12/17/14 Today's Inquiries

I'm starting to like these morning shifts.


The Links:

Jeb Bush is on the up and up. 4 more years! Also, he's done a great job of branding himself as a centrist which gives him general election bonuses but is he conservative enough to win primaries? More here.

So he's going to run with a Mitt Romney level of financing but a Jon Huntsman approach to the issues -- a belief that if he defies litmus tests, he'll be respected for that. (Ask Huntsman how well the latter worked out for him.) But meanwhile, he's likely to clear the field quite a bit -- if he's in, Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney are almost certainly out, Chris Christie will struggle to get funded, and Scott Walker, John Kasich, Mike Pence, Rick Snyder, and other potential fresh faces will probably have second thoughts about running. Paul Ryan will probably decide he'd rather pursue power in the House. We really might be down to a top tier consisting of just Jeb, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, with Ben Carson punching above his weight until the big-money primaries start, in the Huckabee/Santorum role.

Thoughts on making America more like Disney World.

[He] concludes that what makes Disneyland different is….happy thoughts. If only we were more like W.D., he says, “we could make America into a happy place.”

No, what makes Disney invest in infrastructure is not happy thoughts. Johnston is in fact clear about this:

The Walt Disney Co. invests in infrastructure because it makes the company money.

The problem with America is that our public infrastructure has been turned over to a fickle political process that is not governed by a rational calculation of cost and benefit, market test and experimentation but by a pursuit of power, glory and advantage that only rarely coincides with the public interest.

The secret to the Uber economy is inequality. Yeah, if there were numerous well paying jobs, they wouldn't have any drivers.

Cost of living is probably more complex than we think.

Consider that, at a national level, economic experts soberly analyze changes in trend productivity growth of 0.5 percent per year. To measure productivity changes, you need to have accurate measures of real GDP. To measure real GDP, you need to have accurate measures of “the” rate of inflation.

But what if inflation is 5 percent higher in downtown LA than it is 30 miles away? Which is the accurate measure of inflation? Even a slight mistake in aggregating across different areas could completely change the picture for national productivity growth.

I find myself thinking that the multiplicity of economies within the U.S. really matters. For example, I could imagine that the minimum wage would have a much bigger effect on employment in the locations with those sub-$200,000 houses than in higher-cost areas, where employers probably have to pay above the minimum, anyway. I can imagine that downward stickiness of wages matters a lot if you have inflation differentials across areas of 5 percent or so.

Local commission is looking into Fergusson's court system which one participant described as "debtor's prison."

A TPM reader asks, do we really want to live in the world advocated for by defenders of these recent police actions?

But listen to the defenders of the police in these latest cases… do you really want to live in the world they are promoting? One where you must immediately acquiesce to any request/order give by anyone in a uniform, without question or complaint… under penalty of death if you don’t comply, or comply too slowly for them? Do you really mean to give people in uniform the power to kill, maim, imprison any person simply because they questioned why they were being confronted or resisted rough treatment? Is the uniformed officers word to be deemed absolute, without recourse… and his/her power to punish to be deemed limitless?

Antibiotic resistance will kill 300 million people by 2050.

Russia's currency is spinning out of control. Seems like old times.

In other words, reserves useful for defending the currency against speculative attacks are more like $200 billion than $400 billion. That has made the evolution of recent events much more akin to a classic Krugman first generation balance of payments crisis. It also has elements of third generation crises to the extent that balance sheet considerations complicate matters for Russian policymakers. 

What are the odds of a commodities led global financial crisis?

Nonprofits sure are making a lot of money. They just aren't spending it on helping people. You know, like the NFL.

Pearson says there's a renaissance coming in assessment. Let's hope so. The state of standardized testing at the primary and secondary level is abysmal.

Bringing blogging to the classroom. So, bringing classrooms to 2004? How about we bring Instagram to the classroom? Or books. Bring the classroom to 1436.

Chunks of online education.

Herein lies the lesson for online education. Hart and Case put an enormous effort into this. They are not ‘star professors.’ They are not experts in this area. They just explored the knowledge and acted as the translators. And there are similar efforts going on around the world.

This means something for online education. These chunks are the components. All of the efforts, the experts or professors are putting into courses with videos etc are mere place-holders until the true best-practice mode of expression is created. In the end, we will have to think of online education as a vetting and then curation of these components to give students an education. Suffice it to say, we are surely still in the Wild West of doing this.

How humanity will survive a mass extinction.

Rather priceless: