A bunch of Krugman blog posts today on the economy; they're all pretty short though, his column at the end is the longest.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/a-bizarre-complacency/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/a-familiar-feeling/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/money-mouth/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/gee-thats-de-pressing/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/notes-on-the-dollar-panic/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/deficit-hysteria/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/joke-europeans/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html

The general messages: unemployment is disastrously high and there's no sign it's going to get better and no one's doing anything about it. Instead, they, including Obama, are whining or worrying about the debt and inflation, even though the debt isn't that high comparatively, there's no more sign of inflation than there is of employment, and it all seems like a herd effect of conventional wisdom stupidity like the runup to the Iraq invasion, where if you go against the herd you're a crazy person even if you're right.

Inflation: rates are low, people with money like Pimco are moving *into* government bonds, and Japan has been in its recession for the past 20 years, with high debt, and... 1.x% interest rates. It's a phantom menace. But people are worrying about it more than 10% or 17% of the workforce being un- or under-employed, local governments not being able to hold on to their teachers or repair roads.

* Salary gender gap in engineering
* A quarter of US teen girls get STDs, many from their first partner.

On happier or funnier notes:
* Zeppelins over LA
* Unauthorized index of Palin's book

sentence, actual
________"As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on," 102

Well, before that, a summary of Nixon's health reform plan. Pretty similar in spirit to Obama's, but more assertively defined, and maybe further to the left in helping the poor. The country may have moved to the left on gay, women, and black rights, but well to the right on economic issues. AFAIK *Truman's* attempt would have been Medicare for all, essentially, sweeping government insurance a la Canada or Australia.

* "freshwater" economist backlash. These are the "unemployment is voluntary" types if you haven't been keeping up. Chicago school, neo-Friedmanites (more radical than Milton himself.) Followup and dissection of their rage, with brief mention of their mistakes.

* 19th century globalization: the jute industry in Dundee Scotland, using Indian raw materials.

* Even the WTO agrees that carbon tariffs are an allowable and possible essential tool. But free market fundamentalists and fetishists won't.
* Review of a biography of Keynes.

* "Memories of the Carter Administration". Actually on the macroeconomic debate in the late 1970s. Robert Lucas claiming government policies couldn't affect recession or employment, Robert Barro expressing a negative interest in contradictory data. Someone asked him how he could reconcile his model with the severe recession taking place as he spoke. “I’m not interested in the latest residual,” Barro snapped.
** John Quiggin on the same subject. And, back in 2003,

In fact, it’s striking that there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.

* Bankers are going straight back to the pay policies that contributed to the current crisis. "In this case populism is good economics." Obama, of course, gives few signs of actually being a populist.

* The low cost of saving the environment. Not a deep essay, but of interest is Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.
** The missing depth (blogs don't have word limits.) Even Greg Mankiw supports externalty (e.g. pollution) taxes.
** And more depth, graph and better explanation.

A bunch of links, in rough descending order of importance:

* His big article on the state of macroeconomics, and the intellectual bankruptcy leading up to the crisis. Somewhat old news if you've been following his columns and blog, but otherwise it's well worth reading if you want to make sense of the current world -- and the failure of supposed experts to make sense of it. Some points: Keynes wasn't about government takeover, but government intervention; Keynes had total contempt for financial markets, a second-guessed beauty contest; Milton Friedman wasn't as radical as his intellectual descendants, who now insist that people are unemployed because they want to be; "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
** Notes on the article
* Also important: how government stopped (probably) a second Great Depression.
* Soaring income inequality
* Republican crazy, where a 'moderate' talks about "death panels".
* Bush's $2.8 trillion of debt.

* Why the public option matters.
* Why individual insurance doesn't work

* The purpose of stimulus is to mitigate unemployment. Jobless 'recovery' means we're not done yet. Lack of marginal thinking about the stimulus -- it makes sense (if wrong) to believe the stimulus is bad, or that we should spend all the way back up to full employment. A partial stimulus, where we just limp along, is simply confused.

* Keynesian lesson of 1979 and 1970s

* The Blue Dogs don't make sense.
* Neither does Arthur Laffer, of Laffer Curve fame. Beware of the government taking over Medicare. Voodoo economics, hell, this is voodoo reality. And zombie Reaganomics

* America's small-business sector is undersized compared to, say, Sweden. Perhaps because of health insurance.

* Why is he getting death wishes over Swiss health care?
* The problem with modern journalism: horse race reporting. It's safe and easy to report the story about the story, not the actual story. Just have to echo what people say, not actually think.
** Which seems a good point to ask why Glenn Beck hasn't denied murdering a girl in 1990.
* On high debt and growth in the 1940s and 1950s, back in the post-New Deal era of strong government and high taxes. More on why the debt isn't a problem. And more. Um, in reverse chronological order, sorry.
* Blog on what he hopes Obama will say tonight.

I'm back. Have three weeks of collected links!

Cool or important stuff
* Krugman (and 9 page Kenneth Arrow PDF) on why markets fail at health care.
* Jimmy Carter breaks with Baptists over gender equality. He's for it.
* Yet another article on the plural 'they'. This one is new in describing whom to blame for the idea that it's bad.
* Racial whitewashing of covers.
* House of Representatives size over time
* Creepy vintage ads
* Some people say rich people are fleeing California due to high taxes. They're wrong. A lot of people have been gloating about people leaving California; none have acknowledged California's population perhaps unsustainably in dot-com and housing bubbles.
* Prenatal air pollution lowers IQ. Ah, poor people, getting shafted even before they're born. "Just work harder!"
* Replacement fertility isn't a constant 2.1. It's approximately the reciprocal of (chance of a girl being born)*(chance a girl will survive to average age of maternity). So given 50% ratio but 50% chance of survival, the average woman would have to have 1/(.5*.5)=4 children just to keep the population going. Current numbers go from 2.05 to over 3.
** Decadent liberal countries having more children
* Obama did get more young voters to turn out.
* Law and order in the West Bank. But some people think they should be expelled.
* Bus rapid transit. Speaking of Third World megacity sprawl, it seems to me that much of LA is well-adapted to rapid busways, e.g. there are spare lanes to hijack.
* If you listened to the media, you'd never think Nobel-winning economists worry the stimulus is too small.
* Poland weathering the recession


Krugman/Stiglitz dump
article on Stiglitz
http://www.newsweek.com/id/207390
Krugman on it
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/morning-joe/
Newsweek on Krugman
http://www.newsweek.com/id/191393?tid=relatedcl
column excerpts
http://www.newsweek.com/id/191398?tid=relatedcl
female Japanese 'Krugman'
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204874?tid=relatedcl

( GOP news )

( fitness links )

( random )

* Haruhi Suzumiya in the Palestinian territories
* Bert and Osama
* Failure of US rail. Slower than it was in the 1920s.
* Liberals and conservatives have different reactions to authority and disgust.

* Marijuana legalization bill!
** Ambiguity about Obama's enforcement

* Closing of the Canadian border
* Newsweek criticizes Oprah's gullibility
* Republican car dealerships
* Long term whiteness of the GOP, with 98% of Reagan's 1980 votes being white. Though Nate's "always" doesn't see as far back as pre-FDR black Republicans.
* GOP lawmaker claims liberal media is biggest threat to America.
* Health insurance companies invest in tobacco companies.

* Reagan's role in the financial crisis
* Stagflation myth

* Cats don't understand strings
* One man's experience with taking female hormones
* Grilled cheese as metaphor for sex.

Must read
* Letter from an ex-slave to his master. A thing of beauty.
** Tolkien's reply to Nazi Aryan inquiries
* Girly editions of Scrabble, Monopoly, Uno et al.

History
* 25 May was the 40th anniversary of the decriminalization of gay sex in Canada.
** Like Orson Scott Card, John Wright apparently misses those days.

( mercy cut )

* Evil chicken

Depressing
* Troops weren't deployed to help with Katrina
* Systematic child abuse in Irish reform schools
* Obama seeking indefinite detentions
* Blackwater tries to rebrand as "Xe"
* Creepy Bible briefings, the better to manipulate Bush with.
* Steele's latest brainstorm for opposing gay marriage: it'll cost small business money. Unlike, say, hetero employees getting married. Will the GOP oppose marriage on the grounds that it costs too much? That'd be hilarious.

