Category: Equitablog

Three things struck me as must-reads this morning:

Ed Glaeser’s “A happy tale of two cities: New York is a magnet for people on a fast-track to be rich, and for very low-income people. What’s wrong with that?” <- Glaeser’s take on what the mayor of New York City should and should not do for equitable growth at the mouth of the Hudson River.

Brad Plumer’s giant chart on how the world is failing at its climate goals.

Gavyn Davies’s take on English, Lopez-Salido, and Tetlow’s and Reifschneider, Wascher, and Wilcox’s analyses calling for much more aggressive expansionary monetary policy. You aren’t going to read the papers. You do need to read Davies’s précis

Must Reads:

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

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

Should Reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Know Exists:

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

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

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

And here is our first piece of press for WCEG:

David Leonhardt: Podesta Starting a Think Tank on Inequality:

John Podesta, a longtime adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton and President Obama, is starting a research center in Washington to investigate the causes and effects of growing economic inequality…. The center will be called the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and be housed at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning advocacy and research group that Mr. Podesta founded 10 years ago. Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, will become executive director…. The center will write grants to support academic research focusing on three broad questions: What is causing the rise in inequality over the last few decades in the United States and in other rich countries? What are the societal effects of higher inequality? And what policies might reduce inequality? Inequality has soared over the last three decades, with the share of annual income flowing to the top 1 percent of earners having risen to 22.5 percent, from 9.2 percent in 1973….

Continue reading “David Leonhardt: Podesta Starting a Think Tank on Inequality <– Our First Piece of Press for WCEG” →

Only two things that struck me as should-reads this morning:

Michael Stillman, M.D., and Monalisa Tailor, M.D, of the University of Louisville Medical Center, on the blockages to health-care access that are killing one of their patients with colon cancer–and thus on how inadequate our health-care safety net truly is right now.

Carmen Reinhart making the case that we should be really worried about debt accumulation–and, in my view at least, demonstrating that that case is quite weak as long as interest rates remain low.

https://equitablegrowth.org/blog/

Let me try to bring four things together…

1. The coming of the internet has created at least the potential for a much better public-sphere conversation on economic policy than we had a generation ago. Go back to William Greider’s The Education of David Stockman, and reflect that the ignorance about budgetary issues in which they maneuver and about which they lament would not be possible in the internet age of today.

2. We, as of yet, do not have such a public-sphere conversation. At best, the conversation resembles a soccer game of seven-year-olds–twenty people in a huddle kicking the ball in random directions, with few people playing their positions and focusing on what is truly important.

3. Over the past generation our politics and policy making has arguably degenerated. It is now clearly inadequate. We no longer (if we ever did) have a bipartisan technocratic center with serious votes committed to economic growth, equal opportunity, and an efficient well-functioning government that can tack left or right as necessary to assemble legislative coalitions to support good governance.

4. Where the conversation has been guided, it has been directed in directions that I, at least, think are unhelpful. We are moving forward into a world in which a longer-living population and technological advances create opportunities to promote the general welfare via larger expenditures on pensions and health care. But Peter Peterson and company have driven the budgetary conversation to focus on entitlement cuts rather than entitlement right-sizing, right-funding, and right-managing. Similarly, the John M. Olin Foundation–with really very little money–has driven the legal conversation to focus on restoring a classical-liberal order that, in my view at least, never really existed in the first place and that could not have functioned past 1870 if it had.

Taking these things together, it seems to me that it would be a good idea if I signed on to this Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and tried to drive the conversation to what is important.

My promise to you: If you share our interest in public policy that leads to growth-with-equity—and would like to see a 21st century that is an American Century in a these-are-people-to-emulate rather than we-fear-their-drones-and-their-blackmail sense—then:

1. We are going to be disciplined: we will not publish so much under this heading that you either drown or fob us off to an aggregator.
2. Everything we publish will be important for you to read if you are interested in equitable growth (and you really should be).
3. We won’t try to get you to read what we write when somebody else has written it better—we will link instead.
4. We will try to make sure that we always do our homework.
5. We will try to bring to your attention people who think differently than we do and who have done their homework, are not engaged in intellectual three-card-monte, and are being smart.

Let us try to focus our conversation on what is truly important, for all of our sakes.

Let me turn the microphone over to Michael Stillman, M.D., and Monalisa Tailor, M.D., from the University of Louisville School of Medicine:

Dead Man Walking — NEJM: “Shocked” wouldn’t be accurate, since we were accustomed to our uninsured patients’ receiving inadequate medical care. “Saddened” wasn’t right, either, only pecking at the edge of our response. And “disheartened” just smacked of victimhood. After hearing this story, we were neither shocked nor saddened nor disheartened. We were simply appalled.

Continue reading “Health-Care Access Blogging” →

As I understand it, back in 2009 Obama picked the road that leads to universal comprehensive health coverage that was as far right as possible–that paid as much attention and respect to Republican concerns (or, rather, to the expressed concerns of those Republicans who claimed to see universal comprehensive health coverage as a worthy goal). Thus the live questions should be:

• Is universal comprehensive health coverage a worthwhile goal?
• If not, what mechanism should pay for health care for the uninsured–or should they simply die in the gutter?
• Should we move our universal comprehensive health coverage system more to the left–i.e., shrink the role of insurance companies in it?
• How is that implementation going?

That is the conversation Washington should be having about health care financing and insurance. That is not the conversation that Washington is having.

Can we try to change that, please?

Bloomberg:

Jonathan Gruber, Economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses the Affordable Care Act and delves into criticisms to the law. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s Bloomberg Surveillance.

Jon Gruber: Romneycare, Obamacare Basically The Same: