Things to Read on the Morning of September 21, 2014

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Joshua Brown: iPhone 6: Adventures in Global Manufacturing

1. Sam Wang: Senate Conditions Are Back to September 3: “As of today, conditions in the battle for Senate control are just about back to where they were on the day after the shake-up in the Kansas Senate race. Using polls alone in a 2-3 week window (see right sidebar), current medians show the following key margins: Alaska D+5%, Colorado D+2%, Iowa D+0.5%, North Carolina D+4%, and Kansas I+5.5%. In an election based on today’s polled sample, the most likely outcome is 51 votes for Democrats and Independents. [Update: see comments. At the moment, significant drivers of the difference between PEC and other sites appear to be (1) we’re using all polls, including partisan ones, which changes Alaska; and (2) we’re using Kansas two-candidate matchups and don’t have fundamentals to drag those polls in the GOP direction.]”

2. Barry Ritholtz: After 30,000 posts, Big Picture blogger has figured a few things out: “After more than a decade of getting up before the crack of dawn to write a daily journal about all things financial, here is what I’ve learned: (1) Writing is a good way to figure out what you think…. (2) Writing is a good way to become a better writer…. (3) Mainstream media ignored blogs, occasionally stole from, then adopted the format wholesale…. (4) Content: creativity, criticism and curation. Content is king. When you are asking people to read you several times a day, you better have some fine content. Mixing original content, intelligent criticism and curation (a.k.a. reading linkfests) has been a successful formula for me…. I would describe it [as]… ‘First, here is something I CREATED which I think is worthwhile; second, THAT OVER THERE is wrong and not especially compelling and here’s why; and third, you should see ALL OF THESE. They are excellent.’ I am oversimplifying, but that’s the basic three-part content structure of a good blog…. Reader comments have become useless…. This is a shame. At one time, commenters had tremendous value within given communities…. (5) Advertising is a terrible business model (unless you are Google)…. (6) Authors vs. publishers. People read publications less than they do authors…. There is a caveat…. Any powerful platform will potentially expose a writer to a wider audience. That has been my experience here at The Washington Post as well as on Bloomberg View. (7) People lie to themselves…. For a data guy like me, this is both utterly fascinating and somewhat disturbing…. Whenever I encounter someone who refuses to accept reality, all I can do is shrug and remind myself that someone has to be on the losing side of the trade. It might as well be him. (8) It can be difficult for readers to distinguish between good information and distracting nonsense. Despite a tremendous amount of information online, readers are still mired in lots of bad thinking and disproven memes.”

3. Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger: Labor Market Fluidity and Economic Performance: “U.S. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. Job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. The declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education. Younger and less educated workers had especially large declines, as did the retail sector. A shift to older businesses, an aging workforce, and policy developments that suppress reallocation all contributed to fluidity declines. Drawing on previous work, we argue that reduced fluidity has harmful consequences for productivity, real wages and employment. To quantify the effects of reallocation intensity on employment, we estimate regression models that exploit low frequency variation over time within states, using state-level changes in population composition and other variables as instruments. We find large positive effects of worker reallocation rates on employment, especially for men, young workers, and the less educated. Similar estimates obtain when dropping data from the Great Recession and its aftermath. These results suggest the U.S. economy faced serious impediments to high employment rates well before the Great Recession, and that sustained high employment is unlikely to return without restoring labor market fluidity.”

4. Paul Krugman: Conservative Canadian Cockroach “Oh, my. Josh Barro tells us that conservatives are once again touting Canada as a role model, in particular using its experience in the 90s to claim that austerity is expansionary after all. I think this qualifies as a cockroach idea (zombies just keep shambling along, whereas sometimes you think you’ve gotten rid of cockroaches, but they keep coming back.) I thought we had disposed of all this four years ago. But nooooo. Barro hits the main points. Canadian austerity in the 1990s was offset by a huge positive movement in the trade balance, due to a falling Canadian dollar and raw material exports…. Also, the whole debate about austerity versus stimulus was driven by the problem that interest rates were at the zero lower bound, so that there wasn’t any easy way to offset the effects of austerity. Canada in the 1990s? Not so much…. However, Josh misses a trick. When dealing with right-wing claims about economic data, you should never forget Moore’s Law: not only shouldn’t you accept their assertions, you should assume that what they say is probably wrong…. So conservatives have fallen in love with an imaginary Canada, whose history and current reality is nothing like the real place. Are you surprised?”

