Economics 11/26/2009

• RGE – A Tale of Two American Economies

  tags: Economics

  • The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a
    smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in
    a deep and persistent downturn.
  • Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced
    manufacturing and services – are gone forever, and recent studies
    suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs can be fully outsourced over time
    to other countries.
  • And the credit crunch for
    non-investment-grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on
    access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe.
  • Larger firms – even those with large debt problems – can refinance
    their excessive liabilities in or out of court, but an unprecedented
    number of small businesses are going bankrupt. The same holds for
    households, with millions of weaker and poorer borrowers defaulting on
    mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer
    credit.

  • With
    the stock market rising and home prices still falling, the wealthy are
    becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main
    wealth is a house rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being
    saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

    So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a
    severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little
    wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck
    and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.

• RGE – The Worst is yet to Come: Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses

  tags: Economics

  • Also, remember: The last recession ended in November
    2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June
    of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

    So we can expect that
    job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In
    other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just
    waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down.
    All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just
    are not coming back.

  • As a
    result of these terribly weak labor markets, we can expect weak
    recovery of consumption and economic growth; larger budget deficits;
    greater delinquencies in residential and commercial real estate and
    greater fall in home and commercial real estate prices; greater losses
    for banks and financial institutions on residential and commercial real
    estate mortgages, and in credit cards, auto loans and student loans and
    thus a greater rate of failures of banks; and greater protectionist
    pressures.

    The damage will be extensive and severe unless bold policy action is undertaken now.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 11/25/2009

• Not For All the News in China, Part I : CJR

  tags: media, Policy

  • I don’t think that [the press] have gotten it right, to put things very simply. I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.

• James K. Galbraith: Old Mistakes Die Hard

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that “credit would flow again” if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn’t.

  • Low interest rates prove this: despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

    Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: the same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won’t be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other “good signs.” So we’ll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don’t buy what we can’t afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger — perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone’s guess.

• Ezra Klein – Why must we have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future?

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • James Galbraith points fingers:

    Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate.

  • I’m with hughmaine, who is also spot on. What happened to that tease about another stimulus a few weeks back (I’ve been out of touch)?

    What we’ve seen is the stimulus work, such pitiable amount of it that actually went into the productive economy. It’s not complicated. But perhaps the Democrats are tired of holding office.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 11/25/2009

• James K. Galbraith: Old Mistakes Die Hard

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that “credit would flow again” if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn’t.

  • Low interest rates prove this: despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

    Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: the same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won’t be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other “good signs.” So we’ll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don’t buy what we can’t afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger — perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone’s guess.

• Ezra Klein – Why must we have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future?

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • James Galbraith points fingers:

    Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate.

  • I’m with hughmaine, who is also spot on. What happened to that tease about another stimulus a few weeks back (I’ve been out of touch)?

    What we’ve seen is the stimulus work, such pitiable amount of it that actually went into the productive economy. It’s not complicated. But perhaps the Democrats are tired of holding office.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/24/2009

• White House to Reid

  tags: Policy

  • where does the corruption of our government come from? It comes from business.

    From non-regulated, non-accountable, non-responsible business. Something outside of the political process that the people participate in.

    How do we the people fight back against the lobbyists and the corruption? Not by eliminating government.

• Ezra Klein – How the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists cost America $378 billion

  tags: Policy

  • Actually the article is about lobbying, and the money spent by the biologics companies to hold exclusivity of patent on the new miracle drugs before the generic companies can make them too.

    Generics have saved $734 billion in a decade with the other drugs.

    But biologics is a new plateau of medical treatment only recently attained. Biologics are derived as always in medicine on the back of the standard model of the basic research being performed by government and other tax-funded entities, and with the final manufacturing end then handed away at no charge to business.

    Nontheless, the industry argues that too short a period of time for exclusivity of manufacture will not allow companies to recoup their development costs.

    Before biologics, drug companies had five years to make their margin. Obama as a compromise is suggesting 7 years. The companies want 12 years as a minimum.

    The article concludes by asking if the government will have the strength to resist the massive lobbying dollars (which cloud the air with consultants and dire prognostications) and to conduct this negotiation – where the asking party of course overstates as we all do in a negotiation – to the benefit of the dying patients who can’t afford more life, or to the profits of the biologics companies.

  • visonbrkr you crystallize the underlying dilemma here with your support for the “liberal” position.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all deliberate this matter so that those with more liberal (“give to the people”) leanings could spar with those who held more conservative (“but don’t take from the owners”) leanings, and between the two extremes a representative balance could be struck.

    What damages this process for all of us is the distortion of lobbying, especially as it over-advocates, clouding the issues with spurious argument, and actually wearing opponents down with a kind of fatigue.

    I’ve said before that I think we have a good political system except for the corruptions upon that system. But I’m starting to realize that a system susceptible to those corruptions indicates a systemic flaw itself.

    How to strengthen the immune system of our political process?

• health-care and taxes

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • We’re not talking about more taxes, we’re talking about redistribution, narrowing that widened gulf between the holders of wealth and the dispossessed.

    We’re talking about redressing the massive shift in equities of the last 30 years, from Reagan on.

    There are reasons that the culture records a lack of progress in recent decades of that old American Dream – it stopped happening, and regresssive ideologies rolled back a lot of the well-being of ordinary people.

    Every chance, every micro-opportunity arising in the legislative chamber to redress this imbalance will be taken I trust, and should be taken, by the Democrats who were elected in general principle to do this very thing.

• America’s unusually democratic democracy

  tags: Policy

  • I think the system really does work along the lines of the upper house acting as a cooling process for hot legislation from the lower.

    Also it takes much to develop an involved interest in any particular field, and each house has its acknowledged “experts” – you can’t just develop ideas on a dime. This is especially so at the Senate level perhaps, which, as said, is less the originating arena and more the finalizing arena.

    Especially with some study over the years I’ve always thought we have a pretty good system of government – it’s the corruptions upon that system that cause most of our heartburn I think.

    It’s not that the system is rotten, or government inept, more that money is rotten and inept, but carries the most weight and and has its way against all reason.

  • well if this thread is continuing this morning, let me add that the word “democracy” is a loaded one, since the founders of our system wanted a republican form of representation, not a fully typical democracy, which they equated with mob rule and its contemporary menace, the guillotine.

    So they wanted – and created (and this is what we’re dealing with) – a system that embraced proportional representation (one man one vote) somewhat equally with non-proportional representation.

    Bicameral systems of upper and lower houses seemed to be working well, in Europe and the current states, so as the Union was devised the states became the upper house with one state two votes.

    They debated if non-landowners should be given a vote at all, but eventually settled for yes. However, the brake of the states in the senate was intended to destroy the possibiity of “democracy,” precisely so that states with large populations couldn’t so easily prevail upon the inhabitants of the less populated states. This was a deliberate, and very liberal, altruistic conception.

    Personally I think it works well, but you have to take the long view to think this perhaps.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 10/24/2009

• health-care and taxes

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • We’re not talking about more taxes, we’re talking about redistribution, narrowing that widened gulf between the holders of wealth and the dispossessed.

    We’re talking about redressing the massive shift in equities of the last 30 years, from Reagan on.

    There are reasons that the culture records a lack of progress in recent decades of that old American Dream – it stopped happening, and regresssive ideologies rolled back a lot of the well-being of ordinary people.

    Every chance, every micro-opportunity arising in the legislative chamber to redress this imbalance will be taken I trust, and should be taken, by the Democrats who were elected in general principle to do this very thing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sustainability 10/17/2009

• Ezra Klein – The Business of Business in Washington

  tags: Sustainability

  • A little late for this thread, but for the record:

    rmgregory – that BBC post has been completely discredited everywhere – start at climateprogress.org for Joe Romm’s peer-science debunking. It was a sad day when the BBC of all people (well regarded up til now for its climate reporting) let such a blunder from a weather presenter slip under its radar.

    mogreenie – yes, what you said, and please stick around. If we’re going to start turning now to climate and farming (they go together in lots of ways), it’s true we have to realize the FB speaks as little for the good of farming as the AMA speaks for the good of health care.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/17/2009

• Olympia Snowe’s Conservatism — and Ours

  tags: Policy

  • msoja, you know where all your principled framework falls down? It falls down when the insurance companies monkey with government.

    If every corporate lobbyist that perverts and corrupts our political process because they have irresistible amounts of money to withraw from competitive investment and throw at our representatives instead would simply stop it, and let the government simply be a government – then maybe we could start looking at your side of the fence, at the correct and perfect balance of representation versus individualism.

    But we don’t have a government ripe for that kind of philosophizing, because private enterprise has evaded the social police power in drastic measure, and made sure we’ll never be able to have a rule of law with any integrity.

    It’s not too much government that we have, it’s too little of the right kind.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 10/16/2009

• Burn it Down and Salt the Earth | Mother Jones

  tags: Economics

  • There’s an insanity here that’s almost beyond analysis.  Wall Street can spark an economic slowdown that misses destroying the planet and causing a second Great Depression only by a hair’s breadth — said hair being an 11th hour emergency infusion of trillions of taxpayer dollars — and then turn around and use those trillions to return to bubble levels of profitability within a year.  And they can do it even though the rest of the economy is still suffering through the worst recession since World War II.  It’s mind boggling.

    Is there any silver lining here?  Probably not, but I’ll try: If Wall Street can shrug off the worst recession of our lifetimes as if it’s a minor fender bender and get the party rolling all over again in less than 12 months, it means the next bubble is already in the works and its collapse will be every bit as bad as this one.  That in turn means it will almost certainly happen while today’s politicians are still in office.  So maybe news like this will finally spur lawmakers to realize once and for all that the financial industry needs to be cut down to size.  Half measures won’t do it.  Self-regulation won’t do it.  Compensation limits won’t do it.  Byzantine, watered-down rules won’t do it.  Something like a Morgenthau Plan for Wall Street is the only thing that has even half a chance of working.

• Ezra Klein – The House That Private Insurance Built

  tags: Economics

  • This is the house they’ve built: an insurance market where plans are written for the healthy and all legal efforts are made to exclude the sick. That’s meant premiums are somewhat lower than they’d otherwise be, but only because the people who most need health-care insurance aren’t able to afford it, or in some cases, aren’t able to convince anyone to sell it to them. Now that arrangement is ending and they’re scared that they can’t provide an affordable product to the people who need it. They may be right, but it’s evidence of how deeply perverse their business has become, not of what’s wrong with health-care reform. When they say that the individual market would be cheaper in the absence of health-care reform, they’re saying the individual market would be cheaper if they could continue refusing to sell affordable insurance to people who need health-care coverage.

    This isn’t an argument against health-care reform. This is proof of its necessity.

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Sustainability 10/14/2009

• Down to Earth – Raising Cattle, Kids and Consciousness » Blog Archive » Responsible ground beef, how can it compete?

  tags: Sustainability

  • And for the sake of our health, please keep raising and selling your pastured beef.

    The system of producing feedlot beef requires antibiotics to keep the cattle alive because the unnatural food they’re forced to eat makes them sick. Michael Pollan has illustrated this clearly.

    So what you provide us is non-sick beef.

    Looking across America we see an increasingly unwell population. And sick beef is cheap enough everyone can eat it all the time.

    Poor, foolish, overweight, health-impaired America.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/14/2009

• Ezra Klein – Bad Language

  tags: Policy

  • Ezra keep pondering this stuff, there’s a lot of potential there.

    I’ve often wondered why the “soft” people let the “hard people take their language away from them, when marketing 101 says if the opposition hold the buzzwords, that’s where the battle is: you have to fight for the language itself, and steal the keywords from the enemy.

    Witness: billions of dollars spent branding Coca Cola, and 7-up takes a free ride on that investment with the “un-cola”.

    So, two forks to this: either take “strong” and demean it with qualifiers like “blindly” “rigidly” “scared” and such;

    or, better, take their word “strong” and show how it applies to your position best, as in “strong caution,” “strong restraint,” “strong open-mindedness” – the playground is pretty large once you decide to be strong about your softness, and strike instead of wilt.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/10/2009

• Ezra Klein – What Good Are States?

  tags: Policy

  • I read the story you linked, and Alec MacGillis actually tells the story about the Senate existing to cool down legislation – but then he dismisses it. He never grasps the point that this safety check will inevitably disappoint people tied to immediate outcomes.

