8/2/15 Today's Inquiries

So, I'm the boss. But I'm also not the boss. Basically, I think I've been conned into doing someone's work without any of the incentives of being in charge.


The Links:

Want to challenge your faith in modern medicine? Take a look at this drug clinical trial simulator. Get the results you want, not the results you don't! Hint: big pharma doesn't have to publish studies which show their drugs are ineffective.

American style mass incarceration causes more crime than it prevents.

The tech industry loves to claim there's a shortage of workers. Those claims are phony. What they should be doing to colluding to drive down the cost of labor. Oh wait, they did that...

"Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially," Tornquist said, "our immigration system has failed to keep pace." The nation's outdated limits and "convoluted green-card process," she said, had left firms like hers "hampered in hiring the talent that they need."

What Tornquist didn't mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people. 

The mismatch between Qualcomm's plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector's persistent claim of a "shortage" of U.S. graduates in the "STEM" disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

How are Americans responding to a changing job market?

Those of us in education, especially recent grads (well 5 years ago) know how we're constantly told the lecture it dead. It's the worst way to teach. It's tantamount to racial discrimination because lectures are for white people. About that:

Instead of leaving lecture-based instruction behind, all of us involved in building innovative educational models should recognize its traditional value and focus our efforts on improving the design of lectures so that they embody the core values of active learning.

And, how schools push black kids into the criminal justice system. Well I don't want my kid in classes with those sorts of people!

Myths about snake people.

Yet another hole punched in the "homo-economicus" myth.

 “Rational expectations” is one of an entire class of expectations models that I reject. I call this class “identical expectations,” because it assumes that every individual has the same model of the market and the same information, thus arriving at the same set of expectations.

A smart argument for doing more charity now.

Wall St. guy realizes 99% of what they do is useless. Yeah, but it makes someone rich!

"The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings," Bogle told Time in an interview.

"What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It's a waste of resources."

In Scott Walker's Wisconsin, household income isn't keeping up with their demographically similar northern neighbor.

Also, we've had a nice little economic recovery without any military Keynesianism.

Arnold Kling argues, I think persuasively, that politics is starting to resemble a "hate crime."

At dinner last night, a political scientist said that studies indicate that increased polarization has not been driven by greater positive attachment to the party people support but to greater hostility toward the party that they oppose.

Women should not have to act like men while at work.

Is the reaction to Cecil the Lion's death by rich white dentist an example of Outrage Imperialism?

7/27/2015 Today's Inquiries

Trying to be more regular with my posts.


The Links:

The scariest lesson of No Child Left Behind. We don't know how to fix schools. That's the lesson.

Here's a pair of Krugman posts. First, The Disappearing Entitlement Crisis.

Bear in mind that the current US budget deficit is below the level at which the debt/GDP ratio can be stabilized, in other words poses no problem. Looking forward, population aging will expand that deficit by a few percent of GDP, but that’s well within the range that could be closed with moderate tax hikes, cuts in pointless military spending, etc.. Nor is there a big rush: nothing terrible will happen if we don’t immediately decide how we’ll pay for projected benefits in the year 2050.

And, he realizes that in certain circles, ignorance and incompetence are cultivated to improve legitmacy.

And this immediately makes me think of one of the mysteries of economic “debate” in America, namely the preference of the right not just for hacks but for incompetent hacks. Here’s what I wrote:

I suspect that the incompetence is actually desirable at some level — a smart hack might turn honest, or something,

The Determinants of Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth.

Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for genetics. We also examine the role played by bequests and find that, when they are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth.

A rather long post about effective altruism with the lovely anecdote of The Play Pump. You know where this is headed:

Doing Good Better opens, just as you would expect, with an uplifting story of a wonderful person with a brilliant idea to save the world. The PlayPump uses a merry-go-round to pump water. Fun transformed into labor and life saving clean water! The energetic driver of the idea quits his job and invests his life in the project. Africa! Children on merry-go-rounds! Innovation! What could be better? It’s the perfect charitable meme and the idea attracts millions of dollars of funding from celebrities like Steve Case, Jay-Z, Laura Bush and Bill Clinton.

Remember how all that subprime debt in the US was highly rated by the Ratings Agencies who were supposed to assess the risk? Well it looks like China is going to have the same problem very soon.

Around 97% of existing yuan-denominated bonds hold ratings of double-A to triple-A—the best a company can get.

With nine Chinese ratings firms to choose among, “bond issuers are encouraged to pick the highest ratings among agencies,” said Guan Jianzhong, chairman of Dagong Global, the country’s third-biggest ratings company in terms of market share. The fact that the bonds are rated double-A-minus or above, they “are not without risks,” he said. 

Speaking of China, here's a nice recap of how the world's last superpower, Britain, treated China.

Opium was outlawed in China.

British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

This just in! Russian serfdom was bad for the long term economic well being of Russians!


You can go see these in Elite: Dangerous

Today's Inquiries 7/26/15

I've been unable to post recently because I've not had computer access at work (which is where I do most of my blogging these days). I aim to remedy that situation in the upcoming weeks.


The Links:

First, another quick link about how Elite:Dangerous is devoted to keeping its in game universe as close to our real galaxy as possible. Pluto will get a face lift to put it in line with the recently release photos. But, and this is the best part, the simulated planetary surface which they are replacing modeled the real Pluto with a good degree of accuracy.

"We're pleased by how closely our simulation has matched the 'smooth' heart-shaped area on Pluto," Frontier Developments noted (the composites pointed to a significant, lighter-shaded patch, if not the heart itself.) Frontier went on to say that Elite: Dangerous is set in 3001, which would mean "five more orbits and five more heating/cooling cycles" for Pluto, so who knows, that smooth patch might cover the world by then.

All you local-only hippies and farmer's market fanatics are going to have more diarrhea. This study was complied with CDC data, some of which was managed by my lovely wife!

In sum, what we find is:

1. A positive relationship between the number of farmers markets and the number of reported outbreaks of food-borne illness in the average state-year.
2. A positive relationship between the number of farmers markets and the number of reported cases of food-borne illness in the average state-year.
3. A positive relationship between the number of farmers markets and the number of reported outbreaks of Campylobacter jejuni in the average state-year.
4. A positive relationship between the number of farmers markets and the number of reported cases of Campylobacter jejuni in the average state-year.
5. Six dogs that didn’t bark, i.e., no systematic relationship between the number of farmers markets and the number of outbreaks or cases of norovirus, Salmonella enterica, Clostridium perfringens, E. coli, Staphylococcus (i.e., staph), or scombroid food poisoning.
6. When controlling for the number of farmers markets, there is a negative relationship between the number of farmers markets that accept SNAP and food-borne illness in the average state-year.
7. A doubling of the number of farmers markets in the average state-year would be associated with a relatively modest economic cost of about $900,000 in terms of additional cases of food-borne illness.

Measuring Unemployment. The headline rate is one thing but there's also a measure of weekly/monthly unemployment insurance claims. We're at the lowest claim rate in 40 years. Thanks Obama.

A Theory of Very Serious People. I recommend reading the whole thing but here's the gist/etymology if its current use:

Unless my memory is badly mistaken (it might be), Duncan Black arrived at the concept of Very Serious People during the intra-US Iraq War debates. Duncan, Paul and others (including many of us at CT) were very, very unhappy with how debate on the Iraq War was conducted. Those who advocated the pro-invasion case were treated as serious thinkers, of enormous gravitas, who were taking the tough decisions necessary to protect America’s national security. Those who disagreed were treated as flakes, fifth columnists, Commies and sneaking regarders. As we know, despite the agreement of the Very Serious People that the Iraq war was a grave and urgent necessity, it turned out to be a colossal clusterfuck. As we also know, many of the People who were Very Serious about Iraq still continue to be Very Serious about a multitude of other topics on our television screens and in our op-ed pages.

Donald Trump is here to stay, even if his candidacy fails, he will leave an indelible mark on the GOP.

In a field of 16 candidates, when one polls a quarter of the vote it is the equivalent of a landslide. Mr Trump’s detractors, who form arguably one of the largest bipartisan coalitions in memory, comfort themselves that he is simply on an ego trip that will turn sour. That may be true. But they are missing the point. The legions of Republicans flocking to Mr Trump’s banner are not going anywhere. If he crashes, which he eventually must, they will find another champion.

This is the principal problem facing informed decision making in the US:

It’s expensive to persuade someone to believe something that isn’t true. Persuading someone that _nothing_ is true, that every “fact” represents a hidden agenda, is a far more efficient way to paralyze citizens and keep them from acting. It’s a dark art, one with a long past in Russia and in the US, and one we’re now living with online. 

Speaking of which, a man is being sued by the state of Georgia for posting copies of state laws online. Sorry citizen, these laws are not for you to see or read. Please go directly to jail.

SmartGPA: Using your smartphone to predict grades.

We show that there are a number of important behavioral factors automatically inferred from smartphones that significantly correlate with term and cumulative GPA, including time series analysis of activity, conversational interaction, mobility, class attendance, studying, and partying.

More on the fantastic illusion that is Silicon Valley:

Put another way, amid a sea of headlines about billion-dollar valuations are many thousands of employees who stand to lose countless millions of dollars unless companies start to go public, or else sell to an acquirer.

Reading Jane Austen is good for your brain. Here comes the neuroscience!

A wonderful article about the silly assumptions we are making about web design and comparing it to the way airplanes were designed and dreamed about in the 1960s. It contains the following quote which I find funny:

The Il-62 exemplifies a Soviet design approach I like to think of as "add engines until airborne".

+Jason Jones reviews World War Z.

7/4/15 Today's Inquiries

Happy 4th of July!

I think I'll write slightly more commentary than usual.

Oh, and SAFETY FIRST:


The Links:

Tomorrow Greece gets to vote in a referendum which many see as a decision to remain pat of the EU. What amazes me is just how post-modern this whole situation is. A yes vote means the public is accepting the terms of a two part deal which expired at midnight Tuesday. A no vote means they don't accept the expired off-the-table deal and many think it means Greece exits the EU. Moreover, the IMF, which has been steadily opposed to any new debt restructuring for the past year suddenly comes out with a paper on Thursday stating their support, albeit tepid, of debt restructuring. So maybe a no vote puts a new deal together for Greece. Literally nobody knows what's going to happen because nobody understands what the vote even means.

Here is an astoundingly stupid idea. (Link goes to .pdf) It comes from Cato so we shouldn't be surprised. The short version is that states can completely nullify the federal income tax by issuing tax credits and outright cash payouts equal to the amount of federal tax paid by each citizen. This would be financed by not by a state income tax but by a state sales tax. I don't think they thought their clever plan all the way through.

1. This does nothing to deprive the federal government of revenue, so any ideological gains are null and void. You're still pay taxes to the feds, you just get a rebate. 
2. Goods and services subject to sales taxes will become very expensive and the tax will have to float based on the expected reimbursement payouts or...
3. The state's revenues will decline cause the state to run a huge deficit because
4. When goods and services are more expensive, people consume less of them.
5. People will take advantage of offsetting capital gains driving up even more costs for the state. 
6. Obviously this would hurt the poor who have less federal tax rebates to offset the increase in sales taxes. 

Your July 4th must read: These Disunited States. 

Examine a wide range of phenomena at the county level—presidential voting results, indices of health, income inequality, education, social mobility, dialects and religiosity—and you’ll see a recognizable pattern of regional ideologies and political preferences going back a century or more. It isn’t and never has been as simple as North versus South, urban and rural, or the effete coasts set against the rugged interior. Rather, our most abiding geographic differences can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.

Southern white people who have even a basic knowledge of the Civil War don't support the confederate flag. 

June employment report: 223k jobs, 5.3% unemployment. 

Jobs under Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

 

Although there wasn't an official policy of austerity in the US, at the state level there were huge cuts to state employment (especially teachers!). It is still holding back our recovery.  Here's a great chart:

China's annual report on the US's human rights record.

The excessive use of force by police officers led to many deaths, sparking public outcry. …After the grand jury of both Missouri and New York decided to bring no charges against the white police officer, massive protests broke out in more than 170 cities nationwide

The average Texan is 3 time more likely to have committed a sex crime than an undocumented immigrant. I'm all for putting a wall around Texas and severely limiting the flow of people into the rest of the US.

Is it time to give up on computers in schools.

Take one step into that massive shit-show called the Expo Hall and it’s hard not to agree: “yes, it is time to give up on computers in schools.”

Dispatches from our Silicon Valley utopia:

As the cleaner laid out his tools, we made small talk, and I asked him where he lived. "Well, right now I'm staying in a shelter in Oakland," he said. I paused, unsure if I'd heard him right. A shelter? Was my house cleaner — the one I'd hired through a company that has raised $40 million in venture-capital funding from well-respected firms like Google Ventures, the one who was about to perform arduous manual labor in my house using potentially hazardous cleaning chemicals — homeless?

He was, as it turned out. And as I told this story to friends in the Bay Area, I heard something even more surprising: Several of their Homejoy cleaners had been homeless, too.

Movie films:

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6/29/15 Today's Inquiries

What a week we just ended! Big wins for progressive America. Now get back to work.



The Links:

Greece's banks are closed. The ECB isn't bailing them out again. There's not really anything more to it. Most of the debts have been restructured in a what that's not going to make Europe's economy implode. . Renegotiating with Greece opens up the possibility of renegotiating with larger debtors like Italy and Spain. Ain't gonna happen. Here's Krugman. Here's Cowen on the possibility of contagion.

Speaking of Greece, it looks like we have our own little debt problem close to home. Puerto Rico needs to declare bankruptcy but can't. However, it also can't pay off its $72billion in debt. Surprise!

Also related, does democracy slow economic growth?

The Ultimate "What if?" What if America never invaded Iraq? Counterfactual arguments are hard to evaluate but I find this one well thought through.

Why doesn't anyone care that big firms in Silicon Valley are overstating their earnings tot he tune of $16 billion? File this under "bubble."

The US computer industry is dying. Assholes are killing it.

No child left un-mined.

Church burning is back. Stay classy racists.

And, the economic subjugation of blacks is the new Jim Crow. Far more pernicious too because it's not a matter of changing laws on the books.

What would civil-disobedience against Obamacare or King v Burwell even look like? What does Huckabee actually think would happen?

Anti-intellectualism is killing America. Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason.

Social Security overpayments, including those people on disability, only amounted to 0.13%. Yup. Epidemic of fraud and moochers there. Let me tell you. Maybe government works after all?

Along those lines, it's important to note that most of America's poor have jobs. There is no epidemic of welfare queens and disability dukes.

Stories from wage slaves and how they became trapped in debt forever.

Scandinavian-Americans have lower levels of poverty and higher levels of incomes than the average American.

13 year-olds invent condoms that change color when the wearer has an STD. First, great idea. Second, you're 13 years old? Umm... Checks article, oh, England. That makes more sense.

6/23/15 Today's Inquiries

Computer problems are work have increased my focus on, umm, working.


The Links:

So, South Carolina. The latest is that the legislature there is planning to consider removal of the confederate battle flag from the state house. Here is +Jason Jones about the whole incident. I recommend reading his post because it touches on being a Southerner. Many of my Kentucky coworkers are a bit divorced from history and don't really get what Southern means. And the Ta-Nehisi Coates piece about the flag is, as always, worth a read. However, do read the rest of his writing on the subject because the flag is only a symbolic victory. The real focus needs to be on the radicalizing apparatus and on continued social injustice through the prison system, housing, education, and employment.

Birth of a Nation and the Charleston shooting.

A century ago, Birth of a Nation catalyzed an already emerging tendency on the part of both elite white Southerners and their allies in the Northern intellectual establishment to whitewash the sins of the Confederacy and create an alternative history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In more recent years, America has come a long way in righting its official understanding of that era. But clearly not far enough.

And, why gun control is doomed.

Since Scott Walker is going to officially announce his bid for the presidency, I thought I'd share yet another post or two about Wisconsin's economy. Guess what? It's bad. The Gross State Product (state GDP) lags behind the rest of the country. And, employment has been on a nice steady downward trend. So why is this guy polling first in the GOP field of contenders?

Inequality's Toll on Growth. Link goes to podcast. Worth a listen.

Why small booms can cause big busts.

In other words, a relatively small amount of overinvestment is responsible for some $1.8 trillion in lost production every year. Given that the gap shows no signs of closing, and accounting for expected growth rates and equity returns, I estimate that the present value of the total loss to production will eventually reach nearly $60 trillion unless we get a much stronger recovery than is currently in train and even if we put our thumb on the scale by raising the rate at which we discount the future far, far above current market interest rates. For each dollar of overinvestment in the housing market, the world economy will have suffered $120 in losses. How can this be?

The good and bad of online education. It's okay, now that we have VR goggles, every kid can sit at home all day and experience classrooms virtually.

Silicon Valley is a Lie. With a headline like that, I have to share it.

We're forever thankful to Silicon Valley for giving us the iPhone, omnipotent search engines, and swipe-simple hookups. But now that America's most vaunted industry has also become its most self-satisfied, Silicon Valley is veering toward fall-of-Rome territory. Which is why it needs to blow up these seven myths about itself before it's too late

Google's war on the homeless in LA. There's no room for the homeless in our future technological utopia.

