Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Ralph Miliband:

A subsidiary argument, which has… been used to justify some military interventions, notably the Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea… is the argument that, whatever may be said against military intervention in most cases, it is defensible… in the case of particularly tyrannical and murderous regimes, for instance the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda and of Pol Pot in Kampuchea…. But attractive though the argument is, it is also dangerous. For who is to decide…?

Uncharted | The Berkeley Festival of Ideas, October 25-26, 2013

mvsdzb - YouTube:

Marina V. Shifrin is the most famous Mizzou graduate in the world, at least this week...

Serena Ng and Jonathan H. Wright: Facts and Challenges from the Great Recession for Forecasting and Macroeconomic Modeling:

This paper provides a survey of business cycle facts, updated to take account of recent data. Emphasis is given to the Great Recession which was unlike most other post-war recessions in the US in being driven by deleveraging and financial market factors. We document how recessions with financial market origins are different from those driven by supply or monetary policy shocks. This helps explain why economic models and predictors that work well at some times do poorly at other times. We discuss challenges for forecasters and empirical researchers in light of the updated business cycle facts.

Annie-Rose Strasser and Tara Culp Presser: 20 Questions You Have About Obamacare But Are Too Afraid To Ask:

If I want to sign up for a new government-organized health plan, how can I? The enrollment period for the new insurance exchanges begins on October 1 and goes until March 31. During that time period, Americans will be able to sign up for new Obamacare plans by either logging onto healthcare.gov, mailing in a paper copy of an application (to find out where to mail it, click here), or meeting with a “navigator” in person at one of the many enrollment fairs that are kicking off around the country.

"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The Constitution tells us that to faithfully execute the office the President shall:

The whole point of the Byrd Rule is that the budget process should be a budget process--that other Christmas-tree provisions should not be hung on it to try to take advantage of its standing as must-pass legislation. I think that this is a good idea. But, at least judging from the AEI's weblog, nobody at AEI appears to have a public view this weekend.

I interpret this as: "most of us here at AEI are horrified at the train wreck being produced by the House Republicans' and Senator Cruz's attempts to hang non-germane legislative changes on a budget bill, but we don't dare anger our political masters by any of us saying so."

If I'm wrong, and if there is some other way to interpret this silence, please let me know:

Rod Dreher: Republicans, Over The Cliff:

Peter Suderman speaks for me:

What Republicans have right now is a lot of talk. What they don’t have is a workable legislative strategy. Not on Obamacare. Not on the debt. Not on tax reform, the unsustainable entitlement state, or on any of the big domestic policy issues that Republicans say they care about, or that actually confront the nation today. Part of coming up with a plausible strategy is going to be recognizing that right now, the GOP is the minority party in Congress, and that there are limits to what it can meaningfully accomplish until that changes.

They are a barking-mad pack of ideologues, is what they are…. The 2012 elections were their last, best chance to overturn Obamacare, and the country didn’t go for it.

Atul Gawande: Obamacare and Obstructionism:

Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.

Wolfgang Munchau: Do not kid yourself that the eurozone is recovering:

The main constraint on the resumption of growth is the failure to clean up the banking sector. Europe’s political leaders have seized on the first uptick in European economic indicators as evidence that their policies are working. Who would have thought that? Eurozone gross domestic product expanded 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of this year. It will probably have expanded again in the third quarter….

Joe Weisenthal: It Increasingly Looks Like Obama Will Have To Raise The Debt Ceiling All By Himself:

With no movement on either side and the debt ceiling fast approaching, there's increasing talk that the solution will be for Obama to issue an executive order and require the Treasury to continue paying US debt holders even if the debt ceiling isn't raised. Here's Greg Valliere at Potomac Research:

1. "Devotees of BlackBerry’s tactile keyboard will linger here and there. And it will be a few years before corporate techies dismantle decade-old networks and operating systems reliant upon this once-indispensable apparatus. That, however, only underscores the full scope of BlackBerry’s arc. It is no longer a symbol of elite status, but rather one of professional indenture": Rob Cox: Fade to BlackBerry
2. "Wasn’t I supposed to be reviewing a book? Yes, The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis": Garland Grey: Tiger Beatdown › Fond Memories of Vagina
3. "Official forecasts in the spring of 2009 anticipated neither a slow recovery nor that the initial crisis… would soon fuel a knock-on crisis in the eurozone… did not come close to predicting near-zero interest rates for five years (and counting)… uncritical admiration of financial innovation… the inherently flawed structure of the eurozone. But the fundamental reason was the failure to understand that high debt burdens… were a major threat to economic stability": Adair Turner: The Failure of Free-Market Finance
4. "What Marco is reporting here is that the old-fashioned 'make something and get people to pay for it' business is much harder to pull off and likely to always be left in the dust by someone making the same thing for free, getting 100x the user base, and getting 1% of them to pay for some value added feature": Joshua Spolsky: The only business models I want to work on any more have some mass-market component
5. "This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as 'pupil placement' reviews, 'freedom of choice' plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform": Atul Gawande: Obamacare and Obstructionism
6. "I got to Raiders of the Lost Ark…. I was sure it was going to be, just as I remembered it, a perfect gem…. And it turns out to be… just good…. I liked Wreck-It Ralph and The Croods way better this year. They’re action films, but put together better…. Does Raiders have the high status it does because it is, absolutely, a great action movie? Or is it just one of several films--George Lucas, I’m looking at you--that are classics because they enjoyed first-mover advantage?": John Holbo: Raiders of the Lost Ark, a Pretty Good Film

Joe Weisenthal: Morning Markets:

Not surprisingly, markets are ugly today. Pretty much everywhere. In Japan, the Nikkei ended down over 2%. German stocks are down over 1%. Same with Spain. Italian stocks are down nearly 2%. US futures are down a bit less than 1%. Over the weekend there were two major developments. One is it looks virtually certain that the US government is going to shut down. There appears to be no chance, right now, that the GOP-controlled Congress can pass a budget that doesn't contain a defunding or delaying of Obamacare, which is obviously something the White House would never accept…. And then in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi's party has announced its deserting the government's coalition, forcing Prime Minister Enrico Letta into a confidence vote later this week…. And to top that all off, Chinese official PMI last night was weaker than expected.

Shades of "I have here in my hand a list of 205--a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department…"

Larry Mishel: A Brad DeLong Smackdown of Sorts:

While Brad buries the goal of equitable wage growth in the grander category of “obtaining substantial equality of result right now,” I think economists and policymakers must explicitly focus on generating broad-based wage growth when discussing income inequality. This issue must be front and center, or we will never generate the policies needed to achieve the broadly shared prosperity we all want.

The Red Army's 3rd Ukrainian Front at the Dneiper River:

Felix Salmon: The JP Morgan apologists of CNBC:

I don’t know which producer at CNBC had the genius idea of asking Alex Pareene on to discuss Jamie Dimon with Dimon’s biggest cheerleaders, but the result was truly great television. What’s more, as Kevin Roose says, it illustrates “the divide between the finance media bubble and the normals” in an uncommonly stark and compelling manner. The whole segment is well worth watching, but the tone is perfectly set at the very beginning:

Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: Austerity, growth and being economical with the truth:

Just imagine it. A leader in the New Scientist or Scientific American saying that politicians have won the climate change argument because of recent heavy snow. So why is that idea inconceivable, but a leader in the Financial Times saying that recent UK growth proves critics of austerity are wrong goes without comment? It has nothing to do with economists being divided about the wisdom of austerity: as I said, there are arguments on austerity that should be debated, but this is not one of them. It cannot be because austerity is so politicised, because climate change is also highly politicised. It cannot be excused by saying that leaders are just opinions: you do not expect opinions in serious newspapers to be based on deliberate misrepresentation. So what is going on here? Would anyone from the FT care to comment?

Note: The offending editorial was not by Chris Giles but by the FT Editorial Board. I apologize to Chris for the original, now deleted, headline...

Instrument of Surrender; September 29, 1943:

Whereas in consequence of an armistice dated September 3rd, 1943, between the United States and the United Kingdom Governments on the one hand and the Italian Government on the other hand, hostilities were suspended between Italy and the United Nations on certain terms of a military nature;

1. "Our approach… 'Modern Money Theory' or 'The Kansas City Approach', builds on the work of Abba P. Lerner, John Maynard Keynes, Hyman P. Minsky, Wynne Godley and other important figures… provide[s] analyses and policy recommendations that are applicable under a modern, fiat money system": New Economic Perspectives 2.
2. "This struck him as odd, which struck the medievalists in the group as odd; surely everyone has seen this sort of thing before, right?  As anyone who is familiar with 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts can attest, images of armed knights fighting snails are common, especially in marginalia.  But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange, and we had a long discussion about what such pictures might mean": Sarah Biggs: Knight v Snail--Medieval manuscripts blog
3. "‘Forward guidance’ had a poor start in life. It was born as a pleonasm – afflicted with a severe case of redundancy. ‘Guidance’ would have sufficed, as all guidance relates to the future and is therefore inevitably forward… Redundancy as a rhetorical device tends to be used when it is deemed desirable to inflate the importance of someone or something beyond what is fundamentally warranted. Our view is that this also is the case with forward guidance": Willem Buiter, as quoted by Cardiff Garcia: Buiter on forward guidance, or, paging Sumner / Krugman / Woodford / Eggertsson / Svensson
4. "The University of Zurich and UBS somehow launched a major new academic center for the study of economics, brought in top names to speak at their event, and then told nobody. I stumbled upon their YouTube page by accident this evening, and I can't quite believe it. Not a single person in my Twitter feed… has linked to it. The first panel I found included (among the big names) Jordi Gali, Jean-Claude Trichet, and Lars Svensson--with Daron Acemoglu asking some important questions. It's on 'monetary policy and currency markets in a volatile world.' I've watched about half of it, and it's really good. And yet, a total of 315 people have watched it": Evan Soltas: Introducing the UBS Center
5. "What has interested me is the Fed's apparent difficulty communicating the way it anticipates to tighten monetary policy over the next five years conditional on economic performance and outlook": Evan Soltas A New Strategy for the Fed

Lee Fang: Tea Party Lawmaker Letter on Med Device Tax Repeal Authored by Lobby Group:

After the Tea Party catapulted House Republicans into the majority, 75 right-wing lawmakers wrote a letter to Speaker Boehner demanding that a vote to repeal the device tax occur "as soon as possible." The metadata of the letter shows that it was authored by Ryan Strandlund, a member of AdvaMed's government affairs team.

Kevin Drum: A Quick One-Sentence Reminder of What This Is All About:

The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to…

… make sure that the working poor don't have access to affordable health care.

I just thought I'd mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that's it. That's what's happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.

That's a pretty stirring animating principle, no?

1. The best economics weblog aggregator is and remains: Mark Thoma's Economist's View

Ken Jacobs: Sub par reporting on the ACA:

In a story that purports to illustrate how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will hurt fast food businesses, Venessa Wong at Bloomberg News inadvertently shows how small those impacts are likely to be…. The average shop has $800,000 a year in sales. A $4,000 annual increase on a store with $800,000 in sales is an increase of 0.5% relative to sales… 3 cents per Sandwich… I suspect that most customers won’t mind…. Health benefits have positive impacts on worker productivity and reduce absenteeism and turnover….

David Zilbermann: On life and cocoa in the Ivory Coast:

My visit left me with an optimistic view on the… Ivory Coast. There is a growing international demand for the product they produce that will result in support for improved productivity… we will see a community of relatively small farmers that grow several crops at a higher degree of efficiency than at the present…. The spread of cellphones led to fast transition of information and knowledge and desire for change…. The bigger challenge of the Ivory Coast, and West Africa is population growth. I met several people with incomes of less than $4/day, but with more than 7 children. If there is one failure of our research in development is to better understand population growth and how to develop strategies to contain it…

1. "Up through the 1970s, the percentage of non-elderly Americans with insurance from employers had risen steadily. But it stagnated after that and, after another two decades, started to fall—from a peak of 70.3 percent in 2000 to 63.7 percent in 2008 and then, thanks to the recession, 58.4 percent in 2012": Jon Cohn: Obamacare Exchanges Start Tuesday, Oct. 1. Here's Why They're Worth It
2. "The Fed appears to want to shift away from asset purchases in favor of forward guidance and is looking for the right time to begin that process. Their modus operandi has been to see six months of good employment data, send up a warning flag that the end of policy accommodation is coming, and then back down when the data turns weaker in the next three months": Tim Duy: Economist's View: Fed Watch: Resetting Expectations
3. "To me, these past five years have been a lesson on the overwhelming importance of serendipity": James Kwak: Five Years Later
4. "If you were previously uninsured, then the most straightforward argument is that the plan you're getting, probably with subsidies to make it cheaper, is better than nothing. But some people, who might have had individually issued policies before Obamacare with larger networks, will not be happy with their new plans. They may be cheaper, but they may have preferred to pay more for choice, and now they won't be able to. No policy is perfect. On the whole, I believe far more people will benefit from Obamacare than will be hurt by it. Any change will inevitably make someone unhappy. This is one of those situations": Aaron Carroll: There are tradeoffs to Obamacare
5. "Ari Fleischer briefly declared that Twitter must have special rules allowing Obama to use more than 140 characters. In fact, it turns out that Fleischer doesn’t know how to count--but think of the mindset that would even make him think of such a thing" Paul Krugman: 140 Character Assassination
6. "Consider the 'social welfare function' embedded in this story. The claim is emphatically not that this system maximizes some measure of aggregate utility that could be decomposed to a sum of individual welfares. On the contrary, it celebrates as necessary large costs in individual welfare for the sake of impersonal characteristics of the aggregate: 'prosperity', or 'strength'. It is an entirely collectivist justification for policies that are deeply harmful at an individual level, if you take seriously at all the idea of diminishing marginal utility": Steve Randy Waldman: interfluidity » Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong

Joe Barsugli: The answer [to your question about the apparent increase in ENSO oscillations] is in the SPM:

Natural variations of the amplitude and spatial pattern of ENSO are large and thus confidence in any specific projected change in ENSO and related regional phenomena for the 21st century remains low. {5.4, 14.4}

Dan Kervick: Three Pillars of Democratic Empowerment:

In amending DeLong’s list of cardinal virtues, let me put forth these Three Pillars of Democratic Empowerment: I. We need more democracy. And that doesn’t just mean we need more elections and more access to voting. We need more real, honest to goodness, full-participation, deliberative, hands-on democracy. We need more active citizen engagement in all aspects of the processes that determine our future….

At Babi Yar:

In September 1941 soon after entering Kiev the Germans murdered almost the entire Jewish population of the city. Around 30,000 were marched out of the city to a site near to the ravine of Babi Yar, forced to undress and then marched into the ravine itself where they were shot.

It is estimated that a further 80,000 Jews were brought from the surrounding area over the course of the following year and met the same fate. Further victims including ‘Ukrainian citizens of both sexes, prisoners of war, sailors from the Dnieper fleet, and gypsies’ brought the likely total of people killed there to 150,000.

San Francisco Fed: Janet Yellen Conference Room

Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein: The Growth of Modern Finance:

The U.S. financial services industry grew from 4.9% of GDP in 1980 to 7.9% of GDP in 2007. A sizeable portion of the growth can be explained by rising asset management fees…. Another important factor was growth in fees associated with an expansion in household credit, particularly fees associated with residential mortgages. This expansion was itself fueled by the development of non-bank credit intermediation (or “shadow banking”). We offer a preliminary assessment of whether the growth of active asset management, household credit, and shadow banking--the main areas of growth in the financial sector--has been socially beneficial….

We are live at Project Sydicate: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-absence-of-compelling-reasons-to-end-quantitative-easing-by-j--bradford-delong

The central banks of the North Atlantic have promised that they will not raise the short-term safe nominal interest rates they control until the economies under their stewardship show substantial economic recovery.

So far the economies have not done so: they continue to be battered by the destructive fiscal headwinds of austerity, by uncertainty over whether the Republican Party will in fact attempts to crash the credit of the United States, by broken systems of residential finance, and by uncertainty about how the burdens of necessary structural adjustment are to be allocated. With all that, it would seem premature for central banks to even begin to talk about adopting a less stimulative monetary posture.

Yet the central banks of the North Atlantic are doing so.

So the IPCC will say. But what I am curious about this morning is the greatly-increased frequency of "La Nina" ENSO years. I know that a system with more energy in it will occupy more of its available states--is that what is going on, and does that make it more likely that we will also have more and bigger "El Nino" years in the future? Or is something more complicated going on?

Andrew Leonard: Why we hate the new tech boom:

Why do we hate the new tech boom? The answer has two parts. First, there is unsettling realization that the middle is losing economic ground while Silicon Valley execs babble on about “changing the world” for the better. Income inequality is growing ever worse, and it is increasingly clear that one of the forces fueling this trend is the technological innovation flowing out of the Bay Area.

