Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for October 21, 2013
- Steve Pearlstein: Alan Greenspan still thinks he’s right
- Metafilter: First they came for the Black voters, but I did nothing, because…
- Prairie Weather: Experiencing the ACA
- Richard Florida: What the Shutdown Revealed About the Economic Divides in U.S. Politics
- Barry Ritholtz: Fama Has Shiller to Thank for his Nobel Prize
- Byron York Is Fair and Balanced…
- Binyamin Applebaum Gives a More-Polite-Version-of-Pearlstein's Review of ‘The Map and the Territory’ by Alan Greenspan
- The Hamilton Project: Improving College Outcomes: A Modern Approach
- Martin Ruhs: The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration: The Economic Policy Institute
- Paul Krugman: The Worst Ex-Central Banker in the World
And:
- "Strange to say, however, neither Bowles nor anyone else of similar views has, as far as I can tell, actually done what he urged: 'stop and think for a minute what happens if they just stop buying our debt'…. If you’re America or Britain, the central bank sets interest rates, and under current conditions that means holding them at zero. So what happens instead is that your currency depreciates, making exporters and import-competing industries more competitive. The effect on the economy as a whole is therefore expansionary, not contractionary. Things might be different if the private sector had large debts in foreign currency, as was true in Asia in the 90s. But it doesn’t": Paul Krugman: Liquidity Preference, Loanable Funds, and Erskine Bowles
- "The conservative Heritage Foundation released last week a new report on insurance premiums under Obamacare, and the conclusion was that favorite of conservative talking points: people are going to pay more for insurance under Obamacare. Only the foundation left out one key variable…. They didn't account for the financial help that the Affordable Care Act gives uninsured people to purchase insurance": Dylan Scott: One Big Problem With Heritage's New Obamacare Study
- "One thing that puzzled me during the American health-care debate was all the talk about socialized medicine and how ineffective it’s supposed to be. The Canadian plan was likened to genocide, but even worse were the ones in Europe, where patients languished on filthy cots, waiting for aspirin to be invented. I don’t know where these people get their ideas, but my experiences in France, where I’ve lived off and on for the past thirteen years, have all been good. A house call in Paris will run you around fifty dollars. I was tempted to arrange one the last time I had a kidney stone, but waiting even ten minutes seemed out of the question, so instead I took the subway to the nearest hospital": David Sedaris: Socialized Medicine in Old Europe
- "Imagine if you will that an alien life form has come to your planet… but somehow some people were just fine and dandy with… the seven-tongued alien sloth that has subsumed your entire world… enthusiastic in their support of the alien overlord no matter how much you explain to them that the aliens are indeed feasting on our brains and spleens. That is what it is like for a conservative in America in 2013…. This political loss has also come coupled with cultural shockwaves… majority minority, women… a social safety net, and… sex unions and marriages…. And unlike us squishy lefties, they aren’t beating up on themselves, wondering what did “we” do to cause this mass cultural rejection. Instead… the right is stuck in permanent ragegasm. This weekend’s weird protest against the fallout of the government shutdown they engineered is just the latest primal scream…. There will be more, stoked by the craven politicians who don’t care about improving America as long as they get re-elected and the media figures who retire to their palatial mansions as their audiences question the very essence of their lives": Oliver Willis: The Right’s Crisis Of Infinite Ragegasms
Plus: Long:
Carl Shapiro and Joseph E. Stiglitz (1984): Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device | Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Right Man's Burden: Why empire enthusiast Niall Ferguson won't change his mind |
Plus: Short: