Live from PMC's Emergency Department, The Links:
Matt Taibbi has yet another article detailing the utter failure of our government to regulate the financial sector. The piece is too long to excerpt but I highly recommend reading it. Just be prepared for some outrage because the "business as usual" of our outgoing Attorney General is to give preferential treatment to the bankers and wealthy. More here.
Understanding and overcoming America's Plutocracy.
Politics vs policy. Sadly, we get the government we elect and we elect people based on politics and rhetoric.
Although, voter suppression helped produce the lowest turnout in decades.
Free Exchange looks at this week's pretty decent jobs report.
A wonky report on the effects of QE and the importance of the zero-lower-bound.
n December 2008, the Fed lowered the federal funds rate to essentially zero and has kept it there since then. This column argues that, contrary to traditional macroeconomic thinking, monetary policy has not been severely constrained by the zero bound until mid-2011. The results imply that the Fed could have done more to ease monetary policy between 2009 and 2011. These findings could also help explain why the fiscal stimulus package adopted in 2009 did not bring the expected success.Rich countries should absorb more immigrants. Of course, we'll probably only get the H1B high skilled ones and not the broad population which would truly benefit the economy.
As an economist, I see an obvious solution: Relatively underpopulated and highly developed countries could profitably take in young Africans and South Asians — and both sides would gain. Yet it’s far from clear that all nations that could benefit from this policy would entertain it, partly because of persistent racial and cultural bias. There is also the legitimate question of how quickly immigrants can adjust to new environments, especially if they are arriving with weak educational backgrounds as the job market demands ever-stronger skills.Obamacare might be toast because SCOTUS is going to hear King v Burwell. The assumption seems to be that 4 justices are absolutely convinced the law is wrong and Kennedy and Roberts aren't easy to read. More here.
Challenging the market for professional master's degrees. I think these kinds of programs are more likely to succeed than full on MOOCs.
The obvious next target for boot camps is the expanding market for professional master’s degrees. This is really a case of one for-profit business competing with another—master’s degrees are market-priced revenue generators for “nonprofit” colleges and are treated as such. If more employers send the signal that “college degrees are not the primary qualification,” there could be a great many more students who decide that $8,000 for three months of intensive work is a much better deal than $50,000 for a master’s degree of questionable quality.Female academics ought to dress conservatively and other forms of gender repression.
Why do some people long for the Islamic caliphate?
Commercial security at the birth or writing, arithmetic, and religion in ancient Sumer.
It is five thousand years ago, and you pace fretfully in your office. Located in the temple of the great goddess Inanna in ancient Nippur (now in Iraq) you are buried, not in a blizzard of paper, but an avalanche of clay. You fret. You have entrusted a valuable cargo of sheep, barley, and beer to a crusty group of sailors from the Baba Temple in the nearby Lagash[5]. These navy types are far from pious devotees of the goddess Inanna and the great god Enlil with whom you are familiar.The sailors' job, and your payoff -- take the goods down the Persian Gulf and across the sea to Mohenjo-Daro, in the valley of the Indus River (in modern Pakistan). There they will be delivered to your old friend, a trusted agent of Inanna, and sold to the locals for a very substantial amount of silver.Harvard secretly installed cameras in classrooms to see if the 1% were going to class.
Will the sailors get hungry and eat the sheep and barley? Party and drink the beer? Get nasty and poison the lot, throwing disrepute on the great goddess Inanna? Perhaps they will get clever and water down the beer -- or get still more clever and resell your high-quality goods under the name of their crude god.
You needn't worry so much. Long-distance commerce may be a novelty, but you have the clay.
Some guy is blogging his playthrough of Fable and it's pretty fun to read.
A mule has made it to the US dressage finals for the first time ever. At least there is equine upward mobility.Age: 10
Alignment: grudgingly generous
Family: entitled and gullibleToday is my sister’s birthday. I know this not because I have some superhuman memory for trivial facts but because she hasn’t shut her stupid mouth about it for a month. She keeps reminding me that I forgot last year, which is factually inaccurate. I didn’t forget, I just didn’t get her anything. Dad wants to know what I’m getting for her this year.
Movieflim awesomeness:
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Now on Netflix!
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Didn't they do this with that Doom movie?
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Oh the memories!
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