How does Google, one of the most cash-rich and innovative companies in the world, propose to deal with the issue of homelessness in America? What's its 21st century, New Economy solution to disrupt and solve this difficult socio-economic problem once and for all?

In Los Angeles, the company's fix is brilliantly simple: Hire private security to harass and push the homeless out of sight, and then make sure that the smelly bastards and their tents and carts never come back.

A review of two Sci-fi books which explore "lifeboat ethics." And, the economics of Mad Max and Star Trek. 

1 in 3  couples married after 2005 met online.

Some genius decided to take the 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States and "revive" it with data from 2010. The results are glorious. Go check out the whole thing.

6/15/15 Today's Inquiries

It astounds me that someone with years of education and experience in a particular field can be incompetent. 

The Links:

Given the situation in Wisconsin, I think this article is especially important right now: What's Left After Higher Education is Dismantled. 

There's no set of institutions capable of or interested in providing quality, affordable higher education for a large population outside public schools. We must remember this as state legislatures continue to dismantle, defund and privatize public higher education, because as that project succeeds no one else will step into the void and provide the education that will disappear.

Other thoughts on higher education. Professors rarely profess that they don't teach:

But when I turned to the article, there was … Jorge’s picture. NYU was writing about his project, but since they were bragging on him to the outside world, they’d upgraded his title to Professor. Now imagine that Jorge had showed up, brandishing that magazine, to a Faculty Senate meeting. He would have been thrown out. Tenured faculty won’t let adjuncts play in any reindeer games, but our institutions won’t tell the public which teachers are and aren’t ‘real’ faculty either. The distinction between ‘people we trust to teach’ and ‘people we allow to be professors’ is not just something the public doesn’t understand; it’s something we actively hide.

The graduation rates in New Orleans are back to pre-Katrina levels. So much for charter schools. But, as always, the charters made someone rich, and that's the real reason they exist. 

What kind of advice do various foreign countries give their tourists when they visit the US?

Like the French, German tourists are advised to take American prudishness into account: “Nudism” and even “nude bathing on the beach” may be construed as indecent exposure by the Americans. The German government also urges its citizens to refrain from taking photos of naked children or babies, including their own, since Americans are inclined to see pedophilia in even the most innocent photos of babies in the bathtub: To U.S. law enforcement officials, “the line between ‘sexually suggestive’ photos and harmless family pictures is blurred.” And never, ever leave your child unsupervised: Americans may lock you up if you leave a child under 12 or 13 unattended, even for a moment.

Elon Musk is a welfare queen. 

While receiving subsidies is nothing new for the Forbes 400 or even multi-hundred millionaire pikers like Mitt Romney, a recent story in the Los Angeles Times (via Good Jobs First) shows that Elon Musk (#34 in the Forbes 400) is a champion at getting subsidies for his companies. According to the Times article, Musk's three companies, Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX, have received a total of $4.9 billion (nominal value) in subsidies over the years. The article says that Tesla and Solar City stand out in the importance of the subsidies relative to the size of the company.

So how did those bailouts turn out? Pretty well actually. Sometimes I let my biases get the better of me and I forget that the auto company bailouts led to an increased of 200k jobs and that TARRP and expansive Fed actions actually generated a profit.

How can changing job descriptions improve diversity?

When a new job posting was going up for a different department, the hiring manager asked the rest of us for advice on the job requirements section and I said, “if you have to have requirements, make them actual requirements. Like, you would legitimately throw away the application if any of these things are missing. If you have 5 requirements and you’d talk to a candidate who satisfied 4 of the 5, throw away the least important or rarest one.”

An argument in favor of the TPP. Not saying I agree but it's good to engage with contrary ideas. 

9 dead and a warning to stay indoors after lions and tigers are loosed by floods in Tbilisi, Georgia. If only it was our Georgia. 

Uber is using GPS to punish drivers who get too close to protests. Ah, good. Big tech is in the hands of the body politic. Sorry citizen, you aren't allowed to go near this free speech zone. 

Rich people in California are not going to be following water bans. They'll pay the fines knowing it's a pittance and that the poors will be the ones really in trouble when the water runs out. Awesome quote:

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Here is a guided tour of the Billionaire doomsday bunkers that they'll flee to if the world ends taxes go up. How are the rich not Bond villains?

Obama's pick to run the SEC specializes in helping corporations hide taxable expenses. Fox meet hen house. 

6/12/15 Today's Inquiries

Nothing to see here. Go below.


The Links:

Thoughts on real estate prices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.I think he is missing one crucial aspect: demand.

A case study in why I never want to own a home. Condo, townhome? Maybe. But never a house.

The budget deficit, you know, the one those republicans are always harping about, has reached a 7 year low. Democrats: they'll slash spending!

Which raises the question, should we aim for a budget surplus? Keynesians should say no. I suppose that it's not a bad idea during a strong economic boom (like at the end of the Clinton years) but not during tenuous recoveries.

Iceland removed it's capital controls this week. Are those lessons generalizable elsewhere?

Does Finance have a role in macroeconomics. Yes, obviously.

I read this as yet another example of firms behaving exactly the opposite of how economics text books say they should behave. The freshwater school would look for some kind if distorting regulatory apparatus but that doesn't exist in this case.

Goodbye UW Madison. Yeah, if anyone is thinking about starting a graduate program there, maybe loos elsewhere. Your faculty are going to be very busy polishing resumes and interviewing for jobs elsewhere. I can't wait until a Scott Walker presidency.

Criticism of the Clinton campaign's focus. I agree whole heatedly and I'd add climate change and our various international crises to the list of things Clinton is mostly silent on. However, look at the list of things she's been vocal about. Those are the issues the modern left cares about. Those are the issues which will get out the vote.

This week in particular, the president Clinton hopes to replace — if she can break the historical trend that has allowed a party to win a third consecutive term in the White House only once since 1948 — is on edge. President Obama is simultaneously awaiting the outcome of a House vote on trade promotion authority, negotiations on a nuclear deal and a Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act that could potentially dismantle the country’s healthcare system. On all of these issues Clinton has been silent...

Clinton doesn’t like answering questions, so she likes to say the campaign isn’t about her, it’s all about the voters. That might be fine this year because she believes no one can defeat her for the Democratic nomination, but next year in the general election it will actually be about her. Support for same-sex marriage, debt-free college, campaign finance reform and more access to early voting may be appealing to her base, but they aren’t the most urgent issues. She should find the guts to confront them soon if she really wants to be president. 

A most excellent glossary of terms used in reference to the new civil right movement.

Thug: The so-called "criminals and thugs" described by President Barack Obama in his response to the events of 2015 Baltimore are, in the century of the US prison, a racialized group. Despite arguments to the contrary, "thug" is not a universally or equally applied term, making it the reserve of a select few. As Seattle Seahawks Cornerback Richard Sherman and Baltimore City Councilman Carl Stokes separately argued, "thug" is now a proxy for "nigger," exhibiting a kinder, gentler racism that is no less consequential for its target.

Our reinvasion of Iraq escalates.

Did you ever watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? Here's a lisitcle.

6/10/15 Today's Inquiries

Because schedules are for other people...
Also, not much to post that's interesting to me today.

The Links:

Just in case you were's sure about the level of corruption involved in the Trans Pacific Partnership, here are some emails in which a corporate lobbyist is expressing thanks that a Trade Rep passed their preferred rules directly into the text of the trade bill.

The Noble post-White House careers of Obama staffers. Revolving doors gotta revolve.

Here's an answer to a question that I've been wanting for a while. How many people work for large employers (as opposed to small business)? It also breaks down benefits and compensation. The last time I saw any data was for 2010.

Job Tenure, it's not just about Snake People. It would appear that all those blaming "kids these days" for not keeping jobs for the long term aren't aware of the actual trends in employment.

Despite a strong impression that entire careers spent with one employer are a thing of the past, some have declared the image of job-hopping millennials a myth. (You can read some discussions at About.com, CNBC, and Marketwatch, for example.) ...

Declining job tenure is not just all about millennials having short attention spans. In fact, there is a greater (five-year) decline in median job tenure between 41- and 50-year-old "Depression babies" (born in 1933) and 41- to 50-year-old Gen Xers (born in 1973). So, just as our colleagues here at the Atlanta Fed discovered with regard to declines in first-time home mortgages, millennials aren't to blame for everything!

So what does declining job tenure mean for the U.S. labor market? From the perspective of the worker, portable retirement savings and, now, portable health insurance mean that workers confront a world of possibilities that our parents and grandparents never dreamt of. Yes, perhaps the days of predictability in one's career is a thing of the past. But so is the "eggs-in-one-basket" loss of retirement savings when your employer goes out of business as well as potentially slower career progression within a single firm.

The Party of Fiscal Responsibility in Action. It also has a link to Marco Rubio's terrible finances!

