Things to Read on the Morning of January 28, 2014

January 28, 2014

Must-Reads:

  1. Steve Randy Waldmann: interfluidity » Followup: Pro-family, pro-children, anti-”marriage promotion”: “James Pethokoukis misreads the views of people like me. He writes: ‘Folks who agree with [Waldman’s] view often advocate a hugely expanded government safety net — universal pre-K, one-year paid parental leave, a universal basic income among other programs — to do the work of transmitting social and intellectual capital that intact families no longer can.’ Folks who are me do advocate for vastly expanded government benefits for families…. But the purpose… is not to ‘do the work… that intact families no longer can’… I support these programs because they would enable and assist the work that couples must do to stay together and in love and raise children well…”

  2. Noah Smith: The Econ Nobel Prize Is Not a Serious Institution: “A lot of people thought it was strange, and a little funny, to see the 2013 Econ Nobel Prize awarded to two people (Gene Fama and Robert Shiller) whose theories contradict each other, and who hold deeply opposing views of the way the world works. But… you can actually see Shiller’s work as building on Fama’s…. The 2004 and 2011 Econ Nobels…. 2004… Ed Prescott… in an email… he very recently wrote…. “It is an established scientific fact that monetary policy has had virtually no effect on output and employment in the U.S. since the formation of the Fed”…. Bond buying [by the Fed], he wrote, “is as effective in bringing prosperity as rain dancing is in bringing rain.” Wow!… Prescott has made some… odd… claims in recent years, but these recent remarks were totally consistent with his prize-winning research…. 2011… Chris Sims… monetary policy does have real effects…. It is not possible to see Sims’ work as an expansion on or a correction to Prescott’s…. It’s as if the Nobel Prize in Physics went to one person who made a theory saying that electricity doesn’t exist, and then seven years later was awarded to a person who took measurements showing that electricity does exist. That seems like it would never happen…”

  3. Paul Krugman: Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression, AFF Edition: “The blog Social Democracy for the 21st Century has a fascinating post about Austrian patron saint Ludwig von Mises in the Great Depression… it bears so much resemblance to current right-wing flailing… von Mises, faced with the reality of depression, basically dropped Austrian business cycle theory, and for the very reason people like me have always had trouble taking it seriously…. ABCT is essentially a story about the excesses of the boom; it offers no clear or plausible story about how that boom leads to a sustained slump. And von Mises was in effect already conceding that point by 1931…. According to vM, it was excessive wages… and unemployment benefits were leaving workers insufficiently desperate. Sound familiar? It should–it is, essentially, the current Republican story, in which unemployment is high because we’re being too nice to the unemployed–that, as I like to say, soup kitchens caused the Great Depression…. It’s a nonsense story. But it turns out that it’s always the story the right turns to when market economies go bad–because the alternative would be to admit that market economies can in fact go bad, and that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem.”

  4. Dylan Scott: New GOP Plan Makes Everything They Hate About Obamacare Even Worse: “For the last couple months, the Republican critique of Obamacare has been founded on President Barack Obama’s broken promise: ‘If you like your health plan, you can keep it’. It was a pledge that the health care reform law wouldn’t disrupt the existing insurance system…. It’s been an effective line of attack…. Which makes the new GOP alternative to Obamacare, proposed Monday by three Republican senators… baffling… another fundamental disruption of the individual insurance market… [plus] it could upend the employer insurance universe…. That was the conclusion of several health policy wonks who spoke with TPM about the new proposal, put forward by… Burr… Coburn… and… Hatch (UT)… millions of people would likely lose the plan they already have.”

Should-Reads:

  1. Charlie Warzel: Q&A: Ezra Klein Promises “A Completely Different Product”: “This idea of the news site is deeper and has more dimensions than Wonkblog, and it will touch on more parts of our approach to news. It’s not just explainers, and though we have an idea, it will take time to fully unveil itself…. The idea of changing and fixing the problem of how news is presented on the internet has been recognized for a long time. For us, we’re going to try to do it with a mix of technological and workflow approaches…. I was on one of those ‘how the media is changing’ panels with Trei [Brundrett, Vox Media’s head of product] and I remember being terrified by this guy. He was saying stuff that sounded just like the project I was dreaming up and so I mostly kept my mouth shut since I didn’t want to show my hand too much. What we’re doing is not strictly Storystreams but has some of its dimensions…. We ended up being so sure that teaming with with Vox would give us a far better site. More than anything, I trust them. I trust them more than I trust myself or any of my team to build awesome tech and design teams and exquisite platforms. They really make us better on those dimensions from the beginning. We’re building this from scratch and this will be a substantial effort and take many months but they’ve been thinking about it already they’re making us smarter…. We’re not trying to build a ‘super Wonkblog’. If we were doing that we wouldn’t go through all this trouble. We intend to be incredibly good at policy and politics but also sports and science. We are trying to build a full news site and in a better and more useful way for our readers. We will be in as many issue areas as our revenue model will openly support. This is not just Wonkblog or policy news. This is a much broader product.”

