Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Over at the Equitablog:

• Oh Dear: Megan McArdle Relies on John Cochrane, and so Goes Badly Astray…
• Cheaper and Better Ways than Expanding Medicaid to Get Health Insurance Coverage to the Working Poor?
• How Much Should We Fear the Debt When Interest Rates Are Low?: Tuesday Focus
• Do Parents and Children Constitute a Rent-Seeking Special-Interest Group?
• Yet Another Fruitless Plea for Our Reporters to Look Not at Flash and Noise But at Substance and Signal… * “If You Like Your Current Health Insurance, You Can Keep It”: DeLong Analytical Failure Weblogging, Chapter CCXI
• The Budget and Macroeconomic Policy (Slides Updated for November 2013 Version)
• Uwe Reinhardt and Angus Deaton on Wealth, Health and Inequality
• The First Thing The Washington Center for Equitable Growth Clearly Needs: Better Criticism…: Monday Focus

And:

1. Mohamed A. El-Erian: The over-empowerment of advanced countries' monetary policymakers: "Advanced-country central banks never aspired to their current position; they got there because, at every stage, the alternatives seemed to imply a worse outcome for society. Indeed, central banks’ assumption of additional responsibilities has been motivated less by a desire for greater power than by a sense of moral obligation, and most central bankers are only reluctantly embracing their new role and visibility. With other policymaking entities sidelined by an unusual degree of domestic and regional political polarization, advanced-country central banks felt obliged to act on their greater operational autonomy and relative political independence. At every stage, their hope was to buy time for other policymakers to get their act together, only to find themselves forced to look for ways to buy even more time.... The trouble is that few outsiders seem to be listening, much less preparing to confront the eventual limits of central-bank effectiveness..."
2. Josh Marshall: WTF, Richard Cohen?: "What the hell is wrong with Richard Cohen? In the course of sorta explaining the GOP's problem with race, Cohen notes that 'people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York--a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children'. I think that was true maybe 50 years ago, in the sense that 'conventional views' were considerably more retrograde, though 'gag reflex' is still pretty extreme. But these days we call those people 'racists'."
3. Kevin Drum: Yet Another Partial Transcript From Darrell Issa: "I'm not feeling too well this morning, so I'm going to take a break. Maybe I'll be back later depending on how things go. In the meantime, since I don't want to leave Richard Cohen at the top of the blog all day, check out Steve Benen here on yet another 'partial transcript' from Darrell Issa, who apparently is desperate to drum up some kind of Obamacare scandal but can't actually find one. So instead he leaked a few pages of testimony from HealthCare.gov's chief project manager which, as you can guess, left out a few wee details. And which news organization fell for this transparent trick? Did you guess CBS? Congratulations!"
4. Henry Blodget: Content economics, part 4: scale: "Somebody’s going to build the Time Inc of digital media. There are going to be a few big properties, and they are going to hang on this central platform that will have the same technology, the same international sales layer, the same administration. Each publication will be very big and successful unto itself, but they’re sharing some of these services. That will work very well… Many, many companies have a shot at this. AOL. Glam. Vox Media is going after this aggressively..."