The Links:
Lots from the New York Times today. Let's start with Paul Krugman reminding readers why core inflation measures have been a huge success.
An argument for structural unemployment trends being exacerbated by the great recession. All in all, I think this is the most complete story we get. Our labor market is changing and then this big event hits and explodes unemployment, masking those changes until a recovery begins. We also can't forget that many jobs lost were related to construction and real-estate. Although prices have rebounded, those industries haven't regrown all the lost jobs.
Neil Irwin thinks the robots might not take our jobs after all. Why? Because we're all unique creative snowflakes. Also, robots can't identify different kinds of chairs accurately. Yet.
Millions of people have moved from blue states to red states. Far from being proof that red state policies are superior, the new blues are making those states purple.
Teaching future doctors shouldn't necessarily require public funding. The background here is that all residency programs, the 3-5 year post-graduate programs all doctors have to go through before they can practice medicine, are paid for by the federal government. All of them. And the funding for those programs hasn't changed since 1997. That means we are graduating lot's of doctors into the same number of residency slots each year.
Arnie Duncan, secretary of Education, says states ought to get another year before they start using CC based tests to evaluate teachers. Sometimes I forget that the entire common core is just an very roundabout way of being able to fire "bad" teachers.
Alright, enough of the old grey lady.
Whites self segregate, even in their social networks. I remember education classes and discussion about self-segregation in schools. It's funny to think back on it because self-segregation was talk about as something blacks did to themselves. The logic, if I remember correctly, was that we expect blacks to be pro-integration so why are they all sitting at the same lunch tables? Or some stupid thing like that. The obvious answer was that white people don't accept any minorities into their social groups but somehow that was never the way it was discussed.
Overall, the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent).Harper's presents, New Frontiers in Pain-Compliance. How military technology for Active Denial Systems came to be used on the streets of American cities.
More on how economic harassment is part of the problem in Ferguson and elsewhere. A big lesson I learned from the reparations discussion a few months back was how much official policy was to blame for the problems facing America's black communities. This is just another example of America's continued policy of white supremacy.
Alex Tabarrok compares Ferguson's economic harassment to debtor's prison. I really think there's ground here for libertarians to gain inroads among traditionally democratic groups. They just need to make more arguments like these.
Tyler Cowen highlights a Swedish study indicating that poverty is not correlated with proclivity to commit crimes. Maybe the above policies have something to do with the elevated crime rates?
Kevin Drum looks at Clinton era welfare reforms and the Great Recession. He pretty much argues that any "benefits" we saw from reforms were merely a lucky coincidence with the boom times of the mid-late 1990s.
Is housing holding back the economic recovery? Yes and no. If by recovery people mean a return to the pre-2006 housing pustule, then yes, we aren't recovering. But if people recognize that the housing pustule was a product of Wall St., housing policy, and low interest rates, then you'll rightly recognize that we don't want to recover that way.
The Harvard Business Review looks at record corporate profits without the added prosperity of previous generations. For some reason this makes me think of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
America in Decay: The Sources of Political Disfunction, by Francis Fukuyama. Though long, the article uses the US Forest Service as a case study in America's failing institutions.
Brookings presentes, Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and The American Dream. Another long-form piece which looks at our failed state.
Vivid stories of those who overcome the obstacles of poverty to achieve success are all the more impressive because they are so much the exceptions to the rule. Contrary to the Horatio Alger myth, social mobility rates in the United States are lower than in most of Europe. There are forces at work in America now—forces related not just to income and wealth but also to family structure and education—that put the country at risk of creating an ossified, self-perpetuating class structure, with disastrous implications for opportunity and, by extension, for the very idea of America.The Economist notes Janet Yellen's more hawkish rhetoric in Jackson Hole. Here's a complete transcript of her remarks.
And, why is the Fed's meeting at Jackson Hole such a big deal these days? Well there was that one guy in 2005 who presented a paper that completely called the economic collapse that happened 2 years later.
The extreme drought in the western US is so bad it literally moves mountains.
How the US created ISIS and therefore created the justification for invading Iraq for the third time in 3 decades.
This week is the anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany. Check out this LIFE photo collection.
Nail polish that can detect roofies. Pretty cool.
An inside look at The Onion's photoshop department.
More adult women play video games than children under 18. Glad to see the data backing up the female gamer movement. Hopefully the industry will realize that they need to make games for everyone.
Real life fruit ninja. Colin totally did this a few weeks ago with his flea market sword.
And, if you liked Nick Cage's movie Season of the Witch, I think you'll be excited about Outcast.
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