Things to Read on the Afternoon of August 29, 2014

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• **David H. Autor Structural Demand Shifts and Potential Labor Supply Responses in the New Century | Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth
• Greg Sargent: Scott Brown calls for replacing Obamacare with Romneycare
• Rakesh Vohra: Rethinking Intermediate (day 1)
• Matt O’Brien: Why are Venezuela’s supermarkets so empty?

1. Lawrence Mishel: Broadening Agreement That Job Polarization Wasn’t Present in the United States In 2000s: “The ‘job polarization hypotheses’… claim[s] that computerization leads to the ‘simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage and low-education, low-wages jobs at the expense of middle-wage, middle education jobs’…. It is noteworthy, therefore, that MIT Professor David Autor, the leading intellectual architect of the job polarization hypothesis, has presented a paper at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., which finds that job polarization did not occur in the 2000s and that, in any case, job polarization is not necessarily connected to wage polarization. This confirms the findings of others, such as Beaudry, Green, and Sand and my own research with Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitt. One can only applaud Autor for updating his analysis of employment and wage trends, and acknowledging the lack of occupational job polarization in the 2000s and its failure to be able to explain wage trends…. In the new paper, Autor directly acknowledges the failure of occupational employment patterns to predict wage patterns, something he did not do in his earlier work, writing that ‘while computerization has strongly contributed to employment polarization, we would not generally expect these employment changes to culminate in wage polarization except in tight labor markets.’… In the end, changes in occupational employment patterns are a dim flashlight indeed for shining light on key wage patterns…”

2. Olivier Blanchard: Where Danger Lurks: “Until the 2008 global financial crisis, mainstream U.S. macroeconomics had taken an increasingly benign view of economic fluctuations in output and employment. The crisis has made it clear that this view was wrong…. The techniques we use affect our thinking in deep and not always conscious ways…. The techniques were best suited to a worldview in which economic fluctuations occurred but were regular, and essentially self-correcting. The problem is that we came to believe that this was indeed the way the world worked…”

3. Rob Weiner: Overruled: A (Third) Response To Professor Adler: “In the hopes of capping the increasingly tedious (not to mention snarky) contretemps with Professor Jonathan Adler, I think it worth reviewing a few of the instances where his responses to my blog posts on Halbig have ignored, elided, or misconstrued my points…. So, let’s return to substance…. None of Adler’s assertions, including his pointless quibble over the definition of ‘definition’, undermine the statutory arguments in my posts or in the judicial opinions rejecting his position. Adler’s theory requires reading the words, ‘established by the State’ in isolation, and saddling them with an interpretation that vitiates other pertinent provisions of the Act, sabotages the Exchanges that Congress took such pains to create, and denies low income families the subsidies needed to meet the objective proclaimed repeatedly in the statutory text, in the legislative debates, and, indeed, in the very name of the Act–extending affordable healthcare to all Americans…”

4. Alicia Munnell: Dueling Data Muddies Social Security Debate: “The most recent missile is Andrew Biggs’ Wall Street Journal op-ed, ‘Liberals for Social Security Insolvency’. Biggs notes that 75-year Social Security deficit projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have nearly quadrupled between 2008 and 2014… to argue that it is foolish to put forth proposals to expand the program. The angle that I find the most disturbing is the suggestion that Social Security costs bounce around, that we don’t really know what’s going on, and that six years from now they could quadruple once again. Nothing could be further from the truth…”

5. Menzie Chinn: Wisconsin Forecasted to Lag Further Behind Minnesota, and Kansas travels its own path. Bruce Bartlett brings my attention to this article noting Minnesota’s economic performance. This reminded me to check on the Philadelphia Fed’s forecast…. The cumulative growth gap between Minnesota and Wisconsin (relative to 2011M01) is forecasted to grow–rather than shrink–over the past six months…. The cumulative growth gap between Kansas and the Nation is also forecasted to rise, from the current gap of 2.7%, to 3.2%, in just the next six months…”

6. Greg Robb: 5 things you won’t learn from reading Geithner’s book: “Key discussions redacted: After becoming president of the New York Fed from October 2003, Geithner assembled an all-star board of directors… [that] met every two weeks throughout the run-up to the crisis…. In his book, Geithner mentions the all-star board, but none of the specifics of their discussions. What did the New York Fed know about Bear Stearns and when did they know it?… Where in the world was Barack Obama?… Too big to jail?… The extent to which Treasury officials were warning the Justice Department not to be too aggressive and upset the recovery of the fragile banking system…. What went wrong? While Geithner portrays himself as a first responder to the crisis, experts said they were struck by the lack of discussion of what went wrong in the first place. ‘If you read the book and didn’t know anything about the crisis, you’d have no idea what caused it’, said Gerding of the University of Colorado…”

Should Be Aware of:

*Those Who Resist: Philip Zimbardo on The Two Types of Heroes
Jason Furman: Whatever Happened to the Great Moderation?
Scott Horton: Leo Strauss Gives His Cheer for Right-Wing Principles: Fascist, Authoritarian, Imperial
Lee Hutchinson: Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook
LOLGOP: MILESTONE: Republicans cannot take the presidency without winning states that have expanded Medicaid

1. Scott Lemieux: Lame Duck Governor [Tom Corbett] Decides To Stop Inflicting Needless Suffering on State’s Citizens: “Pennsylvania will be taking the Medicaid expansion. Not in an ideal form, although better than the Arkansas version (the administration was right to strike a harder bargain, with Corbett polling in the low 30s.) And, as Sargent says, the next government remains free to make the program more progressive, so it makes sense to let the state proceed now.”

2. Moshe Feiglin: My Outline for a Solution in Gaza: “Any place from which Israel or Israel’s forces were attacked will be immediately attacked with full force and no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. Conquer – After the IDF completes the ‘softening’ of the targets with its fire-power, the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. Elimination- The GSS and IDF will thoroughly eliminate all armed enemies from Gaza. The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave. Israel will generously aid those who wish to leave…”

3. Jason Kuznicki: Leo Strauss, Meet John Stuart Mill | Ordinary Times “No existential, civilization-ending crisis of unbelief for [Mill]! Without it, no need for philosopher-kings to trick us into a belief in natural right. Also, no need for a war to revitalize our decadent, post-moral society in a rejuvenating bloodbath…”