Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 14, 2014

Must-Reads:

1. Megan McArdle: You Can’t Have a Conversation About Sexism at Gunpoint: “The real problem is not the sexualized remarks and threats of violence… [but] that women attract an undue amount of nonsexual rage and denigration…. People are ruder, angrier, more condescending and more dismissive with women who make arguments they don’t like…. This is not just something men do. It is not just something conservatives, or liberals, or nonfeminists do. It is a general rule….

   “If you’re trying to change people’s behavior… lighter punishment is often better…. In our society, accusing a specific person of sexism is now a very, very powerful weapon. And there is no such thing as a “conversation” at gunpoint…. I think that we need to have a conversation about subtle structural sexism. But it actually needs to be a conversation, because the best hope of changing behavior is for well-meaning people to do a little gut check before they go on a tear against an opinionated woman. And the only way to do that is to actually convince them that this is real. So really, guys: It’s not you, it’s me. It’s us. It’s everyone. But like Smokey Bear says, only you, and me, and everyone else can prevent flame wars…”

2. Ezra Klein: What liberals get wrong about single payer: “It’s health-care providers — not insurers — who have too much power in the U.S. system. As a result, they have the most to lose if health-care prices fall. But, as is often the case, political power flows in part from popularity. So politicians who routinely rail against for-profit insurers are scared to criticize — much less legislate against — for-profit hospitals, doctors or device manufacturers (though drug companies come in for a drubbing now and then). These are the people who work every day to save our lives, even if they make us pay dearly for the privilege. No one cheers when you take them on.”

3. Matthew Yglesias: Welfare works for kids: Children whose parents get money grow up healthier and live longer: “AMothers’ Pension[s]…. The program is old enough that almost all the kids whose moms received money are dead now, allowing the researchers to conclude definitively that it increased life expectancy. What’s more, World War II draft records show… sons of the accepted had early adult incomes that were 20 percent higher than those of rejected mothers; these sons were also 35 percent less likely to be underweight as adults, lived a year longer, and had about a third of a year of additional schooling. Since the rejected sons’ families were, on average, somewhat better off, these figures should somewhat understate the real impact of the pensions. The benefits weren’t gigantic—but the sums of money involved were pretty modest as well. Benefit levels varied from state to state, but averaged out to about $260 a month (adjusted for inflation), or around half of a modern-day TANF check.”

4. Adair Turner: Is rapid credit growth really necessary to boost GDP growth?: “Is there something about modern economies that makes adequate demand growth impossible without damaging credit growth? Rising inequality is one driver…. As the rich get richer, consumption growth may decline, unless the financial system uses their savings to lend to the relatively poor. But much of this debt may prove unsustainable. As Raghuram Rajan pointed out in his book Fault Lines, the US subprime-mortgage boom and bust owed much to pitiably slow growth in lower-income Americans’ real earnings over the last three decades…. A more stable growth model requires less… debt that finances purchases of existing assets, supports consumption without addressing the drivers of inequality, or results from unsustainable global imbalances.”

5. Larry Summers: “The extent to which differential productivity growth characterizes our economy is, I think, sometimes underappreciated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics normalizes the consumer price indices at 100 in the period 1982 to 1984…. Television sets at five stand out. That is obviously a reflection of a rather energetic hedonic effort by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One suspects that equally energetic hedonic efforts are not applied to every consumer price. But nonetheless, the simple fact is that the relative price of toys and a college education has changed by a factor of ten in a generation. The relative price of durable goods or clothing as a category and all goods has changed by a factor of almost two in a generation. This table provides a somewhat different perspective on the common and valid observation that real wages have stagnated in the United States. The observation that real wages are stagnant reflects wages measured in terms of the overall consumer price index. But this obscures the truth that real wages measured in terms of different goods have behaved very differently…”

Should-Reads:

1. Dylan Scott: Obamacare Enrollment Exploded In December To 2.2 Million: “As of Dec. 28, 2.2 million Americans have enrolled in private health coverage, according to new data released Monday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. More than 1.8 million of them signed up in December alone, a huge spike that has gotten the law closer to its original goals than most would have thought possible after HealthCare.gov’s disastrous rollout in October. The administration’s original projection was 3.3 million enrollments in private health insurance by the end of 2013, so Obamacare isn’t quite back on track yet. But considering the combined total in October and November was less than the administration had targeted for just the month of October, it’s much closer to the mark.”

2. Barry Ritholtz: What the Heroes of Blogging Have Accomplished: “Blogging: 1. Loosened the grip of traditional players on information and news…. 2. Created a meritocracy: The readership of a blog is a function of the quality of its author’s thought process and writing skills…. 3. Allowed for the faster and wider spread of information (and misinformation), commentary and analysis: One of the things that blogging, combined with Google search, has done is to create a broad and deep universe of many financial topics…. 4. Forced accountability and humility on the financial press…. 5. Democratized the financial / economic debate…. Twitter, initially called a micro-blogging service, has further democratized both the debate and media. The blahg, as it has been disdainfully described, has plenty of problems and issues. Enough that it is perhaps a topic worthy of another column. In the meanwhile, I wanted to take a moment to remind myself the significant impact that user-generated commentary has had on both finance and the media.”
   And

3. Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine: Is MTV’s 16 and Pregnant “A Great Form of Birth Control”?: “We took advantage of the introduction of ’16 and Pregnant’ to assess the influence of media images on teen behavior — specifically teen childbearing…. Could exposure to the images and stories in 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom affect how teens think about pregnancy and ultimately on whether they become teen mothers themselves? Yes, in fact, our research shows that it does and that its impact is significant…. Our results indicates that it led to a 5.7 percent decline in teen births in the 18 months after June 2009 (when 16 and Pregnant first aired), accounting for about one-third of the overall decline in U.S. teen births over that period.”

