Janelle Nanos: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT’s Role in His Son’s Death:
After his son was arrested for downloading files at MIT, Bob Swartz did everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t. Now he wants the institute to own up to its part in Aaron’s death…
First health-care reform. Now financial reform. And just what is the conservative position on climate change right now, anyway?
Mike Konczal: Is there a conservative alternative to financial reform?:
The Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas recently wrote an essay that critiques the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, titled “Too Convoluted to Succeed.” It’s worth reading to get a sense for what the conservative critiques of the law actually are…. One of her biggest complaints is about the law’s “resolution authority”…. Gelinas says… “regulators could use Treasury funds” in these resolutions, thereby “injecting money from the Orderly Liquidation Fund into [the banks] and keeping them going.” Got that? In other words, the resolution authority allows the government to provide emergency liquidity to large banks during a crisis.
Continue reading “Are There Conservative Policy Alternatives?: Friday Focus (January 3, 2014)”
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: The Fed’s Lopsided Inflation Target:
Is the Federal Reserve being cavalier about consistently undershooting its inflation target–and therefore compromising potentially stronger growth and job creation?… First and foremost, there is Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who dissented against the central bank’s decision in December to begin paring back the pace of its bond-buying stimulus by $10 billion to $75 billion per month. ‘I would prefer to wait until the economic improvement that I am forecasting is clearly evident in the data before reducing the size of the asset-purchase program. I think patience remains appropriate at this time’, he said, citing how far the Fed is falling short on both the inflation and employment sides of its dual mandate.
Other officials have expressed similar concerns, and the Fed statement itself cautions that ‘inflation persistently below its 2% objective could pose risks to economic performance’. The Fed has been missing its inflation target for much of the period much since the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. In November, officials’ preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures index, stood at just 0.9%, under half policy makers’ stated 2% goal…
Jay Ackroyd: Eschaton: Beta: “Something that has surprised reporters has been the persistence of people trying to sign up for PPACA coverage via the Federal exchanges, especially people under 40. One reason, of course, is people really want health insurance they can afford. But another is the permanent beta release state that characterizes internet applications. Google has accustomed users to buggy software that gradually improves, with no ‘release date’ or ‘gold master’. The ‘deadline’ stories the media likes so much don’t really make sense. There are no deadlines.”
Jonathan Cohn: Five Rules for Talking About Obamacare in 2014 | New Republic: “The debate over the law’s merits will continue, at least through the midterm elections and perhaps beyond. And the debate will probably look a lot like it has for the past few months, with proponents and critics arguing not just about priorities but also basic facts…. But if we’re destined to keep having these same fights over and over again, maybe can learn to have them more intelligently. With that in mind, here are five rules…. RULE #1: DON’T IGNORE THE OBVIOUS…. When the NBC News ‘investigations’ unit reported [plan cancellations] as a major scoop, I noted with a little snark that the article’s source was a set of regulations published years before in the Federal Register—in other words, hardly the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. But rate increases and plan cancellations were news anyway. And journalists like me were wrong not to recognize that…. RULE #2: PAY ATTENTION TO SCALE. There’s nothing wrong with personal anecdotes…. But anecdotes matter a lot more when they tell us about broader trends…. RULE #3: ACCEPT AMBIGUITY…. Our knowledge of insurance coverage comes primarily from surveys and studies—some by private organizations like Gallup, and some from government agencies like the Census. Our knowledge of what people are paying for medical care and what kind of care they get? That comes primarily from studies that take months, if not years. We can make some pretty good guesses, based on what’s happened in the past. But we rarely know as much as we’d like to think. RULE #4: ACKNOWLEDGE COMPLEXITY AND TRADE-OFFS…. Obamacare sets in motion all kinds of changes. They will typically affect different people in different ways—creating winners, losers, and all sorts of people in between…. RULE #5: CONSIDER THE REAL COUNTER-FACTUAL…. Just because something is happening and Obamacare exists doesn’t mean it’s happening because Obamacare exists—even in health care. This is probably the most important rule of all. It will be tempting to judge Obamacare by comparing it to the status quo. But the status quo was changing already. Preserving it was simply not an option…”
Paul Krugman: Disinformation on Inequality: “Miles Kimball catches Bret Stephens pulling a fast one on Wall Street Journal readers–but it’s much worse than Kimball says. Kimball take Stephens to task for overstating the economic progress of poorer Americans by presenting nominal figures, without any adjustment for inflation…. Stephens also accuses President Obama of a ‘factual error’ in claiming that the top 10 percent receive half the income; it’s the top 20 percent, says Stephens, and there has been no significant rise since the mid-1990s…. Stephens is citing the Census data, which everyone who knows anything about inequality knows has a problem with very high incomes thanks to ‘top-coding’…. Why doesn’t [the recent] sharp rise [in inequality] show in the Census data? Because almost all of it took place among the top 1 percent–the income range that the Census data, which are survey-based, can’t effectively track. OK, we’re still not done here. Stephens then goes on to suggest not just that there has been no rise in inequality since 1995, but that not much has changed since 1979…. The point here, as on so many other economic issues, is that we are not having anything resembling a good-faith debate. We could have a debate about whether rising inequality is a problem, and whether measures intended to curb it would do more harm than good. But we can’t have that kind of debate if the anti-populist side won’t acknowledge basic facts–and it won’t…. Oh, and just FYI: this is the kind of journalism that the great and the good deem worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.”
