Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for November 18, 2013
Over at the WCEG Equitablog:
- Monday-Morning Must Read: Paul Krugman on Larry Summers on the Danger of “Secular Stagnation”: Monday Focus
- Things to Read on the Evening of November 17, 2013
And:
- Paul Krugman: A Permanent Slump?: "The case for... a persistent state in which a depressed economy is the norm, with episodes of full employment few and far between was made forcefully recently... [by] none other than Larry Summers.... And if Mr. Summers is right, everything respectable people have been saying about economic policy is wrong, and will keep being wrong for a long time.... I know that many people just hate this kind of talk. It offends their sense of rightness.... Economics is supposed to be about making hard choices (at other people’s expense, naturally).... But... economic reality is what it is. And what that reality appears to be right now is one in which depression rules will apply for a very long time..."
- Daniel Drezner: Why Foreign Affairs Policymakers are More Prejudiced than Economic Policymakers: "Michael Desch and Paul Avey... find that senior foreign affairs policymakers are extremely dubious about the utility of political science scholarship.... They note at the end of their paper that an outstanding question remains: 'why is it that policymakers are relatively tolerant of complex modeling and statistical work in Economics and survey research but not in other areas of political science and international relations?'..."
- Matthew Yglesias: Katrina vs. Obamacare: Here's the difference: "1,833 people died during Hurricane Katrina..."
- John Cassidy: SIX REASONS THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT ISN’T HURRICANE KATRINA: "In writing about the rollout of the A.C.A., I, too, have used the term 'disaster'.... But Hurricane Katrina? I can easily imagine why Republican politicians are making the comparison.... But does it really stand up? I don’t think so, and here are six reasons why: (1) Obama got out of Air Force One.... (2) Nobody’s been killed.... (3) This time, there is no 'Brownie'.... (4) The war in Iraq is over.... (5) Despite it all, Healthcare.gov appears to be fixable.... (6) The 'disaster' narrative doesn’t yet represent the final cut: Once the Bush Administration had failed the immediate test of responding to Hurricane Katrina, there wasn’t much it could do to change the story. The victims were dead..."
- John dos Passos (1938): U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money "Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machine gun fire and arson, bankruptcies, war loans, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus: good growing weather for the House of Morgan."
- Ezra Klein: One senator’s lonely war against climate change: "Every week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse heads to the floor of the Senate, sets up an easel and some poster board and delivers a speech. He works hard on these speeches. They’re deeply researched and beautifully crafted. He delivers them with passion and fervor--to a mostly empty room. His colleagues figure they have better things to do than listen. But 100 years from now, when our grandchildren look back and try to understand what we were doing while the world burned, these speeches may well be some of the most famed rhetoric of the age. The speeches are on climate change. They range in tone from morally outraged to deeply wonky..."
- Thoreau: Vocation of the Elites § Unqualified Offerings: "The ideas in Twilight of the Elites.... We have an ostensibly meritocratic elite class, and they are legitimized in part by their test scores and educations. We therefore tell ourselves that the solution to inequality is through the education system. We’ll just give everybody a shot... if they’re good enough they’ll 'succeed', and this legitimizes everything. When people notice that inequality persists, the schools can be... scapegoats or saviors, playgrounds for pet projects or distractions from bigger problems. Much of what drives me crazy in education (or, for that matter, much of what might drive anybody else crazy in education) follows from those games..."
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