Things to Read on the Evening of February 28, 2014

Must-Reads:

1. Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland: Ukraine: Emergency Economic Measures: “It is only a few days after the successful February revolution and the country is still in a state of flux. Nevertheless, a new government is needed to deal with emergency economic measures: The country is days away from facing a $2bln payment to international bondholders. The provisional Ukrainian government does not have the necessary legitimacy to make all the changes demanded by the Maidan protesters…”

2. Binyamin Applebaum: The Curse of Unanimity: “The transcripts that the Federal Reserve released… of… 2008… record in painful detail the ignorance of its officials…. What the transcripts do not explain is why the Fed failed at one of its most basic tasks…. The Fed discounted good data, failed to build better models… persisted in its mistaken assumptions… [even though] other people were able to see the cliff…. Fed officials strongly prefer to agree with each other. They are not satisfied with making decisions by a majority vote. They prefer to act unanimously. Sandra Pianalto, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said in a speech Thursday that this esprit de corps has been a great strength…”

Should-Reads:

• Charles Plosser: Monetary Policy and a Brightening Economy

• DJW: Same sex marriage, public opinion and religion: “Rod Dreher… flags an interesting and revealing finding from the recent PRRI poll…. SSM is becoming popular because Christians are very quickly deciding they don’t have a problem with it after all. This is why when I hear people say that Christian teachings and doctrines on human sexuality and marriage just can’t possibly accommodate SSM, I wonder what world they’re living in…. Christianity has been the mainstream religion in American society by calibrating the amount of racism and sexism build into their teachings to remain close enough to the mainstream to retain its status. It’s clearly happening again…”

• Ed Kilgore: The Veto That Doomed America: “It’s gotta be a difficult time for the culture warriors who were deeply invested in the ‘religious liberty’ campaign that hit a land-mine in Arizona this week…. One way out of the kind of bitter intra-communal recriminations that might cause discomfiture later on for the culture warriors to blame somebody else, like that ol’ debbil the Godless Liberal Media. It is hard to imagine a more thorough Blamaganza than that penned by Mollie Hemingway…. I made the mistake of reading it… a strategic retreat into bad TV. But bless her brave soul, Sarah Posner took on Hemingway at Religion Dispatches, and reduced the histronics to something understandable…. What inspired the Arizona bill… is an effort to convince people not previously invested in culture war that they had to pick sides…. I tweeted the other day that the Arizona debacle was the Terri Schiavo case of this decade: an overreach that exposed the underlying extremism of the Cultural Right. That judgment’s looking stronger every day.”

Ross Brenneman: If Unions Died Out, Could Anything Replace Them? | Michael Hiltzik: Once again: Yes, the stimulus worked | Josh Barro: Actual CPAC panel: “Healthcare After ObamaCare: A Practical Guide for Living When No One Has Insurance & America Runs Out of Doctors (Pt 1)”

Should Be Aware of:

1. Charles Warzel: Google’s War On Email: “Late last summer I relinquished control over my inbox… decided to surrender my most sacred online space to Google… let Gmail’s tabbed inbox…. The new interface was also a clear message to email marketers everywhere: Google will now determine the purpose of your email…. Google… [is] continuing the offensive… rolling out an ‘unsubscribe’ action button on emails inside… ‘Promotions’…. Google is knowingly seizing control of and single-handedly reshaping a multibillion dollar industry…. The changes serve a greater purpose: to push users toward Gmail’s vision of the future of email…. The first and hardest step toward colonizing your inbox is already complete. We’ve already let Google back in and relinquished some control, but like any imperial war, change is sure to be gradual and probably a little bloody.”

2. Rick Perlstein: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: