Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

From Two Years Ago:

• Pre-Class Memo to Berkeley Econ 210a Students About January 22, 2014 Class: Pedagogy; Administrivia; Utility of Economic History; Bones, Heights, and Deaths; Malthus and Malthusianism; Pre-Industrial Technological Progress
• The Moral Indignity of Social Democracy: "Mitt Romney used to be very strong on this: to go naked without health insurance or with a health insurance policy that has a cap on the annual benefits it pays is to be what Romney calls a 'taker'..."
• Musings on the "Profession" That Is Academic Labor in the United States Today
• Looking Back on the Limits of Growth
• Another Example of Our Old Media Professionals Not Understanding the World?: "Emma G Keller... and her spouse Bill Keller.... Linda Holmes has, I think, the best take on what went on....'Why would two married people in the same week devote entire columns to debating the same cancer patient's chronicle of her disease?'..."
• Thursday idiocy: Three of the Unhinged: The President Is a--CLANG!!: "At some level, these people know that Obama is not a divider, not a Marxist, not an anticapitalist.... Do they have enough self-understanding to admit to themselves that the fundamental reason they are so upset is that the President is a Negro?..."
• Thursday Idiocy: Neo-Confederacy Watch: "Tim Carney.... 'De Blasio’s inauguration set a tone of intolerance.... A century and a half ago, Reconstruction involved disenfranchising the losers and subjecting them to military rule. What would de Blasio’s Reconstruction entail?...' It has never been possible to say that you are against Reconstruction without also saying that you are for Jim Crow. Just saying..."
• What Is Going on with the Income of the Elderly?: Friday Focus (January 24, 2014)
• Massive Resistance Watch: The View from The Roasterie LXXXI: January 23, 2014: "Practically everyone has somebody uninsured or at risk of rapidly becoming uninsured in their extended family, [yet they are] throwing federal Medicaid and exchange subsidy dollars down the toilet..."

From Five Years Ago:

• Why Might There Be High Unemployment?: "There is the question of why people back in 2007 had no trouble employing these 8 million ZVMP1 workers..."
• Department of "Huh?!" (Long Run Fiscal Outlook 9001 of the Affordable Care Act Department): "People who disagree with the CBO score of the ACA rarely, rarely say why they disagree with the CBO score. For example, Clive Crook..."
• The Question of What Americans Want Fiscal Policy to Be Has Been Answered...: "Doug Elmendorf is wrong... and David Leonhardt is wrong... [in] the claim that: 'The United States faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect [from] the government... and the tax revenues that people are willing to send.'... You can create the appearance of such a disconnect, but only if you ask questions while working carefully to avoid telling the voters just what their taxes are going to be spent on..."
• The Age-Income Profile Is Less Steeply Sloped than I Had Thought It Was
• High and Rising Unequality Does Not Mean that Unemployment Is "Structural"
• Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: "Stop right now. The inability to advance climate legislation wasn't 'Washington's' failure: it was a failure of Republican legislators, their tame hacks and propagandists, the carbon-energy lobby, and coal-state Democratic legislators. Joshua Green knows who the culprits are as well as I do. But for some reason he does not believe he can say so in his lead. Why not, Joshua? Why not?..."
• Why We Don't Believe that the Fact that We Had too Many People Working in Construction in 2007 Has Much to Do with Our Current 10% Unemployment
• Are You Still Rich If You Spend Your Money Living in a Nice Place?: "Living in a nice place that is expensive because it is nice is one way to spend the money you have... it does not keep you from being... rich..."

From Ten Years Ago:

• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: "Henry Farrell tells Danny Glover that Max Sawicky and I had an influence on last year's Social Security debate. Let me be more skeptical. The Bush administration did the heavy lifting, through failing to come up with a Social Security plan that anybody liked..."
• Bo's BBQ: "The pecan pie is made with organic pecans and real Karo..."
• David Sirota Flames Joe Klein (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?): "Sirota focuses on Klein's eagerness to, chameleonlike, change his colors--or, to put it politely, his inability to remember what he writes from one day to the next..."
• And Ramesh Ponnuru Flames Rod Dreher: "Dreher's crime? Worrying about the interaction of industrial air pollution with his kid's asthma..."
• Tyler Cowen's Bliss Point Is...
• Fareed Zakaria Gets One Wrong...: "Fareed's declaration that the Bush administration has gone about nonproliferation policy with respect to Iran 'in a sensible way'? Wrong, completely wrong..."
• On One Level, This Is Pretty Funny...: "Deborah Howell Responds: I've heard from lots of angry readers about the remark in my column Sunday that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to both parties. A better way to have said it would be that Abramoff 'directed' contributions to both parties..."
• Negative Journalistic Credibility (Yes, Yet Another Washington Post Edition): "In the readable parts of the document to which [Howell] links, Abramoff appears to 'direct' $220,000 of contributions to Republicans, and $4,000 of contributions to Democrats. At this point, I'd regard even a half-truth from the Washington Post as big progress..."
• Clown Show Cage Match: Deborah Howell and Jim Brady vs. Susan Schmidt (Yet Another Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Washington Post Edition): "Sure doesn't sound like Susan Schmidt thinks that Abramoff 'directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members... from both parties,' does it? Yet that's what Deborah Howell and Jim Brady claim..."
• : Things Get Even Funnier (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Department): "Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell says 'Uncle.' She changes her line on why no Democrats are in the first tier being investigated in the Abramoff scandal from 'stay tuned' to 'it's not a bipartisan scandal; it's a Republican scandal'..."
• This Is Funny: "Should the Washington Post have a 'World Columnist' who does not know that it is Canberra, not Sydney, that is the capital of Australia?..."
• Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another Washington Post Edition): "Remember when Sebastian Mallaby wrote an editorial for the Washington Post saying that anyone who valued the World Bank as an institution should shut up and stop complaining about Bush's nomination of Wolfowitz to be its president, don't we? Well now Steve Clemons says that the word is that Paul Wolfowitz is as lousy as president of the World Bank as he was a deputy secretary of Defense.."