Noted for December 2, 2012
Worth Noting:
- Paul Krugman: "We now know that Romney’s internal polls were wildly wrong, and that, incredibly, he went into Election Day confident of victory. My immediate question is not so much why those polls were wrong, but rather why the campaign didn’t have severe doubts about what its pollsters were telling them.... Why wasn’t Romney, or someone else at the top level, asking hard questions about why the internal polls were so different, and why the pollsters believed they knew so much better, not just than the public polls, but than the obviously confident Obama team?... All this in turn ties in, I think, with a phenomenon I notice a lot on the right (you can see it often in the comments on this blog): the persistent portrayal of people who disagree with them as marginal figures with trivial support..."
- Mark Thoma sends us to Laura Tyson: "The single most important factor behind the projected growth in federal spending is the growth in health care spending, driven primarily by the growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary. The outlook has already improved as a result of significant changes in the delivery and payment of health care services in the Affordable Care Act. As a result of these changes, growth in Medicare spending per enrollee is projected to slow to 3.1 percent a year during the next decade, about the same as the annual growth of nominal G.D.P. per capita and about two percentage points slower than the annual growth of private insurance premiums per beneficiary..."
- Nate Silver: When Internal Polls Mislead, a Whole Campaign May Be To Blame
- "And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works"
- Jeremy Stein: Large-Scale Asset Purchases
- Jules Dupuit: "It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich … And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous"
- Ronald Coase and Nin Wang: Urging Economists to Step Away From the Blackboard
- Duncan Black: "Elsewhere in the article someone discusses the [Romney] family's commitment to public service. Argh. This isn't about Romney, just this conceit that being a member of Congress, or a governor, or the fucking president, is about "public service." There are public servants, like the teachers everybody dumps on these days, but people with high paying cushy jobs which virtually guarantee them a lifetime of future even cushier even more high paying jobs are hardly making some sort of sacrifice for good"
- John Holbo: Political Dog-Whistles Don't Have an Off-Switch for the Dog Whistle Part
- Scott Lemieux: Whitewashing Jefferson: "Corey Robin has largely saved me from having to respond to David Post…"
Worth Looking at:
No, people who don't drive fuel-efficient Priuses don't guzzle additional gas by driving further...
