Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Should-Reads:

• Avik Roy: An Autopsy of the GOP Effort to Repeal and Replace Obamacare: "Moderate Republican senators, often representing purple or blue states, were reluctant both philosophically and politically to endorse legislation that increased the number of Americans without health insurance... http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/449943/autopsy-gop-effort-repeal-and-replace-obamacare
• Craig Garthwaite: Why replacing Obamacare is so hard: It’s fundamentally conservative: "As a life-long Republican... I’ve come to an answer that will be hard for many conservatives to swallow... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-replacing-obamacare-is-so-hard-its-fundamentally-conservative/2017/07/10/c5d64634-6351-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html
• Antonio Fatas: On Twitter: "Healthcare is complicated but Greg Mankiw should criticize policy proposals that are incoherent or just lie about their benefits..." https://twitter.com/AntonioFatas/status/890979381719511044
• Josh Barro: John McCain saved Republicans from themselves by killing Obamacare repeal bill: "Lindsey Graham made a demand: He would vote for the terrible healthcare bill being offered before the Senate, a bill he thought would cause health insurance market disaster... http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-vote-health-care-obamacare-bill-2017-7
• Simon Wren-Lewis: UK slowdown is a result of Brexit and austerity: "Those who argued that Brexit would bring a short term slowdown have been proved right: they just got their timing slightly wrong... https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-uk-slowdown-is-result-of-brexit-and.html
• Martin Longman: A Glimpse Back at the Old Senate: "two stories I found last night while researching my Murkowski-Collins defection piece... http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/07/27/a-glimpse-back-at-the-old-senate/
• Josh Marshall: Trumpism Distilled: "Scaramucci has managed to become a compressed, crystallized version of all the ridiculousness of Trumpism... http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumpism-distilled
• Mike Bird and Christopher Whittall: The Speech That Transformed European Markets—Five Years Later: "European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.... 'Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro and believe me: It will be enough'... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-speech-that-changed-european-marketsfive-years-later-1501061404
• Leigh Ann Caldwell and Vaughn Hillard: Senate Considers 'Skinny' Repeal of Obamacare in Tuesday's Voting: "The plan... is for senators to... a 'skinny' repeal... eliminat[ing] Obamacare's individual mandate penalty, the employer mandate penalty, and the tax on medical devices.... The Senate would then go to conference.... Conferees would work out a final bill. Both chambers would then have to vote..." http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-sets-sights-skinny-repeal-obamacare-tuesday-s-voting-n786296

Links:

• XPostFactoid: "Not losing, choosing"?-Avik Roy turns up the gaslight on the BCRA http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2017/07/not-losing-choosing-avik-roy-turns-up.html
• Tom Chivers: These People Are Trying To Fix A Huge Problem In Science https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/signifying-nothing
• Prakash Loungani: Inequality of Opportunity, Inequality of Income, and Long-term Growth: "From a new IMF report... 'a robust negative effect of widening income disparities on growth in presence of high inequality of opportunity'..." http://unassumingeconomist.com/2017/07/inequality-of-opportunity-inequality-of-income-and-long-term-growth/
• Adair Turner: Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/is-productivity-growth-becoming-irrelevant
• Justin Fox: Yes, Financial Crises Do Bring Hangovers - Bloomberg: "Can we blame our current struggles on the 2008 collapse and its subsequent fallout? We'd be wrong to discount it..." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-20/yes-financial-crises-do-bring-hangovers
• Tierney Sneed: Inside The Chamber As The Senate’s Obamacare Repeal Plans Went South: "When lawmakers began shuffling into the Senate chamber... Republicans showed few signs that the effort they sunk months into wrangling was about to go down.... John Cornyn (R-TX) was all smiles..." http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/inside-the-chamber-obamacare-senate-vote
• Steve Attwell: I'm Back!: "Malignant tumor in my left leg... amputation above the knee.... When I heard Republican Congressmen talking about how only people who’ve led “good lives” deserved coverage for pre-existing conditions, I would scream at the monitor that the idea that health is tied to moral virtue is a medieval fantasy.... When the ACHA eliminated the Essential Health Plan I became one of the people whom the Republican caucus was out to kill..." http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/07/im-back
• Andrew Prokop: Reince Priebus’s ouster as chief of staff, explained: "Priebus has been on the outs for a long time..." https://www.vox.com/2017/7/28/15724206/reince-priebus-fired-trump
• Zev Ross: Beautiful plotting in R: A ggplot2 cheatsheet http://zevross.com/blog/2014/08/04/beautiful-plotting-in-r-a-ggplot2-cheatsheet-3/#quicksetup-the-dataset
• Steve M.: DEATH IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN PUT A DENT IN GOP PARTISANSHIP: "Why did [McCain] even need to think about this vote?... GOP health care proposals poll poll at 6% approval in Arizona.... The junior senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake—touted as a principled maverick in today's David Brooks column—dutifully voted yes, and also dutifully tried to wrest a yes vote from McCain.... Forty-nine Republicans voted yes on this massively unpopular bill..." http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2017/07/death-is-only-thing-that-can-put-dent.html
• Corey Robin (2013): The Hayek-Pinochet Connection: A Second Reply to My Critics: "My response... should answer the 'So what? Who cares?' question and set to rest the notion that I was smearing an old man. If anything I let him off easy..." http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/25/the-hayek-pinochet-connection-a-second-reply-to-my-critics/
• Jonathan Franklin (2001): Chilean army admits 120 thrown into sea: "Disclosure adds to dossier against defiant Pinochet..." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/09/chile.pinochet
• Timothy J. Sturgeon, Peter Bøegh Nielsen, Greg Linden, Gary Gereffi, and Clair Brown: Direct Measurement of Global Value Chains: Collecting Product- and Firm-Level Statistics on Value Added and Business Function Outsourcing and Offshoring
• Seth Lloyd: : http://meche.mit.edu/sites/default/files/cv/slloyd_CV.pdf

Links:

• Cardiff Garcia: When Keynes pondered Malthus https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/07/26/2191314/the-lessons-of-keynes-pondering-malthus/
• Sanjay K. Chugh: Modern Macroeconomics http://skchugh.com/teachingmanuscript.html
• Peter Ganong and Daniel W. Shoag: Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined? http://papers.nber.org/tmp/53599-w23609.pdf: "A dramatic decline in... population flows to high-income places... coincid[ing] with a disproportionate increase in housing prices in high-income places, a divergence in the skill-specific returns to moving to high-income places, and a redirection of low-skill migration away from high-income places... a new panel measure of housing supply regulations, we demonstrate the importance of this channel in the data..."
• Kevin O'Rourke: Keynote: Globalization in the Aftermath of the Crisis http://www.imf.org/en/News/Seminars/Conferences/2017/06/21/globalization-in-the-aftermath-of-the-crisis-Kuala-Lumpur
• Chad P. Bown: Trade Policy and Supply Chains in a Low Growth World: Globalization in the Aftermath of the Crisis
• BondDad: The Bonddad Blog: Why John Taylor—a Leading Candidate to Replace Yellen—Shouldn't Be Fed Chair http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2017/01/why-john-taylor-leading-candidate-to.html