    The States weren’t “enticed” into joining a Union, they banded together and formed one because it was the clear imperative of the times. We are the result, and you have the luxury now to speak from that Union as if its existence was a given, as if we have always been one Society – the Founders would be proud of their achievement.

    Today the House majority is trying to vote its way into something I (very dearly) want, but tomorrow it won’t be. So we look to the checks and balances, the Senate and the President and the Supreme Court.

    The answer to one’s current frustration is not to abolish the Union or the States or the Senate, but to buckle down to the work required to pass legislation that will carry all of the component institutions of our system. Then one will have some legislation worth passing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 10/10/2009

• bampbs | The Economist

  tags: Economics

  • Wouldn’t it be lovely if experience could triumph over the cycle of euphoria and terror in their turns ? But our knowledge of the future is so fundamentally uncertain that financial markets will never cease their overreactions. It would be good if speculation with borrowed money were prohibited. It would be better if everyone recognized that movements in asset prices beyond those justified by reality are just another manifestation of inflation or deflation, and just as problematical as any other. For this reason, strongly counter-cyclical regulation is best; stability ought to be the regulators overriding goal. Finance has no independent value whatsoever. It is time it was put back in its place.

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Sustainability 10/08/2009

• Worldchanging Interview: Paul Hawken

  tags: Sustainability

  • What I discovered was people, themselves. And really just the number, and the breath, and depth of the ingenuity and authenticity in which people really applied themselves to being problem solvers and alleviate suffering, to addressing the ills of the world, and innovating and re-imagining what was possible. And they are organizing around different ways and different issues around different cultures and different manners. And when you stand back and you really get to see, if you will, not visually, not directly, but see it in a conceptual way, how large and diverse this movement is, then you just have to either laugh, or grin or smile.
  • Now then, you know what we pay attention to instead? All the institutional obstacles, and the resistance, and corruption, and financial chicanery, and on and on and on. And you look at that and you want to just jump off a bridge. And because you just see that, humans seem self serving, greedy, short sighted and violent. And if you just look at that, you just drink that potion, its toxic.

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Sustainability 10/07/2009

• Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws – NYTimes.com

  tags: Sustainability

  • Costco said it had found E. coli in foreign and domestic beef trimmings and pressured suppliers to fix the problem. But even Costco, with its huge buying power, said it had met resistance from some big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,” Mr. Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test.”
  • The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. “They would not sell to us,” said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”

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Sustainability 10/06/2009

• It’s Time for a Delicious Revolution | Conversations…

  tags: Sustainability

  • It turns out these same foods and methods of agriculture are often the best for the planet. Agriculture and the transportation, processing, storage, and preparation of food are a big part of our ecological impact. When it comes to environmental impact, how a family eats is more important than the type of car they choose to drive.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 10/06/2009

• Poverty Simulation

  tags: Economics

  • Come and live a month in poverty…

    One of our most powerful educational tools is the Poverty Simulation Workshop. The Poverty Simulation Workshop is a role-playing experience that offers the opportunity to learn more about the realties of living in conditions of poverty. Participants enter the workshop with a new identify and family profile. Participants experience one month of poverty compressed into the real time of the simulation (generally three hours total). Afterwards in the debriefing, they share insights of extraordinary vividness and intensity.

    
    As a result, ordinary people from all walks of life can share a very special kind of awakening. The Poverty Simulation Workshop can open people’s eyes to the human cost of poverty. The power of this unique learning resource is that it creates, like no other method, an insight into the state of chronic crisis that consumes so many working poor families.

• Ezra Klein – The Persistence of Obesity

  tags: Economics

  • If you have never participated in a poverty simulation run by qualified people, you should seek one out and do it. I thought I wouldn’t learn anything but I was floored by what I realized I would do to cope and survive – and this was a one-hour sim. I was also shocked by the assumptions that people had about the poor. I ran into a lot of deeply internalized beliefs (often to the point of subconscious acceptance) that the poor are not to be trusted, addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and are neglectful parents. If I could, I’d run poverty simulations in every high school in the country.

• Ezra Klein – Your Recession in Charts

  tags: Economics

  • Since the early 1970’s real wages have been flat to falling. Workers’ share of GDP has been falling. Management used to reinvest profits in the business, and/or pay dividends. But since the marginal tax rates came down beginning in the 1980’s, management instead pays itself ever more exorbitant compensation packages.

    To make up the difference, ordinary people stopped saving then started borrowing. The financial sector aided and abetted this by devising ever more clever means to hook people on debt.

    Now the golden goose is dying because people can’t afford to buy stuff any more. People are cutting back on credit and saving as much as they can. Business can’t get credit because the banks are hoarding the money and so no one is hiring. The gov’t is stymied by “deficit hawks” who would rather see unemployment keep rising than spend public money to make up for the decline in private demand. And the rich? The people whose share of income has more than doubled over the past few years? Don’t even think of raising their taxes back to where they were in the Clinton years. That’s Communism!

  • Mimikatz – as good a 3 paragraph summary as I have seen.

    I would add that what I find really remarkable is that many of the rich seem to be willing to allow the golden goose to die.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sustainability 10/03/2009

• Community Markets Association of Williamson County

  tags: Sustainability

  • We are in a silent crisis in America because our food supply chain is being poisoned, and will ultimately be destroyed. What’s causing this is the action of corporate practices that exist only to strip every last dollar out of farming until the land is dead. Then the buyers of food will eat whatever they are fed to survive.

    This crisis needs to become louder. It needs to turn into the scream it really is. We are being killed by bad food, and the answer for each one of us lies within a few miles of where we live.

• Down to Earth – Raising Cattle, Kids and Consciousness » Blog Archive » Local Food: Use it or lose it

  tags: Sustainability

  • I think the answer is we make our markets where we can. In the end I don’t think all of America drives out to the farmer’s market, I think the food will come to us, one way or another.

    I can’t make it to the market tomorrow so I’ve asked someone else to pick up some things for me. Meanwhile I have neighbors here in Georgetown who drive to a market in Austin to buy farm food.

    Obviously I need to organize my neighborhood so only one person needs to drive to Florence to buy food for all.

    And you farmers need to have subscribers – people similar to investors really – who will guarantee a market for your crop, and who will stay with you in good season and bad, in order to keep you in business and to guarantee that they can put wholesome food on their tables.

    It’s a matter of re-arranging the economics of how we grow and buy food more than anything else, in my opinion.

• A Portland sustainability center could sprout in 2010 | Oregon Environmental News – – OregonLive.com

  tags: Sustainability

  • The $90 million Oregon Sustainability Center — for several years a gauzy notion but this year funded by the Oregon Legislature — will be a showcase of the state’s green building innovation that draws visitors, researchers and designer-developers from across the world. It will rely solely on its own solar panels for energy and use no more water than falls on the site, among other major environmental feats.
  • The driving goal: to become a magnet for any business or government looking to meet its sustainability challenges while growing green jobs in Oregon.
  • The sustainability center is intended to meet the Living Building Challenge, a new green building certification program that lays out the most all-encompassing green standards in the industry.

• Ezra Klein – The Persistence of Obesity

  tags: Sustainability

  • interesting post, and discussion. I do think the food chain is poisoned nowadays, and with genetic modification now loose and untracked in the fields there are a lot of untested imponderables going into our mouths no matter how rich we are.

    But as to your main point, that the poor suffer extreme stress, and your secondary point, that the rich don’t really understand this because of their own relative insulation from stress – this is clearly true, and verified by all of our experiences if we review them in this light.

    As for answers…

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Policy 10/03/2009

• Ezra Klein – Will 2010 Be Another 1994?

  tags: Policy

  • One of the key differences between ‘93-’94 and today, I think, is that the Clinton adminstration was curiously tone-deaf to the political impact of many of its actions (gays in the military, a complex, government-centric health care reform proposal), while the Obama adminstration has been, extremely cautious (IMHO, too cautious) about taking actions which would ruffle anyone’s feathers. Numerous surveys have shown that the vitriol toward the Democrats that Cook cites is almost exclusively a Southern phenomena, and despite the fact that it is un-pc to say it folks, the issue is race, race, race. I have no doubt that the GOP will gain seats in the South in 2010, and that some of the Blue Dogs Rahm Emanuel so carefully courted may lose their seats, but the more that Republicans become identified as a Southern party, the less appeal they will have in the rest of the country, because the stereotype of the backwards Southern/Appalachian redneck will even more unattractive as the population continues to diversify.

