Noted for June 11, 2013
Economic Policy Institute: Generating a Robust Recovery (September 2009) | Kieran Healy: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere | Larry Mishel: CAP’s rethinking of the grand bargain path is good. Now CAP should rethink their role in putting us on that path | Emily Badger: 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is | Ellen Kelleher: Funds of hedge funds fight for survival | Sheila Bair: Everything the IMF wanted to know about financial regulation and wasn’t afraid to ask | Michael Hiltzik: Social Security should be expanded, not cut |
Ben Walsh: Counterparties: America’s consistently dissatisfying jobs market: "America’s jobs market seems to have found its boring, dissatisfying comfort zone. The Labor Department announced today that the US economy added 175,000 thousand jobs in May. (Unemployment ticked up a notch to 7.6%.) Matthew O’Brien writes that this is basically the same thing that’s been happening for the past two and a half years…. At the current rate of job creation, employment, on an absolute level, won’t reach pre-crisis levels until late 2014, a full 8 years since the recession began…. The Chicago Fed also projects that a return to full employment (where the unemployed are workers between jobs but still in the workforce) could take another five years, a timetable that, Matthew Klein writes, 'puts the US on track for a lost decade'. Wall Street is rooting for things to get ever so slightly worse, hoping to stave off any decrease in the Fed’s bond buying programs."
Noah Smith: Noahpinion: The Zero Upper Bound?: "The Bank of Japan has been buying long-term Japanese government bonds. This has seemed to have the expected positive effects - Inflation is up, inflation expectations are up, growth is up, consumption is up, exports are up, and the stock market, despite a recent drop, is way way up. But here's the funny thing - Japanese long-term government bond yields kept going up…. Richard Koo attributes the rise in interest rates to increased inflation expectations…. But Nick Rowe has another explanation. According to Rowe, the rate rise was due to greater expected growth (nominal growth, so both better real growth and more inflation). As the BOJ's easy monetary policy causes the economy to improve, Rowe says, interest rates will naturally rise; investors are simply anticipating that rise…. To get a Rowe/Krugman type of rapid interest rate rise, I think you'd need a 'good equilibrium, bad equilibrium' sort of model, where Abenomics kicks the economy out of the bad equilibrium very abruptly, and the economy is shocked back to a sustainably higher rate of NGDP growth. But then again, I guess I do kind of believe in that sort of model…. So anyway… are Japanese interest rates rising because of an incipient real economic recovery? Let us hope to Amaterasu that they are not…. At very very high levels of debt-to-GDP, a rate rise is disastrous… a rise in interest rates would still exact a heavy burden on Japan's public finances…. Japan's only hope is to cause the kind of recovery where interest rates stay very low for a very long time. If Japan is living in a Nick Rowe type world, that will prove impossible, and Japan's only options will be stagnation, default or hyperinflation. We should pray with all our might that we are living in a Richard Koo world instead, and that there is an economic policy that will allow Japan to boost growth and inflation while keeping interest rates low…. Very high debt-to-GDP ratios could act as a long-term growth trap… the much-maligned Reinhart and Rogoff would be right. If you get into a high government debt situation, a long periods of very low interest rates and robust real growth is really your only hope for a clean escape."
Richard Steckel: Health and Nutrition in the Preindustrial Era: Insights from a Millennium of Average Heights in Northern Europe: This essay places the debate over human welfare during industrialization in the context of very long-term economic developments by examining an important aspect of living standards--health and nutrition--since the Middle Ages. I use average stature determined from military records along with a neglected source, skeletal data. Average heights fell from an average of 173.4 centimeters in the early Middle Ages to a low of 165.8 centimeters during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This decline of 7.6 centimeters exceeds by a factor of two any downturns found during industrialization in several countries that have been studied. Moreover, recovery to levels achieved in the early Middle Ages was not attained until the early twentieth century. The paper links the decline in average height to climate deterioration; growing inequality; urbanization and the expansion of trade and commerce, which facilitated the spread of diseases; the global spread of diseases associated with European expansion and colonization; and conflicts or wars over state building or religion. Because it is reasonable to believe that greater exposure to pathogens accompanied urbanization and industrialization, and there is evidence of climate moderation, increasing efficiency in agriculture and greater inter-regional and international trade in foodstuffs, it is plausible to link height gains that began in the eighteenth century with dietary improvements.
Charles Stross: "Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying" — Iain Banks, 1954-2013: "One of the giants of 20th and 21st century Scottish literature has left the building… my relationship with Iain was somewhere between one of the faceless hordes seen at SF conventions, and "guy I run into at the pub occasionally"… after getting over my initial awe of the giant of letters, subsequently discovered that he was a giant in other ways: big-hearted, kind, affable, humorous, angry at injustice…. I'd like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain's more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed)…. I've spent about 3 months away from home (Edinburgh) this year, so the last time I saw him was back in December or January, before his diagnosis. Purely by accident, I ran into him in the St James shopping centre (up the road from where I live). He was his usual affable, cheery self: and that is how I intend to remember him. As Paul McAuley tweeted, a big bright bold boisterous light has gone out."
Rachel Nardin et al.: The Uninsured After Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act: A Demographic And Geographic Analysis: "In June 2012… the Supreme Court ruled that states may opt-out of Medicaid expansion. Since then, the governors of 14 states have announced their intention to opt-out, 6 are undecided, 3 are leaning against, and 2 toward the expansion. Opt-outs will likely leave several million more uninsured…. For states that are opting out, this choice will lead to a decrease in the number of uninsured of only approximately 17 percent, rather than the approximately 50 percent decrease had they opted in…. Following the ACA, only 20 percent of the uninsured will be non-citizens (some of whom reside here legally) runs counter to the common perception that the ACA will cover virtually all legal residents. The ACA will leave tens of millions uncovered. It will do little to alter racial disparities in coverage."
Paul Krugman: The Big Shrug: "I’ve been in this economics business for a while. In fact, I’ve been in it so long I still remember what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis. Normal, back then, meant an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. Normal meant an unemployment rate not much above 5 percent… normal meant very few people out of work for extended periods…. So how, in those long-ago days, would we have reacted to Friday’s news that the number of Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months?… For more than three years some of us have fought the policy elite’s damaging obsession with budget deficits…. That fight seems largely won — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like the sudden intellectual collapse of austerity economics as a policy doctrine. But while insiders no longer seem determined to worry about the wrong things, that’s not enough; they also need to start worrying about the right things — namely, the plight of the jobless and the immense continuing waste from a depressed economy. And that’s not happening."
