…”

2. Dean Baker: Three paths to full employment: “The prospect of waiting another five years to reach full employment is not acceptable. It means that millions of people are being needlessly denied the opportunity to earn a living…. Continued high unemployment means that most of the gains from economic growth will go to those at the top. That the current jobs situation is better than during the worst of the downturn is hardly something to cheer about. The absurdity is that economists know how to get back to full employment…. There are three ways to deal with this shortfall in demand. The first is the simplest and most obvious: Get the government to spend more money…. We also have the route of trade…. Reduce the value of the dollar against foreign currencies…. Finally, if we can’t increase aggregate demand, we can reduce the supply of labor. The way to do this is by encouraging firms to reduce work hours as an alternative to laying people off…”

3. Carola Binder: The Unemployment Cost of Below-Target Inflation: “Svensson notes that inflation expectations that are statistically and economically higher than inflation for many years do not pass standard tests of rationality. He builds upon the ‘near-rational’ expectations framework of Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000). In Akerlof et al.’s model, when inflation is fairly close to zero, a fraction of people simply neglect inflation, and behave as if inflation were zero. This is not too unreasonable–it saves them the computational trouble… and isn’t too costly if inflation is really low…. In the case of Sweden, the near-rational model is modified because people are not behaving as if inflation were zero, but rather as if it were 2%, when in fact it is lower than 2%. Instead of permitting higher output and employment, the reverse happens…”

4. Ed Kilgore: Moderation in the Pursuit of Policies Is No Virtue: “Yes, it is far past time to put to rest the idea there is some sort of moderate ideology identified with the views of Mike Bloomberg or Thomas Friedman or Jon Huntsman or the Bowles-Simpson Commission that would sweep the country if only the cowardly and unimaginative party hacks would embrace it. As Ezra suggests, the notion… is almost entirely backwards…. I don’t buy this idea that us virtuous lefties and the Tea Folk share an anticorporate agenda; I’d personally rather be governed, if I have to be, by Republican Establishment hacks serving the interests of the Fortune 500 than by ideologues who think liberal Protestants are Satanists or that the Medicaid program is slavery imposed by theft. But in the end, we’re at a point in political history where at some point America needs to choose a stable and internally coherent governing ideology for a while. Trying to govern via some sort of mushy middle path is not only a recipe for policy disaster, but anti-(small-d)democratic as well…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Martin Wolf: “Conducting irreversible experiments with the only planet we have is irresponsible. It would only be rational to refuse to do anything to mitigate the risks if we were certain the science of man-made climate change is bogus. Since it rests on well-established science, it would be ludicrous to claim any such certainty…”
• Harold James and Domenico Lombardi: “Bretton Woods demonstrated that it takes a major crisis to produce a political dynamic of reform. Today’s world, for all of its troubles, is simply not dangerous enough – at least not yet – for the countries at the helm of the global economy…”
• John Aziz: Obama isn’t killing coal. It’s dying anyway
• Dart-Throwing Chimp: Another Chicken Little Post on China
• MaxSpeak
• Mallory Ortberg: Dirtbag John Milton

And:

1. David Brockman: Moderate voters are a myth: “What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they’re left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle–and so they’re labeled as moderate. But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream…. Voters who hold gentle opinions that are all on the left or the right end up looking a lot more extreme than voters who hold intense opinions that fall all over the political spectrum…”

2. Miles Kimball: Safe, Legal, Rare and Early: “I agree with the majority of Americans. It makes sense to me that someone ought to have the right not to be killed the day before they would otherwise have been born. And it makes sense to me that, despite its potential, the interests of a single human cell from a recently fertilized egg cannot weigh as much in the balance as the interests of a woman in choosing one of the most basic aspects of what her future will look like. In between, I see the ethical weight of nascent human life as increasing gradually over time. There are milestones along the way: fertilization, implantation, getting a heartbeat, becoming able to feel pain, being born. But even those transitions, seen up close, are gradual ones…”

3. Lynn Parramore: Seven Weird Things Money Does to Your Brain: “1. Money kills empathy…. 2. Losing money hurts, literally…. 3. More money, fewer ethics…. 4. The more money you make, the more you think about money…. 5. Men with a lot of testosterone do weird things with money…. 6. Your brain treats credit differently from cash…. 7. The wealthy are perceived as evil-doers…”