Martin Wolf: Osborne has now been proved wrong on austerity:

Nobody thought a recovery would never happen--merely that it would be delayed. "The UK economy is recovering. The government is vindicated. Its critics should crawl into a hole." This, in essence, is what George Osborne, the chancellor…. Performance since Mr Osborne took office in May 2010 has been dismal. Over three years, the economy has grown by a cumulative total of 2.2 per cent. In June 2010 the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that the economy would expand by 8.2 per cent between 2010 and 2013… the slowest British recovery on record…. Spencer Dale and James Talbot of the Bank of England have shown that UK performance is dismal even by the standards of other crisis-hit, high-income economies…. Mr Osborne responds that fiscal policy did not cause the dismal underperformance. That was due to inflation shocks and the eurozone. Since Mr Osborne was a cheerleader for the eurozone’s austerity, he cannot wash his hands of all blame.

Matthew Yglesias: Ted Cruz and Green Eggs and Ham: Texas senator didn't understand a very liberal speech.:

As part of his fake filibuster today, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) read aloud the text of Dr. Seuss's book Green Eggs and Ham. It's a strange choice of author for a conservative senator. Admittedly, Green Eggs and Ham lacks the overt left-wing politics of a Butter Battle Book or The Lorax but this is still a progressive book. In broad strokes, it's a book advocating openness to experience--one of the key moral dimensions on which liberals and conservatives differ…. The narrator keeps insisting that he hates green eggs and ham, but he's never had green eggs and ham. When he finally tries them—he likes them! Conservatives like Cruz… instead of acting like they're confident that the voter backlash… will power them to victories in 2014 and 2016, they're engaging in flailing desperate tactics to make sure nobody tries the green eggs and ham. Because deep down they fear that Dr. Seuss was right.

1. "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate… its counsellors are always the masters…. [Thus] regulation… in favour of the workmen… is always just and equitable; but… otherwise when in favour of the masters": Corey Robin: Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
2. "The rich… who does nothing but give a few directions lives in far greater state and luxury… than his clerks who do all the business… [who] are in a state of ease and plenty far superior to that of the artizan… [whose] labour… is pretty tolerable… if we compare him with the poor labourer…. Thus he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest is himself possessed of a very small share and is buried in obscurity": via Corey Robin: Adam Smith: Lectures on Jurisprudence
3. "Sources on Reuters’ digital side said there was flat opposition to making the consumer-facing product as good or better than Reuters’ terminal and subscription products. Of the decision to kill Reuters Next, a different former employee said that “the direction the company now wants to go in is about giving power back to the profit centers and abandoning any innovation on the consumer side.” A Reuters representative would not comment… referred to the memo Rashbass wrote announcing the shuttering of Reuters Next. Freeland did not respond… saying that she would only speak to BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief or business editor": Matthew Zeitlin: How Chrystia Freeland Hastened Reuters Next's Demise
4. "So, how much of our depressed economy can be explained by the bad fiscal policy? To a first approximation, all of it": Paul Krugman: The Depressed Economy Is All About Austerity
5. "No one can guarantee that Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s attempts to achieve deleveraging and structural reform will succeed. Moreover, external shocks, policy mistakes, and political instability could disrupt even the best-laid plans. In any case, China’s stellar growth record cannot be sustained. Even if it manages a “soft landing,” annual output growth will slow to 5-6% in the coming decades…. China may be able to rely on policy reforms to boost productivity growth; but, with relatively low innovative capacity, it will struggle to catch up with frontier technologies. China’s inevitable growth slowdown, along with a large tail risk, threatens stable growth in Asian economies that have become increasingly interdependent"": Jong-Wha Lee: Asia’s Rebalancing Act
6. "Reading The Handmaid’s Tale at an impressionable age wasn’t like reading a contemporary YA dystopian novel; there was certainly nothing in it about navigating the seemingly arbitrary obstacles of adolescence. What it did prepare me for was the realization that even in our supposedly egalitarian society, a woman’s body and what she does (or doesn’t) with it are still an enormous source of controversy": Karin Kross: The Careful Leveraging of Fear: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

I know Richard Muller is trying as hard as I am to be helpful and informative, but this made me wince a bit:

John Stachurski and Thomas J. Sargent: Quantitative Economics: http://www.quant-econ.net/

Of course, Googling "Sargent Python" reveals it might be a very bad thing indeed:

UCB Online Schedule of Classes: Search Results: Displaying 1-5 of 5 matches to your request for Spring 2014:

Course:  ECONOMICS 2 P 001 LEC
Course Title:  Introduction to Economics--Lecture Format   Location:  MW 4-530P, 101 BARKER
Instructor:  DELONG, J B
Status/Last Changed: 
Course Control Number:  22378
Units/Credit:  4
Final Exam Group:  17: FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2014   8-11A
Restrictions:  BY CATEGORY
Note:    Enrollment on 09/20/13: Limit:110 Enrolled:0 Waitlist:0 Avail Seats:110

