Things to Read on the Morning of March 7, 2014
Must-Reads:
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Joseph E. Stiglitz: Stagnation by Design: “Markets are not self-correcting. The underlying fundamental problems that I outlined earlier could get worse–and many are. Inequality leads to weak demand; widening inequality weakens demand even more; and, in most countries, including the US, the crisis has only worsened inequality…. Markets have never been very good at achieving structural transformations quickly on their own…. The sectors that should be growing, reflecting the needs and desires of citizens, are services like education and health, which traditionally have been publicly financed, and for good reason. But, rather than government facilitating the transition, austerity is inhibiting it…”
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Tim Worstall: Ritchie on redistributionl: “There’s another very interesting bit to add to this as well. Which is that other work tells us that how you do the redistribution does indeed matter. Transactions taxes are worst (they have the highest deadweight costs), then capital and corporation taxes, then income taxes, then consumption and finally repeated taxes upon real property. And it’s notable that the countries that do the most redistribution (the Nordics, they have the biggest gaps between market and post tax post benefit gini) do it by having heavier than we do consumption taxes and lighter than we do capital and corporate ones (note that that last is influenced not so much by the rate but by the base).”
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Tim Duy: A Lackluster Start to the Year: “Incoming data… disappoint[s]…. Part of the blame should fall on overly optimistic interpretations of data patterns at the end of 2013. In particular, the recently downwardly revised GDP numbers were less than spectacular abstracting away from inventory effects. Looking at real final sales, I see slow and steady, or even a modest softening, not magic acceleration…. The latest data disappointments were the weak ADP report suggesting a just 139k private sector NFP gain in March and a similarly weak reading on the service side of the economy from ISM…. My baseline expectation for monetary policy is that recent softer data makes little difference in the tapering plans…. My suspicion is that [Yellen] will need to see real evidence that labor market slack has evaporated in the form of faster wage growth before she begins to worry of overshooting.”
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Dylan Scott: New Hampshire Advances Medicaid Expansion Under Obamacare: “The GOP-controlled New Hampshire Senate approved a privatized plan for expanding Medicaid under Obamacare…. The bill passed 18 to 5. Five of the 13 Republicans opposed the plan…. The proposal would use Medicaid dollars to help low-income residents purchase private health coverage, as Arkansas has done. The Democratic-controlled House is expected to approve the plan, and Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan has expressed her support. About 58,000 New Hampshirites are expected to gain coverage under the expansion.”
Should-Reads:
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Keith Humphreys: Dear Bill Keller, Please Start Taking Drug Addiction Treatment Seriously: “In his closing contribution to the New York Times, Bill Keller laments President Obama’s unwillingness to invest in drug addiction treatment…. It is also embarrassingly, verifiably, wrong. I am sure Mr. Keller and all the other journalistic critics of Obama’s drug treatment record have heard of The Affordable Care Act… [that] expands access to care for over 60 million Americans by mandating that drug treatment coverage be included in every plan and be at parity with that for other disorders… [the] regulations for the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act provide benefit parity to more than 100 million Americans with employer-provided health insurance… independent analysts at CMS consider the current public policy environment the most dramatic improvement in the quantity and quality of addiction treatment in U.S. history… Rather than use his platform to make assertions that are demonstrably inaccurate, I hope he will in the future engage in… due diligence…”
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Nate Silver: How Nate Silver Hires: “The x-axis runs from ‘quantitative’ to ‘qualitative,’ the y-axis (top to bottom) from ‘rigorous and empirical’ to ‘anecdotal and ad hoc.’ All FiveThirtyEight employees, he says, need to land in the upper-left quadrant of the coordinate plane, where they are quantitatively inclined, rigorous and empirical. The adjacent quadrant above the x-axis, Silver says, belongs to journalists like some of his former colleagues at the New York Times and Ezra Klein, most recently of the Washington Post. ‘People call them numbers whizzes, but they’re not that—just very good journalists.’ The bottom two quadrants belong to the dregs of American journalism: on the left, sportswriters who cherry-pick statistics without thinking through them, and on the right, op-ed columnists. ‘That’s the crap quadrant. Two-thirds of the op-ed columnists at America’s major newspapers are worthless,’ Silver says. He hates punditry, he hates narratives, he hates bold proclamations — and so too does he hate the media’s most willing vessels for all three…”
- James M. Poterba: Retirement Security in an Aging Society
- Orley C. Ashenfelter et al.: Did Robert Bork Understate the Competitive Impact of Mergers? Evidence from Consummated Mergers
Chris Dillow: “I say all this as a response to Tim Worstall. If you really want classical liberal policies that foster growth – such as open(ish) borders, free trade and the creative destruction of market forces – you might need some form of equality as a precondition for them” | Paul Krugman: “Via the always invaluable Mark Thoma, the IMF blog… has a terrific piece on the problem with low inflation in Europe. It’s the perfect antidote to the do-nothing voices insisting that there’s no problem, because we don’t see actual deflation yet” | Robert X. Cringely: “Railroads, superhighways, and the fight for fair access: How can we save Net neutrality from today’s robber barons? By looking at strategies against yesterday’s robber barons” | Josh Bivens: “William Dudley… argued that the 6.5% [unemployment] threshold was already ‘obsolete’… that the wider range of economic data argues against raising short-term rates.. that the Fed has always reserved the right to look at a wider range of data than just headline unemployment” |
Should Be Aware of:
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Via Mark Thoma: Cory Doctorow: Why DRM’ed coffee-pods may be just the awful stupidity we need: “I’ve been thinking about the news that Keurig has added ‘DRM’ to its pod coffee-makers… §1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act… prohibits ‘circumventing… effective means of access control’ to copyrighted works…. It’s been a while since there was someone stupid and greedy enough to try that defense. I think Keurig might just be that stupid, greedy company…. With any luck, they’ll make some new appellate-level caselaw in a circuit where there’s a lot of startups — maybe by bringing a case against some spunky Research Triangle types in the Fourth Circuit…. Of all the DRM Death Stars to be unveiled, Keurig’s is a pretty good candidate for Battle Station Most Likely to Have a Convenient Thermal Exhaust Port.”
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Ed Kilgore: Self-Isolation of White Evangelicals on LGBT Issues: “I think it’s useful to underline the isolation of white evangelicals on all issues related to homosexuality, using the handy WaPo/ABC crosstabs…. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church… heavily invested in… resist[ing] same-sex marriage an… creat[ing] broad ‘religious liberty’ protections for those who resist it…. [But] on same-sex marriage itself, white Catholics support it 70/26, while white evangelicals oppose it 28/66. On gay/lesbian adoptions, white Catholics favor allowing them by a 73/22 margin; white evangelicals are opposed 38/60. On the alleged right of businesses to refuse service to gay folk on religious grounds, white Catholics are opposed by a 23/76 margin, while white evangelicals favor this right 50/44. These are some pretty big splits, eh?
“As Greg notes, white evangelicals are too big a deal in the GOP to enable Republican pols to follow more general opinion on these subjects. So what you hear instead of frank acknowledgement that the party is at the south end of a north-bound brontosaurus are (a) constant injunctions to focus on other issues (Obamacare! Benghazi!), or (b) various dog whistles about the relationship of social ills to the decline of ‘traditional’ marriage, plus the usual “constitutional conservative” invocation of eternal ‘natural laws’. But the tensions between political relevancy and constituency group resistance just continue to rise.”
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