  2. Mike Konczal: Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Should Resurrect “Full Employment”: “The first president to say the words ‘full employment’ during a State of the Union address was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1939 he argued that it was the government’s responsibility ‘to attain the full employment of our labor and our capital.’ Four years later, in 1943, he went further, arguing that actual freedom, the Four Freedoms that included ‘freedom from want’, required ‘the right to expect full employment—full employment for themselves and for all able-bodied men and women in America who want to work’. And it was the responsibility of the government to deliver it when the war ended, he said. The last decade has not been kind to the idea…. Indeed you can see the collapse of the liberal economic project by walking through the use of the term in State of the Union speeches. If President Barack Obama wants to save his failure to end high unemployment in his first term, while also orienting the Democratic party to the future, he should use the State of the Union to resurrect these two words.”

  3. Peter Dizikes: When the job search becomes a blame game: “Searching for a job is tough–and the nature of the hiring process in the United States makes matters far tougher, and more emotionally fraught for workers, than it needs to be. That is the central assertion of MIT’s Ofer Sharone…”

Jason Sattler: House Republicans Make Their Regularly Scheduled Threat To Destroy The Global Economy | Jeffrey Young: These Health Insurance Companies Are Winning At Obamacare | Meghan McCarthy: @afrakt on GOP Senators’ ACA Replacement Bill (with tweets)–Storify | Mark Thoma: How do we know income inequality is getting worse? | Kevin Drum: No, the Decline of Cinderella Marriages Probably Hasn’t Played a Big Role in Rising Income Inequality | Charles Morris: America’s Industrial Rebound Is Not a Myth | * Daniel J. Weiss et al.:* 5 More Items for President Obama’s Climate Change To-Do List |

Should Be Aware of:

  1. Ben Adler: Newt Gingrich & Herman Cain Are Now Making Money Off Spam: “The joke about Cain and Gingrich during the 2012 campaign was that they weren’t at all serious about their pursuits of the presidency but instead just lining up future paydays…. They’re not just cashing in on their candidacies the way some predecessors have, by translating increased visibility to higher speaking fees, more generous book advances, extra board appointments, and so on. Collectively, Cain, Gingrich, and Huckabee are pioneering a new, more direct method for post-campaign buckraking…. Campaigns are very much in the lists business: lists of donors to call, lists of likely voters, lists of identified supporters, sub-lists of the addresses of the friendly voters needing rides to the polls. When the race is over, some of those databases become hot commodities as brokers peddle them to other candidates and like-minded interest groups willing to pay for access to their contents. A master file of the names and contact information collected during Alan Keyes’s perennial candidacies, for instance, remains ‘top performing’, according to direct-marketing clearinghouse NextMark, thanks to the highly engaged constituency it reaches: ‘These conservative individuals are passionately pro-life and pro-family and will do what it takes to ensure that their voices are heard!’ The asking price is $100 per 1,000 names, with surcharges for pulling out targets by congressional district, gender, and other variables.”

  2. Will Wilkinson: Inequality: Why poor Americans aren’t up in arms: “If the absolute quality of private consumables and public goods has improved for the poor even as inequality has gone up and up, some of the mystery of why those at the bottom of the income ladder haven’t taken to the streets is dissolved. Yet rising absolute standards of living are not, in my opinion, the main reason Americans aren’t taking to the streets over inequality. The real reason is that Americans aren’t egalitarian enough, though there is some indication that this is changing. Americans won’t successfully rally against inequality unless they really care about inequality, and they’re not going to care until they become more egalitarian philosophically. But that won’t happen until egalitarians start making persuasive arguments.”

  3. Narayana Kocherlakota: Q&A: A Voice for an Activist Fed: “We shouldn’t let the persistence of the problem lead us to the conclusion that we shouldn’t do more. The last four years have been challenging for me; it’s been a learning process in terms of what’s available in terms of tools and in terms of what should be done. Speaking for myself, maybe others could have done better, but there’s been an evolution in my own thinking…. At the macro level, coming out of 2011, I had been forecasting high inflation and that was failing to materialize, and I had to come back and think to myself, ‘What’s special about me that I would think that?’ And it became clearer that my outlook for accelerating inflation was just not consistent with what’s going on in the world. So I started putting more weight on the low-demand forces in retarding unemployment…. You make a speech in August of 2010 and it inspires a whole quantity of work where people say, ‘This is what Kocherlakota says and we will now show in this paper that Kocherlakota was wrong’. There’s a number of ways that people can react to that, and I reacted in the only way that a sensible person can, which is to update…. I was not trying to find the best way to save my intellectual pedigree. I was trying to do the best job possible.”

And:

January 28, 2014

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