Cardiff Garcia: Meet the new idiots, same as the… actually these idiots might be worse:

To the seasoned finance blogger, US Congressional asshattery lacks the terrifying intrigue it had in 2011. The world was in worse shape back then…. We got through it…. It’s also been easy to think that once again Congress will come to its senses at the last minute and, at the very least, avoid catastrophe. But we just came across this piece by Ezra Klein arguing that the dispute between Republicans and Democrats this year is worse than it was in 2011…

Scott Lemieux: I Am Outraged That Liberal Journalists Don’t Love Ted Cruz!y:

Ted Cruz + Politico = hacktacular!

1. "We find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment. The effects on exits and duration are primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than to a decrease in… the job finding rate": Henry S. Farber and Robert G. Valletta: Do Extended Unemployment Benefits Lengthen Unemployment Spells? Evidence from Recent Cycles in the U.S. Labor Market
2. "Health and Human Services has released the rates for the federally run Exchange marketplaces in 36 states.  They are really good: Richard Mayhew: The rates are in
3. "For a moment, Menzie Chinn thinks he's reading The Onion. Then he realizes it's actually Fox "News": 'The Absolute Funniest Thing I Have Read This Year: From Ed (We Are Not in a Recession) Lazear and Keith Hennessey, "Bush ended financial crisis before Obama took office--three important truths about 2008"'": Mark Thoma: Economist's View: 'The Absolute Funniest Thing I Have Read This Year'
4. "Growing inequality has allowed one strata of society to be largely free of these risks… fewer and fewer worries about paying for college education, has first-rate health insurance, ample funds for retirement, and little or no chance of losing a home…. The upper strata wonders, 'Why should we pay for social insurance when we get little or none of the benefits?' and this leads to an attack on these programs": Mark Thoma: The Real Reason for the Fight over the Debt Limit
5. "A huge structural current account surplus manages to export not just product but bankruptcy too": Martin Wolf: Germany’s strange parallel universe
6. "Now, why did financial conditions tighten?  Oh yes, I recall--because just talking about tapering is the same as tightening. Remember, unless yields head much lower (they are down around 10bp as I write), much of the damage is already done is already done": Tim Duy: No Taper--Yet

UC Berkeley Labor Center: 50th Anniversary Celebration:

6:00 to 9:00 pm :: Berkeley Art Museum :: 2626 Bancroft Way

Moving a Proud History Forward

Barbara Lee, Joe Hansen, Marty Morgenstern, Julie Su, Ai-jen Poo, Lou Paulson, Anthony Thigpenn

Noah Smith has guestwebloggers: Not Quite Noahpinion:

Jeremie Cohen-Setton, Carola Binder, John Aziz, Josiah Neeley, Peter Dorman, Yichuan Wang, Guan Yang

Paul Krugman: What's It All About Then?:

Simon Wren-Lewis writes with feeling about the “austerity deception“; what sets him off is a post that characterizes the whole austerity debate as being about “big-state” versus “small-state” people. Wren-Lewis’s point is that only one side of the debate saw it that way. Opponents of austerity in a depressed economy opposed it because they believed that this would worsen the depression--and they were right. Proponents of austerity, however, were lying about their motives. Strong words, but if you look at their recent reactions it becomes clear that all the claims about expansionary austerity, 90 percent cliffs and all that were just excuses for an agenda of dismantling the welfare state….

One interesting point which Wren-Lewis gets at… is that the austerity side… doesn’t seem to comprehend the notion that other people might actually argue in good faith. No time to do the link right now, but back when we were discussing stimulus many people on the right, economists like Lucas included, simply assumed that people like Christy Romer were making stuff up to serve a political agenda. And now I think we can see why they made this assumption--after all, that’s how they work.

Michael Tomasky: How Legislators View Their Constituents:

David Broockman and Christopher Skovron… asked more than 2,000 state legislative candidates from around the country what they thought the political leanings of their constituents were…. "Pick an American state legislator at random, and chances are that he or she will have massive misperceptions about district views on big-ticket issues, typically missing the mark by 15 percentage points. What is more, the mistakes legislators make tend to fall in one direction, giving U.S. politics a rightward tilt compared to what most voters say they want."