4. Ed Kilgore: The Q-Pac Pack: “a new national survey from Quinnipiac…. On the Democratic side… HRC still leads Warren by better than five-to-one…. On the Republican side, you have seven—that’s right, seven—potential candidates bunched within three points of each other: Paul at 11; Bush, Christie and Huckabee at 10; and Cruz, Ryan and Walker at 8…. I’m still pleased that after a long season of frenetic pandering to the GOP’s conservative activist base, Bobby Jindal’s support level has dropped from 3% to 1%…”

5. Matt Bruenig: Desert Theory, Rehashed: “In response to Pope Francis’ call for nations to distribute their resources more evenly, Sean Hannity unleashed an ugly tirade. In it, he refers to the poor as stupid and lazy, which is more or less the reality of how the right-wing regards them. Despite their various shell arguments to the contrary, the core reason right-wingers oppose egalitarian policies is that they don’t think poor people are deserving of the income such policies deliver to them. In sophisticated circles, this desert theory approach is usually expressed as a kind of productivity ethic. Adherents claim that we should construct our distributive institutions so as to create a patterned distribution in which economic benefits flow to their producers, people usually said to have ‘earned’ them. Adherents seem to think that laissez-faire institutions create such a patterned distribution, but they are sorely mistaken…”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Kenneth Rogoff: Economic Recovery Require Debt Restructuring or Rescheduling: “Eurozone leaders continue to debate how best to reinvigorate economic growth, with French and Italian leaders now arguing that the eurozone’s rigid “fiscal compact” should be loosened. Meanwhile, the leaders of the eurozone’s northern member countries continue to push for more serious implementation of structural reform. Ideally, both sides will get their way, but it is difficult to see an endgame that does not involve significant debt restructuring or rescheduling…. In general, neither pure austerity nor crude Keynesian stimulus can help countries escape high-debt traps…. debt rescheduling, inflation, and various forms of wealth taxation (such as financial repression), have typically played a significant role. It is hard to see how European countries can indefinitely avoid recourse to the full debt toolkit…. It is high time for a conversation on debt relief for the entire eurozone periphery…”

2. Max Speak: Who cares about inequality?: “A lot of people are enjoying cheap dates with expressions of concern…. Take President Barack Obama…. He pairs up inequality with upward mobility, notwithstanding their utterly different meanings…. The alternative to mobility-meritocracy is… economic security for those with no assets but their own labor… [and] the non-proliferation of extreme levels of wealth, levels having no conceivable relationship to contribution, levels that render democratic institutions impotent. Levels like we have now…. My jaundiced interpretation of [Obama’s] ‘that bargain’ is that inequality is fine as long as the rising tide is lifting all boats. You may think it’s fine, so you’re a liberal and God love you. I love you. But I suggest that the search for that rising, beneficent tide, constrained by meritocratic, market-loving rhetoric, is doomed…. If you follow the president’s closing paragraphs–his proposals for action–you will find they are focused on economic growth (how well is a different question), with a generous serving of opportunity, and scant regard for compression of the income and wealth distribution, or the expansion of social insurance. (Beware vague calls to “strengthen Social Security.”) So who really cares about inequality?…”

Max Speak: Who cares about inequality?: “A lot of people are enjoying cheap dates with expressions of concern….

…Take President Barack Obama…. He pairs up inequality with upward mobility, notwithstanding their utterly different meanings…. The alternative to mobility-meritocracy is… economic security for those with no assets but their own labor… [and] the non-proliferation of extreme levels of wealth, levels having no conceivable relationship to contribution, levels that render democratic institutions impotent. Levels like we have now…. My jaundiced interpretation of [Obama’s] ‘that bargain’ is that inequality is fine as long as the rising tide is lifting all boats. You may think it’s fine, so you’re a liberal and God love you. I love you. But I suggest that the search for that rising, beneficent tide, constrained by meritocratic, market-loving rhetoric, is doomed…. If you follow the president’s closing paragraphs–his proposals for action–you will find they are focused on economic growth (how well is a different question), with a generous serving of opportunity, and scant regard for compression of the income and wealth distribution, or the expansion of social insurance. (Beware vague calls to “strengthen Social Security.”) So who really cares about inequality?

