Things to Read on the Morning of July 7, 2014

Should-Reads:

1. Joe Wilson (2004): What I Didn’t Find in Africa: “Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council. It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa’s suspected link to Iraq’s nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That’s me…”

2. Kevin Drum: Here’s What Happens When You Challenge the CIA Through “Proper Channels”: “At this point, of course, I have to add the usual caveat that we have only Scudder’s side of this story…. Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t exactly a testimonial for aggressively trying to work through the proper channels, even if your goal is the relatively harmless one of releasing historical documents that pose no threats to operational security at all. By comparison, it’s pretty obvious that having his pension reduced would have been the least of Snowden’s worries…”

3. David Autor: Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent”: “Although there is no “remedy” for inequality that is as swift or cheap as eyeglasses, prosperous democratic countries have numerous effective policy levers for shaping inequality’s trajectory and socioeconomic consequences. Policies that appear most effective over the long haul in raising prosperity and reducing inequality are those that cultivate the skills of successive generations: excellent preschool through high school education; broad access to postsecondary education; and good nutrition, good public health, and high-quality home environments. Such policies address inequality from two directions: (i) enabling a larger fraction of adults to attain high productivity, rewarding jobs, and a reasonable standard of living; and (ii) raising the total supply of skills available to the economy, which in turn moderates the skill premium and reduces inequality…”

Should Be Aware of:

• David Leonhardt and Lawrence Summers: What does the Future Hold for Our Economy?
• Elias Asquith: Here are the highlights of Justice Ginsburg’s fiery Hobby Lobby dissent
• Paul Krugman: Deficits saved the world
• Sergey Brin: “We Will Make Machines that Can Reason, Think, and Do Things Better than We Can”
• Josh Brown: Amazing Charts to Astound Your Friends!
• Robin Harding: The U.S. economy: The productivity puzzle

And:

1. Martin Kenney: The NSA Is Undermining American IT’s Global Dominance: “The CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers, requested that the National Security Agency stop intercepting the company’s products to install devices for spying on foreign customers…. Since the scale of the NSA’s Internet eavesdropping came to light, governments and large companies outside of the United States are questioning the capacity of American IT firms to guarantee their products’ security. America’s central position in the world’s information economy, which seemed secure just two years ago, is now under threat…”

2. Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction: “The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn’t help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from…. I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is…. I think I’ve managed to balance things out…. Here’s how I do it: Short, regular work schedule: When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal–usually a page or two–and then I meet it every day… it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes…. The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions…. Leave yourself a rough edge: When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you’re in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained…. Don’t research: Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa…. Don’t be ceremonious: Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room…. Kill your word-processor: Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction…. Realtime communications tools are deadly…”

3. Hamilton project: “Day two of The Hamilton Project’s anti-poverty summit, Addressing America’s Poverty Crisis, focused on policy proposals to improve safety net and work support. The first panel of the day discussed expansions to the Earned Income Tax Credit, reforms to the Child and Dependent  care tax credit, and the potential benefits of predictive analytics and rapid-cycle evaluation to improve social services. The authors, Scott Cody of Mathematica Policy Research, Hilary Hoynes of UC Berkely, and James Ziliak of the University of Kentucky, were joined in the roundtable discussion by Gordon Berlin of MDRC, and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Director of The Hamilton Project, Melissa Kearney, moderated the discussion…”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Corey Robin sends us to John Stuart Mill: War and Commerce: “But the economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by those of its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Commerce is now what war once was, the principal source of this contact…”

2. Daniel Kuehn: Facts & other stubborn things: Quick thoughts on “How to Pay for the War”: “I’ve recently been leafing through a first edition of Keynes’s How to Pay for the War…. It’s a really fascinating read…. I like it a lot for a couple reasons: 1. First it highlights quite explicitly the mission that is animating Keynes pretty much from the beginning, which is how a free society works in the modern economy. He sees one group of people who embrace a free society that pretend there is nothing really different about a modern economy (what he refers to elsewhere as ‘laissez faire’, and then he sees another group that understands there is something different but addresses it by abandoning the free society (communists and fascists). He thinks that neither are a viable option. This understanding of his role is there throughout his life, but it comes out very clearly in How to Pay for the War. 2. The General Theory is detailed on investment theory but not as detailed on consumption…. [Here] Keynes seems to really deal a lot more with micro consumption behavior, which is understandable since he’s talking about intertemporal public finance and tax issues. 3. He is talking about slowing growth and fighting inflation. A lot of people act like Kenyes forgot to address this, sometimes based on nothing more than a well circulated Hayek Youtube video…. 4. He talks about expectations for post-war slumps, and as anyone that knows about his exchange at the Fed in ’43 I believe (maybe ’42) he is not pessimistic about it like Samuelson was at the time. 5. He carries over critiques of price controls and rationing that echo insights into consumer theory that he was making as far back as Economic Consequences of the Peace…”