    Posted by: exgovgirl | October 2, 2009 11:52 AM
    | Report abuse

    that’s a compelling perspective, exgovgirl, and makes a lot of sense.

    The Civil War is not very far in the past, and the seed of it was brought into the Union with slavery. From the beginning we’ve had this dirt to wash off. Perhaps we’re still washing, perhaps not, but the Republican party would be a great baby to throw out with the bathwater.

    Posted by: rosshunter

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Policy 10/02/2009

• Ezra Klein – I Endorse

  tags: Policy

  • so really, this blog thing worked pretty well. Ezra made a point and supplied links. His tremendously valuable commenters added greatly to Ezra’s seed piece, as we count on them to do. Ezra even found himself pulled back into the thread.

    The original point is now greatly rounded and enriched, and I’m off to read some entries.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 10/02/2009

• Nieman Reports | Why the News Media Became Irrelevant—And How Social Media Can Help

  tags: Economics

  • But things started to change well before the Web became popular. Over the past few decades, news conglomerates took over local papers and stations. Then they cut on-the-ground reporters, included more syndicated content from news services, and focused local coverage on storms, fires, crashes and crime to pad profit margins. The news became less local and less relevant, and reporters became less connected to their communities. Surveys show a steep drop in public trust in journalism occurring during the past 25 years.
  • The truth is the Internet didn’t steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason—many people don’t feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.
  • Trust is key. Many younger people don’t look for news anymore because it comes to them. They simply assume their network of friends—those they trust—will tell them when something interesting or important happens and send them whatever their friends deem to be trustworthy sources, from articles, blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds, or videos.
  • Mainstream media see social media as tools to help them distribute and market their content. Only the savviest of journalists are using the networks for the real value they provide in today’s culture—as ways to establish relationships and listen to others. The bright news organizations and journalists spend as much time listening on Twitter as they do tweeting.
  • The problem with mainstream media isn’t that we’ve lost our business model. We’ve lost our value. We are not as important to the lives of our audience as we once were. Social media are the route back to a connection with the audience. And if we use them to listen, we’ll learn how we can add value in the new culture.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sustainability 09/26/2009

• Ezra Klein – An Interview With Atul Gawande

  tags: Sustainability

  • People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor’s pen. It’s not that we make all the money. It’s that we order all the money.
  • But you can learn from good hospitals. They do peer review, for instance, and that changes what doctors do in their offices. They blunt the financial incentives in various ways that we haven’t studied at all. It’s kind of ridiculous that there haven’t been very many people putting feet on the ground and studying what the positive deviants are doing. There are hundreds of examples out there. They’re not just the Mayo Clinic and not just Grand Junction. Go to Portland, Oregon; Temple, Texas; Pensacola, Florida. These are places that are doing something differently.
  • There are also more than 6,000 drugs and 4,000 types of operations and procedures. That’s what a hospital has to be able to manage and a doctor’s office has to manage. Our system in my hometown struggles with how to manage that. We’re trying to reform a system to be prepared for the 21st century of medicine and we’ll be struggling for answers for awhile.
  • And part of what’s such a marvel about a place like a Mayo or places like it is that they’ve been able to get teams of doctors work with nurses and nutritionists to work together.
  • We’re doing dress rehearsals on how to talk to each other. It’s hilarious. But when we do it, we not only lower costs, we lower the death rate 40 percent and the complication rate 30 percent. And that’s why I think the answers will be there.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/26/2009

• Reading the McChrystal Report: Interesting Times : The New Yorker

  tags: Policy

  • Obama has Kennedy’s confidence in his own judgment, which Johnson tragically lacked. Gordon Goldstein’s very good book “Lessons in Disaster,” about McGeorge Bundy—national security adviser to both J.F.K. and L.B.J.—pretty much proves that Kennedy, if he’d lived, would not have committed ground troops to Vietnam at the start of his second term. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stopped trusting his military advisers, and went on to overrule them during the Cuban missile crisis and, again and again, on Vietnam. Perhaps this is Obama’s J.F.K. moment. We’ll know in a few weeks. And if so, perhaps he would be right.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 09/26/2009

• Why capitalism fails – The Boston Globe

  tags: Economics

  • “Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.
  • In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”

  • Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

    This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.”

  • To prevent the Minsky moment from becoming a national calamity, part of his solution (which was shared with other economists) was to have the Federal Reserve – what he liked to call the “Big Bank” – step into the breach and act as a lender of last resort to firms under siege. By throwing lines of liquidity to foundering firms, the Federal Reserve could break the cycle and stabilize the financial system. It failed to do so during the Great Depression, when it stood by and let a banking crisis spiral out of control. This time, under the leadership of Ben Bernanke – like Minsky, a scholar of the Depression – it took a very different approach, becoming a lender of last resort to everything from hedge funds to investment banks to money market funds.

    Minsky’s other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was – and is – based on the Keynesian notion of “priming the pump” by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor – by building a new high-speed train line, for example.

    Minsky, however, argued for a “bubble-up” approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government – or what he liked to call “Big Government” – should become the “employer of last resort,” he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else’s wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.

  • If nothing else, an expensive full-employment program would veer far too close to socialism for the comfort of politicians. For his part, Wray thinks that the critics are apt to misunderstand Minsky. “He saw these ideas as perfectly consistent with capitalism,” says Wray. “They would make capitalism better.”
  • Minsky did not share his profession’s quaint belief that everything could be reduced to a tidy model, or a pat theory. His was a kind of existential economics: capitalism, like life itself, is difficult, even tragic.

• The Financial Crisis and America’s Casino Culture – NYTimes.com

  tags: Economics

  • The shock that accompanied the end of the American real estate boom once seemed a sentinel event that would bring tighter government scrutiny of the financial realm. Yet as fear of catastrophe fades, the question is how quickly the momentum in Washington for tighter financial rules is diminishing and whether unemployed workers and strapped homeowners will feed a groundswell for change strong enough to offset government turf wars and the influence of financial industry lobbyists.

  • In Washington, on Wall Street and on Main Street, many are aware that the era of lightly supervised markets was fabulously lucrative for those positioned to capture a piece. Financial services and real estate — nurtured by easy money — swelled into major sources of employment, while boosting stock portfolios for huge institutions and ordinary people alike. New York cemented itself as the global financial capital.

    Over the last quarter-century, moreover, the traditional faith in unfettered markets deepened, and became entwined with the belief in the abundance of American opportunity, reinforcing a justification for laissez-faire: In a land that subscribes to the Horatio Alger story — in which anyone can supposedly make it — the market can be trusted to make the rules. For Milton Friedman, the most influential economic thinker of the last half-century, political and economic freedom were synonymous.

  • So the question now is how many people have similarly changed their sense of what the American economy needs. Mostly, it is a matter of whether the country is still feeling lucky; whether the recent crisis will come to feel like an unavoidable toll on the highway to fortune, or whether something deeper has shifted in the American psyche, leaving us shaken in a lasting way.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/21/2009

• Karel van Wolferen

  tags: Policy

  • To be considered “professional” journalists could no longer “take sides”. They had to be neutral. Court reporting, local political conflicts between equals, and party political platforms were suited to such an approach. But when there were no two sides to choose from, when there was one overwhelming side, or when there were perhaps six sides, the reality had to be reduced to fit the mandatory two equal sides.
  • Objectivity was the big loser as the result of this passion for neutrality. The blindness to the difference in meaning of neutral and objective continues to rule the trade. American reporters are not supposed to insert themselves into the stories they write, in the sense of trusting their own brains to do the filtering of the buzzing, cacophonous reality around them. The neutrality command also means that reporters must pass on to their audience utterances and explanations that they know for sure are bullshit.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 09/21/2009

• Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession

  tags: Economics

  • The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession

  • Paul Krugman, in Sunday’s New York Times magazine, did his own autopsy of economics, asking “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Krugman concludes that “[e]conomics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system.”

    So who seduced them?

    The Fed did it.

• The Atlantic Online | September 2009 | How American Health Care Killed My Father | David Goldhill

  tags: Economics

  • What amazed me most during five weeks in the ICU with my dad was the survival of paper and pen for medical instructions and histories. In that time, Dad was twice taken for surgical procedures intended for other patients (fortunately interrupted both times by our intervention). My dry cleaner uses a more elaborate system to track shirts than this hospital used to track treatment.
  • It’s astonishingly difficult for consumers to find any health-care information that would enable them to make informed choices—based not just on price, but on quality of care or the rate of preventable medical errors.
  • A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/16/2009

• The Bush Presidency in One Line

  tags: Policy

  • I suppose in a way this indicates the neutralizing of the 9-11 powerbase.

    Prior to that pivotal event Bush was portrayed in political cartoons as a child with a short attention span, while “Mr. Cheney” took care of the dull, adult things.

    Without that terrible event in 2001 Bush by 2004 would certainly have been running on the “competence” issue, trying to demonstrate that his laughing-stock administration wasn’t the most incompetent in decades, and that he himself wasn’t some kind of simpleton.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/12/2009

• 9/11

  tags: Policy

  • In the sadness of the days following I think most of the country was prepared to set aside partisanship and see political difference laid to rest for a common cause.

    It could have been a great uniter, a transcendent event.

    Instead, we know what happened. Within days it was converted into a kind of high-octane political capital by the administration and the Republicans in Congress, and used self-servingly to drive a very tangible division through our society.

    I agree with everyone who says it’s a personal thing, but I’ll never forget how quickly it became a political tool, and used to inflict great damage on our Union.

• Ezra Klein – The New Bipartisanship

  tags: Policy

  • It’s like the old joke that you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy. Obama doesn’t have to be bipartisan. He just has to look more bipartisan than the Republicans.

  • I have always seen Obama as having a vast meta message, operating through all his moves: he actually believes we can have civil discourse, and that our political process can represent its nation.

    As time passes, if he can also muscle through the things that need to be done, we will see the country change, and regain some of that character he talks about. I believe this is his real agenda, and the plays and ploys we agonize over daily are just small-scale compared with his true reach.

    Unfortunately for punditry, but fortunately for sanity, this will take the passage of time to become clear.

    Posted by: wapomadness | September 11, 2009 11:38 AM
    | Report abuse

    more to Ezra’s point, I’ve always thought Obama was just outrunning the other guy – the Republicans are throwing themselves deep into the moral low ground, while the game being played is for the high ground.

    Obama by his existence has changed the stakes, and I’m sure he knows this very well.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/11/2009

• Facebook | Home

  tags: Policy

  • thinks President Obama’s health care speech was great.
  • Ross Hunter

    yep, me too. There’s a meta message about Obama, and he held to that all through the focus on health care. The meta is that he believes we can have civil discourse.

    As time passes and we see him continue to express this belief and act accordingly, and still muscle through what needs to get done, the country will change. And regain some character.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Economics 09/11/2009

• Op-Ed Contributor – Big Food vs. Big Insurance – NYTimes.com

  tags: Economics

  • When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/10/2009

• Ezra Klein – Gang of Six Death Watch: Moving Forward

  tags: Policy

  • Baucus is clearly slow-walking this and Grassley has publicly predicted a “miniscule” bill by Christmas.

    The claim that Democrats are obstructionist is silly. The House passed a bill, Senate HELP passed a bill, Baucus himself put out a plan last September called “Call to Action: Health Care 2009″ which itself would be a fine place to start a final compromise, But for reasons of his own Max Baucus just decided to say “No”.

    That is NOT a useful spirit to forge good public policy, at this point arguing that Baucus is operating in good faith is a fools game.

  • BTW it is my opinion that the stalling point is not the Public Option but the potentially very strict profit controls built into Sec 116 of the House Bill. The wording seems deliberately innocuous but its effect would be to gut the current insurance industry model of making money by denying care. The insurance companies are already publicly gunning for Sec 113 which limits the premium gap you can charge between young and old, but 116 is actually more deadly to them. Watch for Finance to push out a bill against some deadline hoping nobody notices what they did to Secs 111-116 which together are the core of insurance reform.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.