Abortion opinions
* 538 summary, linking back to two earlier posts, and to this which is way more detailed and useful than the recent Gallup "more pro-life" poll that's causing these posts.

Cool
* Progress in RNA Genesis
* From Pakistan to San Francisco: the voyage of bondage gear
* How Norway's coping with the recession. Quite well, thank you.
* Zhao Ziyang's memoirs -- this is the leader ousted for opposing the Tiananmen Square massacre
* Health cost fallacies
* Having daughters makes parents liberal, maybe.

* Personal genomics. 23andMe and Bioresolve seem both cheapest and giving the most holistic and scientifically ambitious results.
* Star Trek as a Mage game
* Star Trek movie as twinks vs. bears, once you get past the "I don't watch SF" rant.

* Surrogacy boom in India
* Heart Attack Grill. Burger joint with a "we're really unhealthy" theme, burgers in lard, all you can eat fries in lard, and "burger geisha" waitresses in skimpy nurse outfits. "Poised in the art of conversation" (from the French Documentary video).

* No, really. Andy Schafly says so. From james_nicoll

* Also fun: Liberal Denials about history, and Why do non-conservatives exist?

This is all good timing after Posner elegy for intellectual conservatism.

* More on the "Democratic Socialist Party".
* Senate's acting up in appointments, first blocking an environmental lawyer for Interior, and now a rule of law advocate for Justice.

In happier thoughts:
* Police chief against prohibition
* Steven Brust reads the Wealth of Nations
* John Quiggin's refutations of economic doctrines
* Hunter-gatherer wiki

And
* Awesome Avatar fanfic comic. Warning: 446 pages. Features Zhao.

* The rage of the privileged. Wall Street financiers who'd be unemployed sans government bailout cry at the reduction of their bonuses and looks at whether they've been paid for wrecking the economy.

* Growing unbelievers in America
* Conservatives out to repeal civil union benefits in Washington state. This is why marriage is needed: "separate but equal" can be attacked separately.
* The NDP and economic management in British Columbia

Some of these links from Randy.

* Segregationist to replace Specter on Judiciary committee
* Grandmother arrested for "child porn" photos of her granddaughter in the bath
* Obama may re-open Gitmo courts. "Most liberal president" my ass.
* "Competitive authoritarianism

Krugman:
* For investigating torture
* Investment bank salaries soaring again
* Climate change policies are affordable. Though it's amazing how "the market knows best" free-market fundamentalists suddenly lose all faith in the market to route around a few pollution taxes.

* Dancing animals can follow a beat.

http://bostonreview.net/BR34.3/baker.php

Dean Baker argues that standard economic principles aren't applied to health care. Efficiency is when prices are near marginal cost of production, but patents on drugs and tests keep prices sky high, and could be replaced with public research, prizes, or patent buy-outs; patents also lead to rent-seeking and political distortions of the market. Competition among doctors is excessively discouraged by long and expensive med school programs, and keeping foreign doctors out, despite the training of the latter. Medicare doesn't pay for benefits outside the USA, so you can't take your pension benefits in a cheaper country. But you don't hear about economists -- or Republicans -- talking about throwing the door open to foreign doctors.

( Other links, caught up now )

So, the last entry linked to three articles on the car companies and their failure. One argued it was mostly because Americans have stopped buying American cars; one said it was more due to underfunded company pension plans; I want to quote more from New Yorker one. It's message is on the peril of employer vs. universal health and pension plans, yes, but also about dependency ratio and development.

( Read more )

So, I finished reading Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007). It's about economic (in)equality in America, how it's changed over time, and why -- in particular, about the political interventions that have reduced or increased it, from the New Deal to movement conservatism, and why those political movements succeeded.