Continue reading “Things to Read at Lunchtime on January 3, 2013”
Ravi Somaiya: Ezra Klein Is Said to Plan to Leave Washington Post:
Ezra Klein, an analyst, columnist and television commentator who runs The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, is making plans to leave the newspaper after failing to win support for a new website he wanted to create within the company…. Klein… approached Katherine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher… to build a new website dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics… affiliated with The Post… but… a separate enterprise. The investment he sought… was in eight figures.
Ms. Weymouth and the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, declined to support the project. Since then, Mr. Klein has had discussions with several potential investors…. It is possible that Mr. Klein could remain at The Post if talks about his plans were rekindled. As 2013 drew to a close, Neil Irwin, the economics editor of Wonkblog, joined The New York Times. Mr. Klein has been on vacation in San Francisco. Both declined to comment, as did The Washington Post. The Washington Post owns the name Wonkblog… and could continue it even without Mr. Klein…
Jonathan Cohn: Five Rules for Talking About Obamacare in 2014 | New Republic:
The debate over the law’s merits will continue, at least through the midterm elections and perhaps beyond. And the debate will probably look a lot like it has for the past few months, with proponents and critics arguing not just about priorities but also basic facts…. But if we’re destined to keep having these same fights over and over again, maybe can learn to have them more intelligently. With that in mind, here are five rules…. RULE #1: DON’T IGNORE THE OBVIOUS…. When the NBC News ‘investigations’ unit reported [plan cancellations] as a major scoop, I noted with a little snark that the article’s source was a set of regulations published years before in the Federal Register—in other words, hardly the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. But rate increases and plan cancellations were news anyway. And journalists like me were wrong not to recognize that…. RULE #2: PAY ATTENTION TO SCALE. There’s nothing wrong with personal anecdotes…. But anecdotes matter a lot more when they tell us about broader trends…. RULE #3: ACCEPT AMBIGUITY…. Our knowledge of insurance coverage comes primarily from surveys and studies—some by private organizations like Gallup, and some from government agencies like the Census. Our knowledge of what people are paying for medical care and what kind of care they get? That comes primarily from studies that take months, if not years. We can make some pretty good guesses, based on what’s happened in the past. But we rarely know as much as we’d like to think. RULE #4: ACKNOWLEDGE COMPLEXITY AND TRADE-OFFS…. Obamacare sets in motion all kinds of changes. They will typically affect different people in different ways—creating winners, losers, and all sorts of people in between…. RULE #5: CONSIDER THE REAL COUNTER-FACTUAL…. Just because something is happening and Obamacare exists doesn’t mean it’s happening because Obamacare exists—even in health care. This is probably the most important rule of all. It will be tempting to judge Obamacare by comparing it to the status quo. But the status quo was changing already. Preserving it was simply not an option…
How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” | MIT Technology Review:
“Filter bubble”… Eli Pariser coined [the term] to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world… two people who googled… “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill… social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like. This is the filter bubble–being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with….
Continue reading “How to Burst the “Filter Bubble”: Thursday Focus (January 2, 2014)”
Steven Sherwood: Planet likely to warm by 4C by 2100: ‘Sherwood accepts his team’s work on the role of clouds cannot definitively rule out that future temperature rises will lie at the lower end of projections. “But,” he said, for that to be the case, “one would need to invoke some new dimension to the problem involving a major missing ingredient for which we currently have no evidence. Such a thing is not out of the question but requires a lot of faith.” He added: “Rises in global average temperatures of [at least 4C by 2100] will have profound impacts on the world and the economies of many countries if we don’t urgently start to curb our emissions.”‘
Josh Marshall: Where Does Obamacare Stand?: “One key thing any health care policy economist will tell you is that the pure numbers are less important than the demographic blend of the pool. Basically, what’s the mix of young and old people, healthy and sick. If that’s significantly out of whack you’ll have problems. All told, though, if you step away from the political pyrotechnics where every missed target is a catastrophe for Obamacare and the end of the Obamacare presidency, the current numbers look like a decent recovery from a very poor start. And there’s good reason to think that the program as a whole is moving along toward the benign and effective transformation of national health care markets it was intended to effect…”
Continue reading “Things to Read on the Morning of January 2, 2013”
Paul Krugman: How Much Better Things Are in Europe Now that the European Central Bank Is on the job: “Government debt to GDP… the 10-year interest rate… [at] the peak of the euro crisis in 2011 and a relatively recent observation…. Borrowing costs for the troubled euro countries have dropped a lot… not because austerity policies have brought their debt under control–debt ratios are still rising, in large part because of shrinking economies and deflation. Instead, there has been a dramatic flattening….
Why?… The timing strongly suggests that… the ECB’s signal that it will, in a pinch, act as sovereign lender of last resort has removed much of the fear of self-fulfilling liquidity panics… [and perhaps] some reduction in the political risk premium, because European nations are proving amazingly determined to stay on the euro at almost any cost. So is the euro crisis over? No–it’s not over until the debt dynamics sing… a duet with internal devaluation. We have yet to see any of the crisis countries reach a point where falling relative wages are generating a clear export-led recovery, or in which austerity is actually paying off…”
Josh Marshall: Where Does Obamacare Stand?:
One key thing any health care policy economist will tell you is that the pure numbers are less important than the demographic blend of the pool. Basically, what’s the mix of young and old people, healthy and sick. If that’s significantly out of whack you’ll have problems. All told, though, if you step away from the political pyrotechnics where every missed target is a catastrophe for Obamacare and the end of the Obamacare presidency, the current numbers look like a decent recovery from a very poor start. And there’s good reason to think that the program as a whole is moving along toward the benign and effective transformation of national health care markets it was intended to effect…”
And: