4/3/15 Today's Inquiries

April showers.


The Links:

The Iran deal is astonishingly good. That won't stip the GOP and Israel from completely blowing it up and putting us back on the path to war. Diplomacy be damned, there's money to be made.

Ben Bernanke explains why rates are so low. Parts 1 and 2.

The state of the economy, not the Fed, is the ultimate determinant of the sustainable level of real returns. This helps explain why real interest rates are low throughout the industrialized world, not just in the United States.

What is holding back labor productivity growth?

Taken at face value, the chart suggests that a primary reason for the sluggish average labor productivity growth we have seen over the past three years is that capital spending growth has not kept up with growth in hours worked—a reduction in capital deepening. Declining capital deepening is highly unusual.

The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis.

We saw massive overbuilding in most areas of non-residential construction in this period. Even seven years later you can walk around the downtown of a relatively prosperous city like Washington and still see vacant retail and office space everywhere. This bubble was destined to burst, with or without a financial crisis.

As an aside, we send teachers to prison for cooking the books but why don't we jail any bankers?

I used to be in favor of raising the SS retirement and early retirement ages as an easy way to fix cost overruns. I've since changed my tune and working in the ER, seeing numerous geriatric patients with the Docs, has further reinforced my views. Old people need to get the hell out of the workforce and their families can't be on the hook for caring for their elderly relatives. Research, apparently, bears this out. I liked this bit:

In 2008, only 74.4 percent of 25 year olds who had less than a high school education survived to age 65, while 92.1 percent of their peers with a college degree or its equivalent years of education would do so. Higher levels of education are associated with higher income, access to better health care and nutrition, better odds of survival to age 65, and longer post-retirement life expectancies. However, the retirement age for Social Security is the same for everyone.

Interesting thoughts on gentrification. The quote is about low density housing in urban areas, for example, people who challenge scatter-site housing schemes but I think it applies equally to suburban homeowners. And the suburbs are where the poor increasingly live.

Homeowners in low-density neighborhoods will fight like tigers to preserve what they have. We’ve given them the legal tools to frequently win that fight — and if you try to take those tools away, they’ll fight that, too.

Chicago is in shockingly bad fiscal shape. They use all sorts of accounting shenanigans to hide that fact.

How much does job search matter for job switching? Is this an indicator of increasing inequality too? If employers are hiring people they already know and who aren't searching for jobs then it's personal connections that matter more than skills and training.

If workers aren’t searching for new employment, then it appears employers are the ones conducting a search. Recruitment and poaching are likely ways employers do this, the authors point out. But how can researchers measure employer recruitment efforts? The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every month, measures job openings. But Carrillo-Tudella, Hobijn, Perkowski, and Visschers cite research that finds over 40 percent of hires at firms were for jobs that were never publically advertised.

I think this is the biggest barrier to the further automation of healthcare, or Big Data can't fix everything:

If you add the inaudible alerts, those that signal with flashing lights and text-based messages, there were 2,507,822 unique alarms in one month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false. Add in the bed alarms, the ventilators, and the computerized alerts . . . well, you get the idea.

The economics of The Economist.

More on the continuing saga of those poor saps (literally, they were mostly poo people) who were students at Corinthian colleges when they went under and sold out to a debt servicing firm.

With the election around the corner, here's a handy guide on how to research all the money in politics.

Being poor, meanwhile, is basically a crime.

Overconsumption and overpopulation in pictures.

And, more evidence that most recycling is bullshit. But highly profitable for the waste disposal business.

One problem with literary tattoos.

Why does whisky taste so good? Here comes the science:

Lastly, teachers aren't always the smartest crayon in the pencil bucket: