Things to Read on the Morning of February 4, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : For A Closing Act, Obama Has A Bold Plan To Transform Child Care
- : Tough Fedding
- : “The Federal Reserve can probably ignore the sharp decline in the bond market’s long-term inflation forecast. But not safely…. The problem lies more in what the TIPS market implies inflation will be in the five years that begin five years from now…”
- : Maternity Leave Policies in America Hurt Working Moms
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: Did the Fed’s QE program boost the US economy?: “I would think understanding the past might provide some useful insights for policymakers. To that point, understanding the Great Recession and its aftermath is especially important. Take the role of the Federal Reserve during the Not-So-Great Recovery. Here is Senator Ted Cruz on his cosponsorship of the new Fed audit bill introduced by Rand Paul…” -
: Class Resentment, Class Treason and Political Consciousness: “[Reihan] Salam proceeds to lay out a detailed brief against the mass upper class in policy terms: from their support for unproductive tax breaks… mortgage interest deduction… restrictive zoning… cartel-preserving licensure requirements… a backwards immigration system that lets in nannies but keeps out doctors…. You can contextualize… [this] policy criticism Salam is making within a general libertarian critique… or… a general left-wing critique… (we need a class-based politics that doesn’t get hijacked by cultural politics)… both frameworks for talking about how to reduce the political influence of a favored class…. But Salam doesn’t make either argument. Instead, he’s says we need to guilt the upper middle class into being a more civically-responsible gentry…. There is no virtuous class out there. Contra William F. Buckley, a collection of random names from the Boston phone book would do a terrible job running the country…. Here in New York. Our Mayor, Bill de Blasio… is trying to yoke… [a] pro-development stance to an affordable housing plan… acting against precisely the entrenched class interests that Salam thinks are so problematic…. But his cultural politics line up perfectly with the kinds of liberals Salam knows dominate the mass upper class. Which matters more? That, it seems to me, is the question.” -
: The Economist Magazine Is Wrong About Welfare’s Impact on Family: “If you want to see the right-wing denuded of its usual bluster about family values and welfare, visit this [Will Wilkinson Economist post… [that] argues that the problem isn’t a paucity of empathy for poor people who rely on welfare, but perhaps an excess of it; furthermore, the piece goes on to suggest that poor people who rely on disability benefits should, in order to get off of welfare, pack up and move away from family and friends in search of jobs…. The quandary the author refers to is the problem of preferring to rely on disability income and to stay among family and friends rather than moving to an entirely new place alone in order to relinquish benefits. There are multiple problems with this view…. There most certainly is an empathy gap when it comes to well-off individuals’ view of the poor…. The articleinadvertently admits a reality about poverty and welfare that few on the right are willing to: that poverty, rather than welfare, breaks up families…. Disability payment… allows people with disabilities to remain in places where their families live rather than chasing after work in far-flung places… resist[s] the massive social dislocation brought on by free-market capitalism…. The demands of capital and the obligations of family are often at cross-purposes…. [Will Wilkinson of] the Economist makes a good conservative case for a more expansive welfare regime: one that would really shore up family life.” -
: The Supreme Court challenge against ObamaCare is rapidly falling apart: “The Adler-Cannon brief… cite[s] a letter sent by 11 Texas House Democrats, which they say constitutes evidence for the assertion that ‘[m]any House members… recognized [PPACA] conditioned subsidies on states creating Exchanges.’ Adler and Cannon’s characterization of the letter is blatantly dishonest…. The letter’s argument that under the Senate bill ‘millions of people will be left no better off than before Congress acted’… is preceded by a discussion of how some conservative states have cut or failed to expand benefits under Medicaid and CHIPRA…. The concern of the Texas Democrats… is that… conservative states[‘]… exchanges… would… make it impossible for some residents to obtain affordable insurance. Adler and Cannon stand the meaning of the letter on its head…”
Should Be Aware of:
- : Paul Ryan’s Most Shameless Lie Ever
- : How an Amish missionary caused 2014’s massive measles outbreak
- : Optimism of intellect
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: “Re: ‘2) The ARRA was too small. Here the data (as analyzed by all but John Taylor) show that Keynes was right. But the way people think is that the recovery was feeble, we tried that and it didn’t work…’ Which is EXACTLY what us stoopid Green Lanterns predicted would happen and why we’re still hung up on the fact that Obama settled so easily for so little. ARRA being so undersized–along with the 12-dimensional-ju-jitsu-chess-master-black-belt’s assurances that it would do the job–have made it even more difficult to deploy stimulus for the foreseeable future. (Not to mention the fact that if he had structured the ARRA the way Stiglitz wanted it with infrastructure $ and direct aid to the states & localities to cover their deficits, he would have had all the little Hoovers lobbying for it or having to explain to their constituents why it was so much better to lay off all their teachers, police and fireman than to take that dirty federal money.) But, hey, get over it. It was only millions of lives that were irrevocably damaged…. And then I hear some maroon from the O[bama] administration the other day talking about how the economy has come ‘roaring back’. Seriously. Roaring. Just ask all those people whose paychecks have been growing so fast they can barely fit them in their bank accounts…” -
: Macroeconomic Cronyism: “The stories Dornbusch and Edwards analyzed, the issues of Latin America today, involved governments that really were trying to help the poor and workers…. Populist regimes, even if they didn’t end up serving the interests of their constituency. But nobody would call the Putin regime populist; he’s rejecting economics as we know it to defend a kleptocracy…. Putin seems to have brought something new, or at least formerly rare, into the world of economic policy: macroeconomic cronyism, an effort to suspend the laws on economics on behalf, not of the broad populace, but a tiny group of well connected malefactors of great wealth. Innovation!” -
: Lunch with the FT: Demis Hassabis: “DeepMind… has the aim of making ‘machines smart’…. Watch one of Hassabis’s entertaining presentations on YouTube. There, you can see him showing off the AI system… play[ing] retro arcade games such as Space Invaders. At first, the machine pilot is hopeless but, after just a few hours, it is firing missiles to its targets with uncanny accuracy…. His ambition is to create ‘general’ AI systems that use ‘unstructured’ information… to make independent decisions…. Before he leaves, I ask how long it will take to create general AI. When will Hassabis’s lines of computer code, his algorithms, start writing their own lines of code, their own algorithms?…” -
: Reagan’s Bizarre Defenders: Rick Perlstein, Phony Centrism, and the Attack on History: “‘Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan–Perlstein has moved from covering a minor saint, to a martyr, to God.’ — David Weigel. Weigel’s summary goes to the heart of why Rick Perlstein’s… ‘The Invisible Bridge’ has been received so differently from his first two histories…. A bogus plagiarism charge was even mounted to not only muddy the waters, but to actually try to prevent publication of his work…. Perlstein…. ‘My stupidest reviews come from centrists desperate to cling to myth of a sensible right’… linking to his response to a review by Jacob Weisberg…. And when UC Berkeley economist/econoblogger Brad DeLong tweeted back, ‘OK, I will grant you Jacob Weinberg. Who else?,’ Perlstein responded, ‘Sam Tanenhaus. Damon Linker [here] (he wasn’t all that bad). Robert Kaiser [here]’… Geoffrey Kabaservice and Michael Kimmage…. Perlstein’s got a point…. In his responses to Tanenhaus and Weisberg, Perlstein focused primarily on what they got wrong about his book descriptively–clearly demonstrable failures to accurately reflect the content they were commenting on…. [But] we [also] get repeated displays of ideologically loaded assumptions–it’s just that the ideology involved is a centrist one…”