5. Jason Millman: Millions have joined Medicaid under Obamacare. Here’s what they think of it: “All the study participants said they feel better off with free or low-cost Medicaid coverage… worry less about being able to afford bills or see a doctor…. The majority said they’ve already used their coverage and feel healthier…. Most said they didn’t even know they were eligible for Medicaid…. There’s some confusion about what the program actually covers, and researchers found some feared receiving low-quality or limited care. The enrollees’ biggest problem has been finding a primary care doctor…. Some new enrollees in the focus groups said they had to call at least six practices to find a doctor…. Others said they weren’t used to the process of finding a primary care physician, and others didn’t try because they didn’t see an urgent need to find one…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Federico Vittici: iOS 8 Changed How I Work on My iPhone and iPad
• Scott Kaufman: 9 college freshmen dead in alcohol-related incidents in first weeks of new school year
• Robert Hutchins (1951): The Freedom of the University

1. Benedict Carey: Implant bolsters memory in rats: “Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats…. In the new work, being published today, researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California… read neural activity… [and] translated those signals internally, to improve brain function rather than to activate outside appendages…. Scientists at Wake Forest led by Sam A. Deadwyler trained rats to remember which of two identical levers to press…. To test the effect of the implant, the researchers used a drug to shut down the activity of CA1. Without CA1 online, the rats could not remember which lever to push to get water…. The researchers, having recorded the appropriate signal from CA1, simply replayed it, and the animals remembered. The implant acted as if it were CA1, at least for this one task…”

2. Nick Cohen: Alex Salmond’s tactic of making the rest of the UK the enemy was depressingly successful: “WHEN the great leader makes his last bow, there’s an awful temptation to play the hypocrite and mutter warm words…. For me the true measure of Alex Salmond’s worth came last weekend when a crowd of protestors surrounded BBC Scotland’s headquarters…. Nick Robinson had asked hard questions of the first minister at a rigged press conference packed with SNP stooges and said on air that Salmond had ducked them. The demonstrators found his lèse-majesté intolerable. They demanded the BBC fire their political editor for holding power to account. Think about it. A mob takes to the streets because the first minister does not like what an independent journalist has said about him…. By voting No and seeing Salmond resign, it looks to me as if Scotland has had a ‘joyous’ escape. A view confirmed when I read how he had tried to force the principal of St Andrews University to tone down her warning that independence would bring a ‘catastrophic’ loss of UK research funds. St Andrews is an ancient, revered and, above all else, independent Scottish institution. But Salmond couldn’t tolerate Professor Louise Richardson behaving as free women in free countries ought to behave and speaking her mind…. I hope there’ll be a reassessment of the guff he said about ‘civic nationalism’. How soothing that phrase sounds. How cuddly and safe. On the one hand, we have the nasty nationalism that start wars and racial conflicts. On the other, civic nationalism, which wouldn’t hurt a fly…. It’s not true…. Even though he lost, Salmond’s tactics of making the rest of the UK the enemy were depressingly successful.”

3. Leah Schnelbach: H.G. Wells Invented Everything You Love: “H.G. Wells is considered one of the fathers of science fiction, and if you look at a brief timeline you’ll see why he’s so extraordinary: 1895: The Time Machine. 1896: The Island of Doctor Moreau. 1897: The Invisible Man. 1898: The War of the Worlds. 1901: The First Men in the Moon. So basically for four consecutive years Wells got out of bed on New Year’s Day and said, ‘What ho! I think I’ll invent a new subgenre of scientific fiction!’ And then he took a year off, only to return with a story about a moon landing. If it wasn’t for that gap in 1900, he probably would have invented cyberpunk, too…”