Things to Read at Lunchtime on May 2, 2014

Should-Reads:

1. Sarah Kliff: Seven things we now know about Obamacare enrollment: “1…. 8,019,763 people enrolled [via Marketplaces] between October and April…. 2. This is not the number of people who will have health insurance through the exchange this year. People will shift off… and others will shift on… 3. The individual market had lots of flux before Obamacare – and will have lots of flux after it…. 4. Enrollment looks really different from state to state…. 5. Most people who have signed up for plans do seem to be paying their insurance bills…. 6. The exchanges aren’t the only place where people are gaining coverage through Obamacare. About three million young adults signed up for their parents’ plan…. Other people are getting covered through the health care law’s expansion of Medicaid…. 4.8 million people signed up for Medicaid since October, but [HHS] hasn’t specified how many of those people were newly-eligible for Obamacare’s expansion…. Medicaid enrollment grew five times faster in states that expanded the program than those that didn’t. 7. Is 8 million people signing up for private insurance a success? That’s hard to say…. You could see the 8 million as a proof-of-concept: there was a sizable audience of people who decided they wanted what Obamacare was selling. This wasn’t taken as a given at the start of open enrollment, or even as recently as December, when health law sign-ups lagged far behind projections. At the same time, there are lots of people without insurance who didn’t sign up…”

2. John Cassidy (2012): Inequality 101: The Picket Fence and the Staircase: “I should acknowledge that many conservatives still believe that inequality isn’t anything to worry about. Some of them say that commonly used statistics, such as the ones I have cited, exaggerate the inequities in the U.S. economy. Others argue that inequality is healthy—a sign that innovation and entrepreneurship are being rewarded…. Diana Furchtgott-Roth… Richard Epstein…. I don’t find these arguments convincing. In the words of the Economic Report of the President: ‘The confluence of rising inequality and low economic mobility over the past three decades poses a real threat to the future of the United States as a land of opportunity’…”

3. Virginia Heffernan: Real Reading, Fake Reading: “Here’s where our most sacred class values came in, pounded with a hammer. It’s no surprise that The Atlantic and The New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos and social-media ‘updates’ for data merchants and info tradesmen—not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the true man of letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argued, was not for virtuous people who liked to read. It was for subliterate business types who have to read. Separating real from false reading, and real from false readers, has been a power proposition with sinister consequences the 1st century A.D., when sofers argued that reading the then-new codices (books with separate pages) wasn’t really reading. Until you’ve found your way in a maddeningly disorienting Torah scroll, went the argument that safeguarded the scribes’ status as the one literate caste, you haven’t really read at all…. Most of the attacks on Spritz came dressed in scientific jargon. That didn’t make them any less off-kilter…. Spritz’s research show[ed] that readers using it retained as much or more of what they read using traditional technologies (pages, books, scrollable screens)…. Novel-reading is today the defining practice of the sound and literate mind. If you don’t read ‘for pleasure,’ after all—reading, that is, ‘not for work or school,’ in the words of the National Endowment for the Arts—you are not said to read at all…. But in a rousing and beloved 1797 screed called ‘Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,’ novels are depicted as more sickening than coal dust in a boy’s scrotum…. In impelling women to have premarital and extramarital sex, novels were not said to fill pretty heads with sordid notions (also a rank metaphor), but rather to pollute the bloodstream: ‘Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.’…”

Should Be Aware of:

1. Ryan Avent: Inequality: Does anyone care about distribution?: “Paul Krugman noted in a recent blog post that readers seem much more enthusiastic about his inequality columns than those on let’s-boost-growth macro pieces…. Americans do seem to care more about inequality in places like central cities. Whether that is because rising inequality is simply more obvious there or because the rise of the rich seems more clearly to come at the expense of the poor I can’t say. But gentrification fights are often bitter, and it is in big cities that Americans are increasingly electing governments with mandates to address inequalities…. The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently provided a very nice tool… computed state and metropolitan price levels…. The first is that income gaps between metropolitan areas are simply staggering. Personal income per person in the San Francisco metropolitan area (the richest large metro) is $66,591. In Riverside (the poorest large metro), income per person is less than half that…. Rich metropolitan areas… have higher price levels…. People living in cheaper cities earn lower nominal incomes, which suggests they are less productive… even after controlling for the composition of the labour force…. There are also negative effects in rich cities. Living costs there are high in large part due to limits on housing-supply growth. NIMBY action creates an artificial housing scarcity…”

2. Dan Merica: Bill Clinton plays professor, blasts media in Georgetown speech: “The former president said the coverage of the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act–also known as Obamacare–stifled the public’s understanding of the law because journalists built a politically dramatic narrative and did little to stray from it. ‘If a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on addictive to have a storyline’, said Clinton. ‘And then once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving that borders on blindness to shoehorn every fact, every development, every thing that happens into the story line, even if it’s not the story’. Clinton went on to say that public policy is ‘dimly understood’ and often ‘disconnected from the consequences of the policies being implemented’…”

And:

• Josh Bivens: Austerity’s Legacy: GDP is Far Below Potential, and Not Climbing
• Binyamin Appelbaum: By Its Own Yardstick, the Fed Is Falling Short
• HHS ASPE: Health Insurance Marketplace: Summary Enrollment Report for the Initial Annual Open Enrollment Period
• Timothy MacBride: Health Use up [at a] 9.9% [Annual Rate] in Early 2014: What Does This Mean? Was This Expected?
• Jason Furman and James Stock: The Moment Is Right for Housing Reform
• Jared Bernstein: Inequality and Pay: Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens on “Rents” vs. Merit
• Jason Furman: The Employment Situation in April
• Jeff Madrick: Piketty Review Roundup

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Kevin Drum: A New Obamacare Mystery: How Many Uninsured People Signed Up For New Coverage?: “The fine folks at HHS released some new data on Obamacare signups today…. 8 million… 34 percent are under age 35… 54 percent are female… the head scratcher: ‘Of the 5.45 million people who selected a Marketplace plan through the [federal exchange]….5.18 million… were required to answer a question about their health insurance coverage…. 695,011 (13 percent) indicated that they had coverage at the time of application…’. On the federal exchange, about 4.5 million people signed up who were previously uninsured. If we figure a somewhat lower rate for the 2.6 million who signed up via state exchanges, you can add about 2 million… 6.5 million people who were previously uninsured. This is far, far higher than previous estimates of about 3 million or so. I’m not sure what to make of this given the amount of survey data that produced the smaller figure…. For now, just take this as a bit of a mystery. In a month or two we’ll probably have much firmer data…”

2. Igor Volsky reports that Avalere says:

3. Danielle Kurtzleben: Don’t panic about slow economic growth last quarter. Panic about 6 years of it: “Individual-quarter GDP charts miss the bigger picture: that this recovery is truly, phenomenally disappointing. Economists Atif Mian, professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University, and Amir Sufi, professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, show this in a new post today on their House of Debt blog: