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Noted for March 14, 2013

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  • David Winer: Thread: Charles Pierce is wrong about Ezra Klein being wrong: "I'm a big fan of both…. [T]he epiphany of Klein's that Pierce mocks happens to be one that I have been writing about for almost 20 years, over and over. Think of all the time everyone could have saved if they deigned to pay attention to people who don't do what they do. It's tragic that it took a smart guy like Klein so long to understand such a basic structural truth about how news, his own profession, has been working for the last 15 years. Gives you some idea about the power of the blinders this community puts on…. [B]ecause we live in the times of the Internet and what Klein calls The Revenge of the Sources, I can go ahead and be heard without them listening. I call this Sources Go Direct…. It's not revenge, it's more pragmatic. The old system didn't work. So we use the new one instead…. Do I think either of them will read this piece? Nah. :-)"

I had no idea that people building marine oil wells live for weeks at a time at depths of 1000 feet | Beverly Mann: Paul Ryan is the Joe McCarthy of Our Era. Maybe the Mainstream Media Finally Will Recognize That. Then Again, Maybe It Won’t. | Breitbart/O’Keefe partner Hannah Giles pays $50K to fired ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera | Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence That Mars Could Have Hosted Life | Duncan Black: 401Ks are a disaster | Ezra Klein: Five huge things we still don’t know about Paul Ryan’s budget | Pope Francis I | DeLong Says Not Time to Cut U.S. Budget With Free Lunch | David Dayen: The Budget/Austerity/Catfood Moebius Strip | Igor Volky: Paul Ryan Makes Big Admission: Republicans Helped Write Obamacare | Peter Temin and David Vines: The leaderless global economy: Can economic history suggest lessons? | Tim Duy: Economist's View: Fed Watch: The Importance of Printing Your Own Currency | Osip Mandelstam | New Beijing Leader's 'China Dream' | Juan Cole: Falsity of Nuclear Accusation against Iraq Was Known before Bush's Invasion |

  • Austin Frakt: Make room for the facts: "Aaron and I have noticed something. It’s been bothering us for years. We’ve written more emails to each other about it than about almost anything else. So it’s not new. Here’s the latest example: Conservative standard-bearers Holtz-Eakin and Roy are enjoying another 15 minutes of media attention. That’d be fine except that they don’t seem to have their facts straight. Meanwhile, Aaron corrected the record and barely got a mention in the round-ups and posts that highlighted Holtz-Eakin and Roy. (Thanks Jon Chait!) It seems like we’re stuck at the kids’ table. Why? Is it the facts that don’t matter or the way they’re delivered? Likely both. Well, we can’t change the facts. But we could, with help, change how they’re delivered. It seems like TIE doesn’t count, even when we are first to post the same facts and evidence that others come around to later. In contrast, columns in big media outlets automatically get attention. So maybe we have to publish in Forbes or WaPo or the like to get equal time. Happy to! Anyone have space for us or know someone who does?"

  • Kevin Drum: Good Loans, Bad Loans: "Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley company that builds expensive, sporty electric cars, plans to pay back its government loans five years early. Steve Benen comments: 'The political part kicks in, however, when we look back at the 2012 presidential election… I seem to recall the Republican condemning Obama's loan to Tesla all the time. In the final months of the race, it was a standard line of attack: the president was recklessly using our money, Romney said, to "pick losers." Obama was so irresponsible, he even invested in Tesla Motors. Romney was so fond of the criticism, he even brought it up during one of the debates. Paul Ryan joined in on the fun, condemning Tesla's loan on the stump as well. I'm curious, given these new developments, whether the GOP still considers the administration's loan an outrageous abuse worthy of public scorn.'"

  • Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: The long run government debt target: "In a recent post I had an imaginary interviewer asking 'But surely no government can keep on borrowing more forever.' To which my suggested reply was 'Of course not. But the right time to cut government borrowing is when the economy is strong, and the cost of borrowing is high.' This prompted a little discussion in comments about the long run desirability or otherwise of government borrowing. What I have to say here is only about the long run, and has no immediate relevance…. What little literature there is on this issue contains the ‘steady state random walk debt’ result. What this means in ordinary English is that it can be optimal to have no target for government debt. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the costs of adjusting towards any target outweigh the long run benefits of achieving it…. [T]he basic result relies on the exact equality of the discount rate and real interest rate. If the real interest rate is even slightly greater than the discount rate, and there are good reasons for thinking in the long run that it might be, then it makes sense to adjust to a debt target…. So what should this target be? The simplest answer is also the most extraordinary – the government should aim to hold assets, not debt. The long run debt target should be negative."

  • Brian Tamanaha: Balkinization: The Law Graduate Debt Disaster Goes Critical: "[A]t Whittier, among 123 total graduates, only 21 secured full time jobs as lawyers; 63 out of 236 Thomas Jefferson graduates landed full time lawyer positions; at New York Law School, only 185 out of 515 graduates landed full time lawyer jobs. Poor results are not limited to low ranked law schools. At American, only 167 out of 467 graduates obtained full time lawyer jobs; Loyola Marymount saw only 172 out of 403 graduates land full time jobs as lawyers…. One last piece of bad news: the upcoming JD graduating class of 2013 will be the largest ever, with the highest debt ever, flooding into a dismal job market."

  • Alan Blinder: Easing Angst About Fed Easing: "Might Chairman Ben Bernanke's dovish majority be losing its hold on the Fed's policy-making body? Turns out he isn't…. Mr. Bernanke acknowledged that 'highly accommodative monetary policy also has several potential costs and risks', but he immediately and emphatically debunked them. Basically, he didn't give an inch…. [T]he Fed's balance sheet keeps growing, currently at a rate of about $85 billion a month. It's now about $3.1 trillion but rising steadily. Critics claim that this growth will make the eventual exit more difficult. In some tautological sense, they must be right: If the Fed wants to get back to, say, a $1 trillion balance sheet, it has more work to do if it starts from $4 trillion than if it starts from $3 trillion. Yet the basic exit mechanism is the same. The Fed built a big balance sheet by buying assets. It will shrink this balance sheet by selling assets and by letting assets run off as they mature. Mr. Bernanke has noted repeatedly that, when the time for exit from super-easy monetary policy comes, the Fed can induce banks to hold on to more reserves by paying higher interest rates on those reserves. The more reserves the banks keep idle at the Fed, the less the Fed's balance sheet must shrink…. The Fed isn't a private corporation that seeks profits and goes out of business once its net worth turns negative. It can still perform all of its essential functions with negative net worth."

  • Paul Krugman: The Curse of EconoSisyphus: "Jeff Frankel participates in a discussion of Chinese currency policy — and finds many of the participants subscribing to the doctrine of immaculate transfer. As he says, I thought I had definitively disposed of that doctrine 25 years ago. But it keeps coming back. That’s the sad thing about economic discourse… the same demonstrably wrong ideas just keep coming back, and back, and back, from the Treasury view on demand to the trust fund bait and switch. And those are just the logical fallacies; there are also historical fallacies (unprecedented growth under Reagan!) and empirical fallacies (huge growth from cuts in top rates!). On top of that, basic information takes amazingly long to make its way into public discussion. Some of us have spent years trying to drive home the point that many Americans haven’t shared in rising life expectancy, making policy recommendations like a rise in the Medicare age a really bad idea; so while I’m glad to see the WaPo running a story saying 'Hey, it turns out that lower-income Americans haven’t seen much rise in life expectancy!', it’s frustrating to see this presented as new and surprising information."

  • Evan McMorris-Santoro: Why Everyone Hates The White House Beat Now: "[T]he White House is increasingly seen as a newsless land of 'stenographers' — a dead end for young, ambitious reporters hoping to carve out a niche, and a constant target of criticism…. Peter Baker… said… 'It's not a place that's easy to generate real scoops. Unlike on Capitol Hill, where you can roam freely and find 535 generally willing sources, plus hundreds of aides, lobbyists and others, in the White House you face physical and information constraints that make it hard to break out…. It can be frustrating and soul-killing to listen to the same talking points and spin sessions day after day'…. McClatchy's Steve Thomma… said there are ways to beat the system, but he wasn't keen on revealing them. 'That is going to require me giving a rival advice on how to compete. That part you're just going to have to learn by yourself.'" <--Is McClatchey's Steve Thomma really that much of a %#^&?

  • Peter Koudijs: 'Those Who Know Most': Insider Trading in 18th c. Amsterdam: "I look at the market for English securities in the Netherlands during the 1770s and 1780s…. I reconstruct the arrival dates of sailing boats that transmitted information from London to Amsterdam and I look at the movement of English security prices between the arrivals of boats. The evidence is consistent with a Kyle (1985) model in which insiders trade on their private signals in a strategic way and private information is only slowly revealed to the market as a whole. The speed of information revelation in Amsterdam crucially depended on how long insiders expected it would take for the private signal to be publicly revealed. The importance of private information is underlined by the response of London prices to price discovery in Amsterdam."

  • Michael Brocker and Christopher Hanes: The 1920s American Real Estate Boom and the Downturn of the Great Depression: Evidence from City Cross Sections: "In the 1929-1933 downturn of the Great Depression, house values and homeownership rates fell more, and mortgage foreclosure rates were higher, in cities that had experienced relatively high rates of house construction in the residential real-estate boom of the mid-1920s. Across the 1920s, boom cities had seen the biggest increases in house values and homeownership rates. These patterns suggest that the mid-1920s boom contributed to the depth of the Great Depression through wealth and financial effects of falling house values. Also, they are very similar to cross-sectional patterns across metro areas around 2006."

  • Austin Frakt: "Again with the Medicaid?: This [Paul Ryan budget] is a huge cut in 10 years. It’s enormous. Do people really think that Medicaid – which is already the cheapest insurance around, which already under-reimburses according to most opponents – has that much fat and waste to be trimmed? Really?"

  • Brendan Nyhan on how Glenn Kessler does not know how to do his job: That's not a factcheck!: "What, exactly, is a 'serious' plan to resolve the budget impasse in Congress? It’s not clear how to define adjectives like this, but that didn’t stop Glenn Kessler…. Kessler’s argument is semantic, not factual, and based in his own centrist ideology…. What’s especially surprising about Kessler’s column… is that it begins with him justifying his decision to avoid rendering judgment on a more directly misleading claim by House Speaker John Boehner that Obama had 'no plan' at all."

Duncan Black: Eschaton: Mysteries: "What I find rather fascinating is that there's quite clearly no business model for MOOCs. Sure, there's a model in which a bunch of grifters get paid, but there's no model such that prestigious state and private universities actually make money off of them. Institutions are selling a pedigree, credentialing, networking, social experience, education, and a brand. MOOCs pretty much nullify all of those things. But grifters gonna grift, and administrators gotta justify their existence."

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March 13, 2013 at 22:18 in #weblogging | | Comments (0)

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