Category: Equitablog

Woolworth’s Parkview, Johannesberg:

My submission to the Atlantic Monthly series for the most important graph of 2013:

Jared Bernstein: Disability Rolls and the Makers/Takers/Fakers Nonsense:

Kathy Ruffing [has facts] about the factors actually responsible for most of the increase in the DI rolls…. Population… aging… more women… working and thus eligible for the program… half of the increase since 1990 is due to those factors…. The increase in the eligibility age for Social Security from 65 to 66 over this period has also played a role over these years, as once DI recipients hit the retirement eligibility age, they transfer onto the retirement program.

I’ve always thought the key test of the Jimmy P et al. claim–that lots of people were abusing the DI rolls when they could be working–is the extent to which the DI rolls are countercyclical, meaning they go up when the economy goes down…. What Kathy finds… is… applications… [do line] up roughly with… unemployment…. But awards… less so… [unless you] squint…. Some growth in the DI rolls that may reflect folks getting DI who ought not to, much of the increase appears to be explainable by known, legitimate factors…. More than 90% of entitlement dollars go to people who are either elderly, disabled, or working…. The makers/takers frame is factually wrong not to mention mean-spirited and divisive… [and] that frame just sounds really nasty to me… I’d urge them and others to give it up.

Cardiff Garcia: Stanley Fisher’s views on monetary policy:

He does believe in the efficacy of asset purchases when rates have hit the zero lower bound… “by the provision of liquidity… by changing interest rates other than the central bank’s interest rates…”. But he does add that asset purchases are imperfect: their benefits simply outweigh the costs…. He appeared to favour a tapering…. have raised questions about whether he would support the Fed’s use of forward guidance…. Fischer said he tried, on becoming governor of the Bank of Israel in 2005, to give signals to the market – but quickly gave up as he realized it restricted the bank’s future actions when circumstances changed…

Christopher Wimer et al.: Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure:

Poverty measures set a poverty line or threshold and then evaluate resources against that threshold. The official poverty measure is flawed… it uses thresholds that are outdated and are not adjusted appropriately… and it uses an incomplete measure of resources which fails to take into account the full range of income and expenses that individuals and households have…. In recent work, we have produced SPM-like estimates for the period 1967-2012…. In this report we apply an alternative poverty measure which differs from the SPM in only one respect. Instead of having a threshold that is re-calculated over time, we use today’s threshold and carry it back historically by adjusting it for inflation using the CPI-U-RS. Because this alternative measure is anchored with today’s SPM threshold, we refer to as an anchored supplemental poverty measure or anchored SPM for short…. Another advantage of an anchored SPM (or any absolute poverty measure, for that matter) is that poverty trends resulting from such a measure can be explained by changes in income and net transfer payments (cash or in kind)…

Six years ago I knew what the Conservative-Republican ideas were:

• Give people skin in the game via high deductibles and high copays.
• Push people out of tax-subsidized employer-sponsored insurance into individual-marketplace exchanges as fast as possible.
• Encourage insurers to shrink their networks in order to bargain more aggressively with health-care providers.
• Cut Medicare.

Today?

Continue reading “What Are the Conservative-Republican Ideas for Health Care Reform, Anyway?” →

Must-Reads:

1. Kevin Drum: Vermont Is Kicking Everyone’s A– at Signing Up People for Obamacare: “The number of people who have completed an application and been confirmed eligible to purchase private insurance via the exchange. They still have the final enrollment step left, but they’ve obviously navigated everything successfully…. The chart below shows the results for 49 states (there’s no data for Massachusetts). States in red are running their own websites. States in blue are using the federal website. Vermont and Kentucky are way ahead of everyone else, and demonstrate how well the Obamacare rollout is doing in places where the website is working and the state government is doing a good job of marketing and operations.”

2. Dani Rodrik: Sub-Saharan Africa’s Growth Performance Is Not Sustainable: “The underlying problem is the weakness of these economies’ structural transformation. East Asian countries grew rapidly by replicating, in a much shorter time frame, what today’s advanced countries did following the Industrial Revolution. They turned their farmers into manufacturing workers, diversified their economies, and exported a range of increasingly sophisticated goods. Little of this process is taking place in Africa…. In principle, the region’s potential for labor-intensive industrialization is great. A Chinese shoe manufacturer, for example, pays its Ethiopian workers one-tenth what it pays its workers back home. It can raise Ethiopian workers’ productivity to half or more of Chinese levels through in-house training. The savings in labor costs more than offset other incremental costs of doing business in an African environment, such as poor infrastructure and bureaucratic red tape.But the aggregate numbers tell a worrying story. Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing…. Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980s…. Farmers in Africa are flocking to the cities…. Rural migrants do not end up in modern manufacturing industries, as they did in East Asia, but in services such as retail trade and distribution. Though such services have higher productivity than much of agriculture, they are not technologically dynamic in Africa and have been falling behind the world frontier…”

3. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker: Capitalism Redefined: “For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken…. Our economic policy discussions are nearly always focused on making us wealthier and on generating the economic growth to accomplish that…. Kuznets and other economists highlighted that GDP was not a measure of prosperity…. Moses Abramovitz cautioned that ‘we must be highly skeptical of the view that long-term changes in the rate of growth of welfare can be gauged even roughly from changes in the rate of growth of output.’… Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems… prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society’s wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens…. This all implies that we must find new ways to measure progress. In the same way that no good doctor would measure the health of a person by just one factor—her temperature, say—the economy shouldn’t be measured with just GDP…”

4. Adam Ozimek: Tyler Cowen: The Future Of Work (And Life) Is Conscientiousness: “His most recent book Average Is Over. In what is both his most fun and also his scariest book yet, he emphasized conscientiousness will be more important in workers in the future: ‘Team production makes the quality of “conscientiousness” a more important quality in laborers. Managers need workers who are reliable. If you have a team of five, one unreliable worker is wrecking the work of four others. If you have a team of twenty-five, one unreliable worker can negate the work effects of twenty-four others. managers will stay away from possibly destructive labor and they will put a lot of care into building and managing their teams.’ This came to mind recently while reading an article from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic about the most used words in 259 million LinkedIn profiles in 20 countries. The most common word was ‘responsible’…. More surprising is the 5th most common word: ‘patient’…. Another word associated with conscientious is the 4th most common: ‘effective’…. Like Tyler I’m not necessarily an optimist about all of these changes….If all of this future seems tiring or overbearing perhaps you can take comfort in the idea that behavior modification drugs will make conscientiousness a lot easier for you. My guess is most won’t find this comforting…”

Continue reading “Things to Read on the Evening of December 12, 2013” →

Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker: Capitalism Redefined:

For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken…. Our economic policy discussions are nearly always focused on making us wealthier and on generating the economic growth to accomplish that…. Kuznets and other economists highlighted that GDP was not a measure of prosperity…. Moses Abramovitz cautioned that “we must be highly skeptical of the view that long-term changes in the rate of growth of welfare can be gauged even roughly from changes in the rate of growth of output.”… Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems… prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society’s wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens…. This all implies that we must find new ways to measure progress. In the same way that no good doctor would measure the health of a person by just one factor—her temperature, say—the economy shouldn’t be measured with just GDP…

Chuck Lane writes:

Incivility rewarded: @johnpodesta picks sneering, rancorous @delong to blog for his new inequality think tank

— Charles Lane (@ChuckLane1) December 12, 2013

Hmmm… Did I run over Chuck Lane’s dog? What have I said about Chuck Lane in the past?

Here is the top hit for “Chuck Lane” on my old weblog, Grasping Reality. It is me quoting Ezra Klein on Chuck Lane:

Ezra Klein: Venomous responsibility: My colleague Chuck Lane accuses me of a “venomous smear” against Joe Lieberman…. What is surprising is that Lane, well, agrees with my venomous smear. “I understand that [Lieberman] seems to bear a grudge against the Democratic liberals who tried to unseat him in 2006 because of his vote for the war in Iraq,” writes Lane, “and that he might be engaged in a little pay back right now.” That’s pretty much the ballgame….

Continue reading “Chuck Lane of the Washington Post Is an Unhappy Camper…” →

Adam Ozimek: Tyler Cowen: The Future Of Work (And Life) Is Conscientiousness:

His most recent book Average Is Over. In what is both his most fun and also his scariest book yet, he emphasized conscientiousness will be more important in workers in the future:

Team production makes the quality of “conscientiousness” a more important quality in laborers. Managers need workers who are reliable. If you have a team of five, one unreliable worker is wrecking the work of four others. If you have a team of twenty-five, one unreliable worker can negate the work effects of twenty-four others. managers will stay away from possibly destructive labor and they will put a lot of care into building and managing their teams.

This came to mind recently while reading an article from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic about the most used words in 259 million LinkedIn profiles in 20 countries. The most common word was “responsible”…. More surprising is the 5th most common word: patient…. Another word associated with conscientious is the 4th most common: effective…. Like Tyler I’m not necessarily an optimist about all of these changes….If all of this future seems tiring or overbearing perhaps you can take comfort in the idea that behavior modification drugs will make conscientiousness a lot easier for you. My guess is most won’t find this comforting.

Dani Rodrik: Sub-Saharan Africa’s Growth Performance Is Not Sustainable:

The underlying problem is the weakness of these economies’ structural transformation. East Asian countries grew rapidly by replicating, in a much shorter time frame, what today’s advanced countries did following the Industrial Revolution. They turned their farmers into manufacturing workers, diversified their economies, and exported a range of increasingly sophisticated goods. Little of this process is taking place in Africa…. In principle, the region’s potential for labor-intensive industrialization is great. A Chinese shoe manufacturer, for example, pays its Ethiopian workers one-tenth what it pays its workers back home. It can raise Ethiopian workers’ productivity to half or more of Chinese levels through in-house training. The savings in labor costs more than offset other incremental costs of doing business in an African environment, such as poor infrastructure and bureaucratic red tape.But the aggregate numbers tell a worrying story. Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing…. Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980s…. Farmers in Africa are flocking to the cities…. Rural migrants do not end up in modern manufacturing industries, as they did in East Asia, but in services such as retail trade and distribution. Though such services have higher productivity than much of agriculture, they are not technologically dynamic in Africa and have been falling behind the world frontier…