Kenneth Rogoff: Economic Recovery Require Debt Restructuring or Rescheduling: “Eurozone leaders continue to debate…

…how best to reinvigorate economic growth, with French and Italian leaders now arguing that the eurozone’s rigid “fiscal compact” should be loosened. Meanwhile, the leaders of the eurozone’s northern member countries continue to push for more serious implementation of structural reform. Ideally, both sides will get their way, but it is difficult to see an endgame that does not involve significant debt restructuring or rescheduling…. In general, neither pure austerity nor crude Keynesian stimulus can help countries escape high-debt traps…. debt rescheduling, inflation, and various forms of wealth taxation (such as financial repression), have typically played a significant role. It is hard to see how European countries can indefinitely avoid recourse to the full debt toolkit…. It is high time for a conversation on debt relief for the entire eurozone periphery…

Note that when Adam Smith says “seems at first sight”, he is not signaling that he is about engaging in pointless contrarianism and about to reverse field and explain that a prosperous working class is an inconvenience rather than an advantage to society. It was an age of lower irony in which often things are as they seem: he is saying, rather, that you do not need to take more than a first glance for the answer to be “abundantly clear”:

Adam Smith: Smith: Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 8: “Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people…

…to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.

Poverty… seems even to be favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children…. Luxury in the fair sex, while it enflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. But poverty… is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children…. It is not uncommon… in the Highlands… for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive…. In civilized society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species… by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits…. The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.

It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy…

Two things are worth noting here:

The first is that even as early as 1776 economics had already acquired the utilitarian bias toward an equal distribution of income: feeding, clothing, and lodging the working class “tolerably well” contributed much more to the flourishing and happiness of society then would devoting the same resources to further increasing the luxury of the rich. We are in the world of Jeremy Bentham, where any claim that we cannot make interpersonal comparisons of utility between rich and poor is dismissed with a laugh.

The second is that Adam Smith is, in the longest run and in the last analysis, a Malthusian: economies are headed for a stationary–or, worse, a declining–state, and that stationary state is not a good one: “the condition of the… great body of the people… is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state…” But there is no sense that we should not grab for the boom as long as we can, and as long as we are in the boom period, Adam Smith says, we should not complain about population growth:

The liberal reward of labour… is the effect of increasing wealth… [and] the cause of increasing population. To complain… is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity…

Thomas Palley: Milton Friedman’s Economics and Political Economy: An Old Keynesian Critique: “Milton Friedman’s influence on the economics profession has been enormous…

…In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman’s professional triumph is testament to the weak intellectual foundations of the economics profession which accepted ideas that are conceptually and empirically flawed. His success has taken economics back in a pre-Keynesian direction and squeezed Keynesianism out of the academy. Friedman’s thinking also frames so-called new Keynesian economics which is simply new classical macroeconomics with the addition of imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. By enabling the claim that macroeconomics is fully characterized by a divide between new Keynesian and new classical macroeconomics, new Keynesianism closes the pincer that excludes old Keynesianism. As long as that pincer holds, economics will remain under Friedman’s shadow…

As I repeatedly say, most notably here, Thomas probably is 100% correct in saying that new Keynesianism is more directly an intellectual descendent of Milton Friedman’s than of John Maynard Keynes’s.

But, as I also repeatedly say, there is very little warrant for believing that John Maynard Keynes would have disapproved. In at least some of his moods, he was as much a “bastard Keynesianism” as Keynes himself: vide A Few Scattered and Preliminary Notes on Comparative Economic Theology…

Lars Syll: Krugman on the relevance of the history of economic thought: “Being myself the author of seven books…

…on the history of economic thought I can’t but applaud Krugman’s plaidoyer…. The financial crisis of 2007-08 and its aftermath definitely shows that something has gone terribly wrong with our macroeconomic models, since they obviously did not foresee the collapse or even make it conceivable…. Modern mainstream macroeconomics obviously did not anticipate the enormity of the problems that unregulated ‘efficient’ financial markets created. Why? Because it builds on the myth of us knowing the ‘data-generating process’…. Mainstream macroeconomists… want to be able to use their hammer. They decide to pretend that the world looks like a nail and that uncertainty can be reduced to risk. So they construct their mathematical models on that assumption–and the ensuing results are financial crises and economic havoc…”

OK…

Suppose we decide that we are no longer going to:

1. Pretend that agents–or economists–know the data-generating process…
2. Recognize that people are not terribly committed to Bayesianism–that they do not model probabilities as if they have well-defined priors and all there is is risk…

What do we then do–what kind of economic arguments do we make–once we have made those decisions?

Should-Reads:

1. Tim Duy: Inflation Hysteria Redux: “The Fed doesn’t target core inflation. They target headline inflation. But they also believe that headline inflation will revert to core, and as such tend to be more concerned with core inflation in excess of 2%. Consider the history of core inflation since 1985…. For the last twenty years, core measures of inflation have more often than not been at or below the the upper range of the Fed’s error band, especially for core-PCE…. It is simply difficult for me to become too worried about inflation given the history of the past twenty years…. Underlying inflation simply has not been a problem… because the Federal Reserve tightened policy multiple times to preempt inflation. Expect the same during this cycle as well…”

2. Jonathan Kirshner: The Neoliberal Bailout: “The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression, [by] Daniel W. Drezner… is a smart, thoughtful, and important book that I largely disagree with…. The argument is neatly summed up by the book’s title, and on its first page: ‘The punch line of this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. In response to the 2008 financial crisis… global economic governance responded in an effective and nimble fashion. In short, the system worked.’ There is much to agree with in this claim: however bitter the experience of our lingering economic malaise—the ‘great recession’—the world did indeed avoid another Great Depression. Another such cataclysmic meltdown could have easily taken place in the wake of the financial crisis, as many analysts at the time feared….Drezner is right: the roof did not fall in, global economic performance stabilized, and, in many quarters, bounced back. But Drezner glances away from an elephant in the room: the system worked much better for some than for others…”

3. Thers: “I’m sort of hesitant to say this because it sounds too much like a standup comedy line, but what I want to know is, as a heterosexual male, how the hell is women having universal access to quality contraception bad? I mean, speaking from the perspective of a man who is sexually attracted to women… HOW THE HELL IS WOMEN HAVING AS MUCH ACCESS AS POSSIBLE TO HAVING CHEAP CONTRACEPTION EVEN REMOTELY A BAD THING, FROM A MALE HETEROSEXUAL POINT OF VIEW?… Contraception is very much a men’s issue, if you define it in terms of how–based upon my Objective Reporting as an Adult Straight Male–having sex with a woman you find alluring and companionable is kind of terrific, and if you’re not worrying about producing any small humans, that’s a great relief! Here is a Crazy Hunch–some subset of powerful men just may be more invested in controlling women than in being friends and lovers with women…. I’m not saying it’s inexplicable, but I am saying it’s marvelous, how these five weirdo ancient Catholic judges of the Supreme Court are now somehow the Lords…”

4. Kory Kroft et al.: Long-Term Unemployment and the Great Recession: The Role of Composition, Duration Dependence, and Non-Participation: “During the Great Recession… compositional shifts in demographics, occupation, industry, region, and the reason for unemployment jointly account for very little of the observed increase in LTU….We calibrate a matching model that allows for duration dependence…. The calibrated model can account for almost all of the increase in the incidence of LTU and much of the observed outward shift in the Beveridge curve between 2008 and 2013. Both negative duration dependence in the job-finding rate for the unemployed and transitions to and from non-participation contribute significantly to the ability of the model to match the data after 2008…”

5. Frances Coppola: Scott Sumner on Thomas Piketty: “So having completely misunderstood one paragraph from Piketty–though admittedly a complex one–Sumner then turns his attention to Piketty on labour markets. But his analysis doesn’t improve…. It is Sumner’s description of this paragraph from Piketty that makes me want to weep: ‘We are free to imagine an ideal society in which all other tasks are almost totally automated and each individual has as much freedom as possible to pursue the goods of education, culture, and health for the benefit of herself and others. Everyone would be by turns teacher or student, writer or reader, actor or spectator, doctor or patient.’ Sumner calls this ‘dystopia’ for ‘most men’. But Piketty has merely described the future of work. Sumner’s ‘dystopia’ is already being created, and the forces driving it are too powerful to resist…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Brad DeLong: The Triumph of Monetarism?
• Nick Bunker: Being the reserve currency has its privileges and costs
• Alberto Galasso and Mark Schankerman: “Patent protections encourage further innovation in the pharmaceutical, chemical and mechanical industries, but discourage it in computers, electronics and medical instruments…”
• Linda Geddes: Anaesthesia
• Michael Ruane: President Harding’s steamy love letters with Carrie Phillips to go on display
• Rachel Aaron: ‘You’re doing what?’–Why I Decided to Self-Publish My Next Series

And:

1. David Atkins: For whom are Boehner’s crocodile tears intended?: “The politics of immigration are mostly clear at this point. Republicans have become abjectly terrified of their own base, particularly after Eric Cantor’s defeat. Democrats are furious at the lack of action on the border in pure policy terms, but from a nakedly electoral standpoint every cycle that Republicans continue to make themselves the party of ‘get the hell out’ is another cycle in which the vast majority of Hispanics may not be thrilled with Democrats, but certainly refuse to even consider voting for the Republicans…”

2. Thomas Palley: Milton Friedman’s Economics and Political Economy: An Old Keynesian Critique: “Milton Friedman’s influence on the economics profession has been enormous. In part, his success was due to political forces that have made neoliberalism the dominant global ideology, but Friedman also rode those forces and contributed to them. Friedman’s professional triumph is testament to the weak intellectual foundations of the economics profession which accepted ideas that are conceptually and empirically flawed. His success has taken economics back in a pre-Keynesian direction and squeezed Keynesianism out of the academy. Friedman’s thinking also frames so-called new Keynesian economics which is simply new classical macroeconomics with the addition of imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. By enabling the claim that macroeconomics is fully characterized by a divide between new Keynesian and new classical macroeconomics, new Keynesianism closes the pincer that excludes old Keynesianism. As long as that pincer holds, economics will remain under Friedman’s shadow…”

3. Martin Longman: Inhaling Their Own Disinformation: “Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio has penned an editorial for CNN explaining why he feels compelled to sue the president in an effort to get him to uphold the law. But, if you were looking for specific complaints, you’ll be disappointed. This is as close as he came to naming anything the president has done wrong: ‘In the end, the Constitution makes it clear that the President’s job is to faithfully execute the laws. And, in my view, the President has not faithfully executed the laws when it comes to a range of issues, including his health care law, energy regulations, foreign policy and education.’ I guess we are supposed to know what the hell John Boehner is talking about, but since most of us don’t watch Fox News or listen to hate radio, we’re left clueless as to what the president has done that is inconsistent with the law….”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. David Wessel: Central Bankers Line Up their Defense: “At the beginning of the week, the… Bank for International Settlements warned loudly of the risks of moving ‘too slowly and too late’ to raise interest rates back toward normal. As it did before the global financial crisis, the BIS emphasized the need to act early to avoid the booms-and-busts in financial markets and offered all sorts of reasons why today’s very low inflation shouldn’t be the primary concern of central bankers. Central bankers appear to have agreed on a common response… have used the same phrases to say: Fuggedaboutit! With price and wage inflation not a concern right now, we aren’t going to raise interest rates and throw at lot of people out of work to avoid excesses in financial markets or to head off possible asset bubbles, they said. There may come a day when our worries about financial stability will prompt us to hike interest rates, but rates are ‘the last line of defense’. Not now. The ‘first line of defense’ is making the financial system more resilient so it can better withstand shocks and using our supervisory and regulatory ‘macroprudential tools’ to rein in excesses, as we are doing now…”

2. Paul de Grauwe:: Revisiting the pain in Spain: “There has been a stark contrast between the experiences of Spain and the UK since the Global Crisis….The ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions policy has been instrumental in reducing Spanish government bond yields, [but] it has not made the Spanish fiscal position sustainable. Although the UK has implemented less austerity than Spain since the start of the crisis, a large currency depreciation has helped to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio…”

3. German Lopez: Colorado offered free birth control — and teen births fell by 40 percent: “A program that provides contraceptives to low-income women contributed to a 40-percent drop in Colorado’s teen birth rate over five years, according to state officials. The… Colorado Family Planning Initiative, provides intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants at little to no cost for low-income women at 68 family planning clinics…. The teen abortion rate dropped by 35 percent from 2009 to 2012 in counties served by the program…. Young women served by the family planning clinics also accounted for about three-fourths of the overall decline in Colorado’s teen birth rate during the same time period. And the infant caseload for Colorado WIC, a nutrition program for low-income women and their babies, fell by 23 percent from 2008 to 2013…”

4. Paul Krugman: Knutty Asset Prices: “Although I hear the phrase ‘artificially low’ all the time, I don’t think many people who use it have thought through what they mean. What would a non-artificial interest rate be?… Wicksell… [said] an unnatural [interest] rate… would be… an interest… [at which] the economy overheats… [with] accelerating inflation. But that hasn’t been happening…. So what are the people complaining about artificially low rates talking about?… They are low by historical standards–but there are enough changes… from deleveraging to demography that this isn’t a convincing argument…. Once you accept the possibility that rates belong where they are, or even a bit lower, to correspond to the Wicksellian natural rate, you also conclude that asset prices might make sense; and once you concede that asset prices might make sense, you lose the supposed evidence that rates are all wrong…. Where is the wild exuberance that we associate with dangerous bubbles? I don’t see popular TV shows about house-flipping, and CNBC viewership is plumbing new lows…”