Rick Santorum event pulls in a record number of voters, one.

Humiliation as a tool of foreign policy.

Where does ISIS get its guns?

Terrorists and weapons left over from NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011 were promptly sent to Turkey and then onto Syria – coordinated by US State Department officials and intelligence agencies in Benghazi – a terrorist hotbed for decades.ISIS’ supply lines run precisely where Syrian and Iraqi air power cannot go. To the north and into NATO-member Turkey, and to the southwest into US allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Beyond these borders exists a logistical network that spans a region including both Eastern Europe and North Africa.
First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/09/logistics-101-where-does-isis-get-its-guns/

More evidence that our much lauded Silicon Valley entrepreneur class are mostly a bunch of child-men. San Francisco tech startups are obsessed with replacing their moms. That's right, why take care of yourself and be organized when your mom phone can do it? Sorry about the slide show.

After yet another HBO-invented scene, Matt Yglesias steps in to challenge the criticism and says the scene was "perfect". Spoilers, obviously.

Keeping black kids out of white pools is an American tradition. Oh racism, is there anything you can't do?

There's a case to be made that the very existence of private pools like the one in McKinney was a response to the end of legal segregation of municipal pools in the late 1940s and early '50s. In other words: many white people preferred to build their own pools than enjoy this type of recreation side by side with their black neighbors.

6/6/15 Today's Inquiries

What is it that makes coffee so good?

The Links:

Bill Gates is very worried about a 1918 esque flu pandemic. His simulations show 33 million dead within about 250 days! So it's a good thing that MERS has emerged in Korea. 1300 quarantined. Coming soon to a city near you!

No slowdown in global warming. 

The Education Myth. The tl;dr version is that many countries have increased their educated populace without seeing much improvement in outcomes, GDP, or whatever measure you pick. So what else is holding them back? I'd argue disadvantageous trade policies, late-ending colonialism, and the GWOT are largely to blame. 

Pinker, Hobbes, and Baltimore. Thoughts on the state's monopoly on violence. 

Does a Liquidity Trap ever end? Yes, when the economy, for reasons unrelated to liquidity, is able to grow. Perhaps due to technological change or a war. 

In the past 5 years productivity has grown by 3%. That's not each year That's total over 5 years. So where's this technological revolution in productivity? 

Monetary Policy and Inequality.Done in one:

The claim that Fed policy has worsened inequality usually begins with the (correct) observation that monetary easing works in part by raising asset prices, like stock prices. As the rich own more assets than the poor and middle class, the reasoning goes, the Fed's policies are increasing the already large disparities of wealth in the United States.

Paul nails it:

America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.

Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.

Here's a good overview of the TTP and why all the arguments in favor fail hard. 

This hit parade of failed arguments should convince any fence sitters that this is a bad deal. After all, you don’t have to make up nonsense to sell a good product.

The gap between services inflation and good inflation. Very wonky but an interesting look at pressures on various aspects of our economy. 

Don't go to law school. Presented in the lovely form of a listicle! I would have been the one going to law school for the last reason:

Law school is a very good way to solve the problem of being ineligible for a license to practice law. It is not a very good way to solve the "I don't know what to do with my life" problem, or the "I am afraid that if I follow my true passion I will fail" problem, or the "I am desperate for other people's approval" problem.

Scott Walker's appointee to the University of Wisconsin's board of regents thinks there are too many duplicate degree programs. Some fine republican thinking going on here: I mean seriously, why teach chemistry at UW Madison and UW Milwaukee and UW Green Bay? Just pick one!

A Republican victory against Obamacare at the Supreme Court (and the announcement could happen any day now) could backfire in swing states in 2016. 

A state-by-state analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that about 6.4 million Americans in 34 states that use the federal marketplace would lose a total of $1.7 billion monthly tax credit dollars—an average of $272 per person—and face a net premium increase of 287 percent.

The effects would be particularly perilous in swing states, according to the Kaiser report.

A reminder about the state of employment under various presidents. 

Fareed Zakaria thinks we ought to be listening to Rand Paul more on foreign policy. Nope, the war machine is far too profitable. 

I don’t agree with Rand Paul on many things, including foreign policy. I think some of his positions on civil rights are historically blind, cruel and dangerous. But in the arena of national security, he has time and again raised important, inconvenient questions, only to have them ruled out of order and to be told that he is a crank, far outside the mainstream. In fact, it would be useful and important for Republicans — and Democrats — to stop the name-calling and actually discuss and debate his ideas.

The New York Times has coverage of "The Agency," a Russian semi-national corporation whose responsibility is spreading misinformation in the US through false articles, fake images, and outright trolling in various online forums. I think they should hire! There are many disenfranchised MRAs, racists, and conspiracy nuts who would gladly join in the mayhem. Also, I think this is kind of inverse Orwellianism. Instead of replacing the truth with an authoritative political reality, we have the entire concept of truth and reality undermined for the purpose of, well, I'm not sure. 

In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false...

 The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year.

This article has been making the rounds. Basically there's this professor whose liberal students scare him because he can't ever hurt their feelings or he's getting fired. Vox published a response. +Jason Jones comments here. 

Barack Obama is the greatest gun salesman of all time. 

Shared for +Rebecca Miller :

Han Solo was, at one point prior to Episode IV, married and ran out on his wife. It is now cannon. 

5/28/15 Today's Inquiries

Shh! I'm posting from work.


The Links:

Bernie Sanders throws bomb at Hillary Clinton:

"I'm not going to condemn Hillary and Bill Clinton because they've made a lot of money. [But] that type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world."

Rick Santorum comes tumbling out of the clown car.

More on the effects of Fox News on American politics. This time it's confirmation bias.

Based on when you were born, this handy chart will tell you how much of your life we've been at war. Didn't Foucalt say something about normalizing a state of war?

23 states saw unemployment rates decrease in April.

Are we seeing the start of a rebellion against longer and longer work hours?

a new paper, from two economists at Monash Business School, suggests that the tide may be turning. Using relatively recent data on workers in Australia's six states and two territories, it finds the opposite. As income inequality rose, it finds, Australians decided to work fewer hours. A 1% rise in the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, ends up resulting in a 0.2% decline in working hours.

Solar power is growing so fast that it is beginning to rival the shale gas boom.

Online courses at community colleges are not going well. It's almost as if they need structured personal interaction with an educator in order to succeed! Follow up here.

[H]ere’s an unusual case where scholarly research is producing a clear conclusion: online instruction at community colleges isn’t working. Yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them.

Would graduating more people from college actually reduce inequality?

All of these phenomena suggest that the labor market isn’t working for most employees—problems that aren’t confined to those without a college education—and that suggests the problem isn’t that too few people have college degrees. Rather than focus on education attainment as the solution to inequality, it’s time for policy-makers to move on from the race between education and technology and focus on our stagnant labor market. As Summers said, “the core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs.” The key to reducing inequality is more jobs and a higher demand for labor. In the absence of more jobs, heroic assumptions about educational improvement are likely to deliver only modest economic benefits.

Is there finally real evidence about aid helping the global poor?

A vast randomized trial — the gold standard of evidence — involving 21,000 people in six countries suggests that a particular aid package called the graduation program (because it aims to graduate people from poverty) gives very poor families a significant boost that continues after the program ends. Indeed, it’s an investment. In India, the economic return was a remarkable 433 percent.

What should you study in college to stay ahead of computers?

Here's the impact of the "On Demand" economy.

The Geek Heretic. I need to read the book discussed here:

For twelve years I worked at Microsoft, where, like every other gizmo-happy technologist, I unconsciously embraced a peculiar paradox. It revealed itself in the most innocuous things that the company said. At corporate gatherings, executives would tell us, “You are our greatest asset!” But in their marketing, they would tell customers, “Our technology is your greatest asset!” In other words, what matters most to the company is capable people, but what should matter to the rest of the world is new technology. Somehow what was best for us and what was best for others were two different things.

I had a clutle column at WIRED and then I didn't. More from the front lines of women in tech and tech media. I thought this was especially incisive:

So as far as I can tell, they don’t cover the future. They produce a white male fantasy of the future.

The dehumanizing myth of meritocracy. Meritocracy dehumanizing? I'm surprised I never thought of it in that way before. Obviously we're reducing people down to a very specific set of traits, namely work and income, rather than valuing their humanity. This longform piece looks at the myth of meritocracy in open source coding.

Fertility rates are rising for educated women. I have seen it argued that having children is becoming something only wealthy white americans do.

John Nash passed away suddenly this past week. Here's a great, although long, discussion of his impact on Game Theory.

A chart of the death toll from Qatar's World Cup construction efforts.

How does Star Wars illuminate constitutional law?

I think this is merely evidence of New Jerseyians being more flammable than people from other states.  I mean, what else could it be?