Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for October 24, 2013
- Jim Stock: An 0.25% Point Reduction in Fourth Quarter Growth and Minus 120000 Private-Sector Jobs
- Angus Deaton: Inequalities in Income, Health, and Wellbeing
- Dean Baker: Unemployment Edges Down as People Continue to Leave the Workforce in September
- Simon Wren-Lewis: Is a currency crisis bad for you at the ZLB?
- Brian Buetler: The amazing politics of ObamaCare
- Paul Krugman: Maybe Economics Is A Science, But Many Economists Are Not Scientists
- Cardiff Garcia: The downsides of quantitative easing, Cardiff Garcia smackdown watch
And:
- "If all the problems are driven by means-testing, state-level decisions and privatization of social insurance, the fact that the core conservative plan for social insurance is focused like a laser beam on means-testing, block-granting and privatization is a rather large [issue].... The Medicaid expansion is working well where it is being implemented, and the ACA is perhaps even bending the cost curve of Medicare, the two paths forward that conservatives don’t want to take.... The choice between Category A and B above will characterize much of the political debate in the next decade. It’s important we get more sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the ACA rollout to better appreciate how utilizing 'the market' can be far more cumbersome and inefficient than the government just doing things itself": Mike Konczal: What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?
- "'The Industrial Revolution didn't put everyone out of work, and neither did 80s-era technology like ATMs and accounting software. Therefore, 2030s-era technology won't either.' This is, literally, the worst possible case you can make for the continued relevance of the middle class. To say that 'intelligent machines per se are not new', as Bessen does, wildly misrepresents both intelligence and machines.... Those machines won't need help from ordinary humans. In fact... they won't need much help from really smart humans either.... If you wave this away, you're missing the whole debate. You're pretending to argue without actually addressing the main point of the techno-optimists": Kevin Drum: Yes, Technology Is Going to Destroy the Middle Class
- "The very existence of the bucket list is a problem. It doesn’t prove that QE should be discarded, but it does show that QE is a policy whose comprehensive effects are widely and badly misunderstood--because they are easy to badly misunderstand. This makes the signalling mechanism, which is so important, difficult to process correctly. QE unavoidably asks the markets to do much of its heavy lifting. That the signals it sends them are so vulnerable to being mangled is therefore another downside": Cardiff Garcia: The downsides of quantitative easing, Cardiff Garcia smackdown watch
- "There is little evidence for Rogoff’s implicit assumption that investors’ decisions today are driven by the government’s handling of its debt in the past.... A country’s past failures do not influence investors if its current institutions and economic policies are sound. That was clearly the case when Osborne and his colleagues opted for austerity": Robert Skidelsky: Misconceiving austerity
Plus: Long:
Paul Krugman: Gambling with Civilization: William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino |
Plus: Short:
