Forms of Inquiry: 1/27/14 Today's Inquiries

These snowstorm spectaculars remind me exactly how much Ney York has an outsized influence on the media.

The Links:

I'm trying to wrap my head around the situation in Greece this week. Krugman has a pretty good summary with links to some other pretty good summaries. Basically, we're not in the same boat as we were in the Summer of 2010 and again in 2011. Back then, all the greek debt was held by German and French banks. Those banks' positions were so large that no single country in the EU had enough money to bail them out if the Greeks defaulted. The solution was to have the ECB and other central authorities buy that debt. And they did. Today, the vast majority of the Greek debt is held by the public - that is, by the ECB. I feel like that makes an EU exit far more likely but far less damaging. Also, I like the point that the debt is basically a phantom at this point: an imagined sum which could be anything depending on what the policy makers decide to do. Maybe they roll it over. Maybe they ask for lots of concessions. Maybe they seek payment in gyros and olives. At this point, it is all a political game and not an actual financial problem. More here.

You probably aren't surprised, but Wall St. is the biggest threat to the American middle class.

What role did credit play in replacing wage growth in the 2000s?

But when Adelino, Severino, and Schoar look at the individual level they find a positive correlation. In other words, mortgage credit was going to individuals who were seeing positive income growth. The authors show that the borrowers who were receiving the credit weren’t those at the bottom of the income ladder, but rather those at the middle and the top. And the credit growth appeared to be in proportion to income growth: The debt-income-ratio didn’t appear to change much during the bubble years.

Good news everyone! The Obama administration is going to open the Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling. Still think he's not a republican?

The bottom line is this: Energy has contributed to job creation, but so have many other industries.

Were oil and gas jobs the primary source of job growth following the great recession? Not so much, but that doesn't stop people from saying it like it's true.

Nursing homes are increasingly asking to have power of attorney over their patients. Mostly so they can extract income from their senile and demented patients.

The Koch consortium is planning to spend a record amount of money on the next election. Remember, it's not just about the presidency. It's also about state and local elections, which have been areas of success for right wing activists.

So let's watch several 2016 hopefuls try to be one-up each other in praising the Kochs.

RUBIO: No, here's the point. I believe in freedom of speech. I think that political spending and political activism is a form of protected speech. There is a gentleman out there who has radical environmental ideas, who has spent tens of millions of dollars, lost most of his races but spent tens of millions of dollars attacking Republicans who didn't want to support his radical environmental agenda. He has a right to do that! I believe in freedom of speech and I believe that spending money on campaigns is a form of political speech that is protected under the Constitution. And the ones who seem to have a problem with it are the ones that only want unions to be able to do it, their friends in Hollywood to be able to do it, and their friends in the press to be able to do it.

Here's your roundup of the latest anti-science bills in front of state legislatures. I wonder how many states have passed the same bill year after year?

So, business leaders in Iowa are worried that climate change is going to harm corn crops. How will this play out when all the climate denying republicans show up for the primaries?

Nursing homes are increasingly asking to have power of attorney over their patients. Mostly so they can extract income from their senile and demented patients.

Politicians are supporting the Comcast Time Warner merger with letters ghostwritten by Comcast.Corruption comes to Roswell, GA.

On August 21st, 2014, Mayor Jere Wood of Roswell, Georgia, sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission expressing emphatic support for Comcast’s controversial effort to merge with Time Warner Cable.

Climate driven technical change: seasonality and the invention of agriculture. Well, at least there's a precedent for humanity surviving climate change.

Cities and he environment, a first order effect.