Right before it I read his Pop Internationalism (1997), on the ubiquitous myths regarding international trade and the ill-founded notion of "competitiveness". In that he argued that "countries are not corporations", and not in competition with each other, especially for a country like the US where 90% of GDP is Americans producing for and selling to other Americans. Wages are generally driven by the average level of productivity, with little evidence or mechanism for trade driving them down, especially in general but even in cases like American unskilled labor.

This book doesn't challenge any of his earlier statements on trade, but it's rather more interventionist on wages; the economy generates wealth, but politics and social norms can control how much of that labor gets. We start with what he calls the Long Gilded Age, the Gilded Age proper and the years following, up to the Great Depression in 1929. Income increased at all levels, following the rapid technological development, but inequality stayed high, and politics were highly polarized between populist Democrats and big business Republicans. Then we got the Depression and the New Deal reaction, with Social Security, progressive income tax, estate tax, government supporting unions instead of breaking them, and government work programs, followed by WWII and outright controls on prices and wages. Eisenhower in 1952 brought the GOP to accept the New Deal consensus, and we had 30-ish years of 70-90% top tax bracket, 2.7% growth in the median income (doubling it), relatively low inequality between top and bottom brackets, a minimum wage that was half the average income, and 'bipartisan' politics since the parties basically agreed on major issues, competing on running the government.

( Read more... )

...that'll have to be all for now.

* Bananas at Sahara Mart have jumped to 79 cents a pound, but apples are down to $1.99.
* Whee, swing dance! Finally I've learned some more lindy hop variations.

More news and links
* Civilians have too many rights and can't be forced into hardship positions, so reservists may be called up based on their civilian jobs to fill posts in Afghanistan.
* More on Card joining NOM, including his call to overthrow the government is Prop 8 didn't pass, and his attempt to actually argue how gay marriage would hurt his marriage. (Commendable in a way, since most opponent mumble incoherent at that point.)
* Cheap shots: Republicans less popular than Venezuela Or China. Or France.
* Chavez has problems, but Colombia is worse, yet not reported on as much.
* How the Kindle might transform reading books. Friends snarked that it read like a Thomas Friedman essay or some 1996 gush about the Web, but I'm not sure it's wrong.

Krugman, the Dismal Scientist
* Banks are reporting profit because the market value of their debt is going down -- because creditors think the bank is likely to fail.
* Bush admin torture sought to establish link between Iraq and 9/11, which of course was non-existent. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month. 6 times a day! And with 'real' waterboarding, e.g. water dumped into the nose and mouth, beyond what passed for safety guidelines. Petition for a special prosecutor.
* Since 1995, European productivity allegedly lagged that of the US. Half due to Wal-Mart, half due to financial services. Perhaps we'd like to reconsider. A comment adds that in-house software development is 'investment' in the US but 'expense' in Europe. Same activity, different accounting.
* Notes that conservative economist Greg Mankiw says we need inflation.
* Texas: rich or poor? -- posting for the links and numbers; he doesn't really make a case for median vs. average income, and cost of living would seem to matter, and be higher (at least in housing) than in NJ. OTOH, the numbers do mean that employers in NJ (or NYC) are willing to pay that much for the labor there, vs. what Texans can command.

Krugman columns, not blog posts
* False hope
* The Irish model
* Tea parties and the craziness of the GOP (And the tea party sponsors)
* If banking isn't boring, someone's stealing your money.
* America the tarnished (finance, not torture. That I have to say that...)
* Obama: hypnotized by capital markets

* UN racism conference news. Libya gets called out.
* Polarized voting index
* The First Earth Day. Condom witches in Bloomington.
* Article mentions that Orson Scott Card is on the board of the National Organization for Marriage (nom nom nom), which seems to be the new front of gay-marriage bigotry.
* Jared Diamond sued for making shit up. LJ comments here. carloshasanax and Doug M. traditionally criticize Diamond for abusing his citations; William Hyde seems a good climatologist and rejects Doug M's source.
* Greg Bear to write Halo novels.

* Krugman on "too many banks" and a Bush-like shifting of narratives for the bank policy -- Bushlike in how tax cuts were a good idea when the economy was booming (give back money) and failing (stimulus!) and wartime (...).