4. Kenneth Y. Chay, Daeho Kim, and Shailender Swaminathan: Health Insurance, Hospital Utilization and Mortality: Evidence from Medicare’s Origins: “We examine Medicare’s impact on hospital insurance, utilization and mortality rates. The analysis applies an ‘age discontinuity’ design to data both before and after Medicare’s introduction. We find that Medicare: i) increased hospital utilization and costs among the elderly, but at a lower rate than previously found; and ii) significantly increased life expectancy in the eligible population. The mortality reductions exhibit an age discontinuity only after Medicare’s introduction – patterns not found in nations that did not introduce a Medicare-style program in the 1960’s – with deaths due to heart disease and stroke accounting for most of these reductions. We estimate that Medicare’s introduction had a cost-per-life year ratio below $200 (in 1982-84 dollars). We also analyze changes over time in Medicare’s impact and the characteristics of the “marginal” person who benefited from coverage. We find that the age-65 discontinuity in insurance rates fell over time, more so for blacks, the less-educated, poor and disabled; and that Medicare’s salience rises in recessions. We present evidence that the benefit-cost ratios of Medicare fell during the 1980s, partly due to changes in Medicare’s reimbursement formula.”

Tim Jost: Implementing Health Reform: An October Through December Exchange Enrollment Report | Tim Duy: Employment Report Keeps Policymakers on Their Toes | Julia Isaacs and Olivia Healy: Unemployment benefits can be a lifeline for long-term unemployed families | Kevin Drum: Why Have Investors Given Up on the Real World? |

Should Be Aware of:

1. Virginia Postrel: What Emma and Bill Keller Don’t Know: “Hitchens’s essays and Adams’s tweets… are individualistic… specific voices, specific knowledge and specific experiences…. Newspaper column writing tends to demand a one-best-way approach to every issue, from budget negotiations to finding a mate. If you wouldn’t do it that way, you write a column about how no one else should, either. How to cope with cancer is a singularly bad topic for the op-ed pages…. When I had cancer, I didn’t want to talk much about it in public…. I can’t imagine emulating Adams. But that’s just me. What makes me different from the typical newspaper columnist is that I know it.”

2. John Quiggin: The Repubs Won’t Douthat: “Ross Douthat is something of a punchline in these parts. But… he’s just about the last member of the once-numerous class of committed Republican intellectuals, all the rest having either defected to the left… or descended into hackery…. And, every now and then he writes something that raises important issues, at the cost of pointing up how hopeless his own program for Republican reform has become…. Bill De Blasio, Douthat tries to make a case that the Democratic Party won’t be able to take even the minimal steps needed to address the problem growing inequality…. He starts with the obvious point that Obama… is not a wild-eyed socialist, or even a traditional US liberal, but rather a moderate conservative[s. This] may be a revelation in some Republican circles, but it is scarcely news to the rest of us. Douthat’s more substantive claim is that the weakness of Obama’s tax policy is… dictated by the demands of the Democratic Party base…. socially liberal high-income earners who are absolutely resistant to any increase the taxes they pay…. This is a caricature, but most caricatures have some validity…. It’s true, as Douthat says, that there is plenty of resistance to this program within the Democratic Party. But the once-overwhelming dominance of Wall Street and its advocates has been greatly weakened, notably because the financial lobby overwhelmingly supported Romney and shared his contempt for ‘the 47 per cent’…. Douthat wants the Republican party to beat the Dems to the punch by offering an economic program that appeals to middle and working class voters. It’s patently obvious, however, that there is zero support for this program in any of the leading factions of the Republican Party…. It seems clear, reading between the lines, that Douthat has already recognised this. As the NYT official Republican columnist, he faces some pretty big costs if he jumps ship (not to mention his tribal affiliation with conservative Catholicism). Still, I can’t see how he can go on pretending much longer.”

3. Ramez Naam: The Evidence on GMO Safety: “I do believe that we’ll eventually have labels on genetically modified foods.  So long as those labels are in the ingredients section and not needlessly frightening, I think that’s fine.  Clearly a set of people very much want labels, and the resistance to labeling gives the appearance that there’s something to hide with genetically modified foods. There isn’t. Genetically modified foods are safe.”

And:

• Daniel Borata et al.: Post-study caffeine administration enhances memory consolidation in humans
• Arindrajit Dube: Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes
• Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie, and Adriana Lleras-Muney: The Long Run Impact of Welfare
• Frances Coppola: Three posts on basic income

Ed Luce: The tide is rising for America’s libertarians | Virginia Postrel: Two Cheers for ‘First World Problems’ | Eric Loomis: This Day in Labor History: On January 14, 1888, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was published | J.K. Trotter: Howard Kurtz Lied About Business Ties To Fox News Contributor |