5/7/15 Today's Inquiries

Nothing to report today. Umm, I dunno, allergy season?



The Links:

MIT thinks the government should pour money into current solar technology and implement solar power widely across the US ASAP rather than continue to fund long term R&D projects. Yeah, look at Germany, they've had several days this past year where they were 60-70% renewables. Factor in things like Musk's battery and we've got a chance here.

Or is Tesla's Powerwall battery basically worthless?

But if its sole purpose is to provide backup power to a home, the juice it offers is but a sip. The model puts out just 2 kilowatts of continuous power, which could be pretty much maxed out by a single vacuum cleaner, hair drier, microwave oven or a clothes iron. The battery isn’t powerful enough to operate a pair of space heaters; an entire home facing a winter power outage would need much more. In sunnier climes, meanwhile, it provides just enough energy to run one or two small window A/C units. 

Swarthmore College, meanwhile, is not going to divest its $1.8 billion endowment from fossil fuel.

And science takes it on the jaw in the House Space Science and Technology committee. I am not a scientist and neither can you!

Huckabee tumbled out of the clown car this week, here's why he will fail terribly.

Evidently aware that he can no longer count on fundraising in sanctuaries, Huckabee has turned to shilling for bullshit diabetes cures on internet infomercials to bring in cash. This, too, is an old trick in the celebrity evangelical book: After notorious televangelist Jim Bakker was jailed for multiple counts of fraud, he returned to the airwives to hawk survivalist food kits for the apocalyptically minded. Celebrity evangelicals have always been good at making money, in part because of what they're willing to do for it. But the age of their outsized political influence seems to have ended.

On the ground in Iowa.
Walker @ 21%, Paul and Rubio @ 13, Cruz @ 12, Huckabee @ 11, Carson @ 7 and Bush @ 5.

The fall and rise of income inequality. 2 useful graphs.

Thinking outside the box on inequality. Preach:

Over the last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.

Over that same period, the earnings of workers in the bottom half of the income pile have progressed little. American society has buckled under the strain.

The actual size of government? Measured by the taxes we pay, it was about 25 percent of our gross national product in 1970.It is still about 25 percent of our G.D.P. today. And the share of our wealth spent on the poor, apart from money devoted to the rising cost of health care, has not changed very much, either.

And yet there are other tools. In the furious partisan bickering, the debate has bypassed all the other ways the government affects the distribution of the nation’s prosperity, selectively placing its thumb on the scales.

Want your dream job out of college? Just be born rich.

Graphs about quantitative easing. With commentary from Brad DeLong.

1. American financial markets did not expect QE to do much.
2. Nevertheless, QE had substantial effects: whenever the Federal Reserve went on a long-bond buying spree, those who had sold the bonds took a nontrivial share of their cash and piled into stocks.
3. That is the way it is supposed to work for QE to be effective.

The housing crisis which begot the Great Recession caused a miniature Great Migration.

We knew that poor neighborhoods in Cleveland or Jacksonville would suddenly have loan brokers going door to door, usually to houses where the resident had equity, on a quest to steal it. They saddled them with high-cost mortgages or home equity lines of credit, and when everything crashed the lenders provided little to no relief, to say nothing of the government. I remember stories around the 2010 election of candidates sending out volunteers to walk precincts, and they would only find one or two occupied homes on a street. There are parts of this country that looked like ghost towns. And the burden wore heavily on people of color.

Here's a pair of posts about our improving demographics. I think this is one of the most positive and ignored stories of the past 2 years. A population with moderate growth rates is essential to long term economic success. Moreover, it makes liberal welfare-state programs far more solvent. 2nd article here.

Changes in demographics are an important determinant of economic growth, and although most people focus on the aging of the "baby boomer" generation, the movement of younger cohorts into the prime working age is another key story in coming years. 

Two posts about our the continuing drama in Baltimore. First we have The Long, Painful, and Repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore. Basically, for African Americans the US is a failed state.

These shocks happened, at least 80 years of them, to the same communities in Baltimore, as they did in cities across the country. Neighborhoods weakened by mass incarceration were the same ones divided by highways. Families cornered into subprime loans descended from the same families who'd been denied homeownership — and the chance to build wealth — two generations earlier. People displaced today by new development come from the same communities that were scattered before in the name of "slum clearance" and the progress brought by Interstate highways.

Second is a reconsideration of The Wire under our present context. Well worth reading though I will excerpt sections below.

The connective thread of every Wire season, as described by show co-creator David Simon was that when individuals, no matter how heroic, fight to change entrenched power structures and bureaucracies—whether in the form of City Hall politics, police, or organized crime—the individual is going to lose...

That David Simon could tell people with bricks in their hand to "go home," and have no direct words of condemnation for the violence displayed by the police made me remember my friend Dashon—from Baltimore—who told me he would never watch The Wire because he believed it to be "copaganda," since it was created not only by Simon but by longtime Baltimore police officer Ed Burns... 

Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people's ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I've met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday's march? In the season about the drug war and "Hamsterdam," where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity—and frankly the luxury—of David Simon's pessimism. Perhaps this pessimism, alongside the adrenalizing violence, created, as Jamilah Lemieux put it in Ebony, a show steeped in the voyeurism of "Black pain and death" for a liberal white audience that "cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray."

A bonus article:

Baltimore’s innovation was the use of government legislation to achieve systematic, citywide race separation.  “Nothing like it can be found in any statute book or ordinance record of this country,” the New York Times wrote.  “It is unique in legislation, Federal, State, or municipal — an ordinance so far-reaching in the logical sequence that must result from its enforcement that it may be said to mark a new era in social legislation.”  Baltimore thus became a national leader in residential segregation.

Police, our civic guardians, have killed 1500 people in the past 16 months.

I had no idea this was a thing:

Most commentary about Citizens United has focused on the new leeway it grants corporations to spend on elections. However, Citizens United also makes it legal for corporate managers to campaign for their preferred political candidates in the workplace. Businesses can even go so far as to mandate that their workers participate in politics in certain ways – such as attending a rally for a favored politician. That happened during the 2012 election, when an Ohio coal mine required its workers to attend a rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Miners were not paid for their time, but some said they were afraid they could lose their jobs if they did not participate in the rally. 

A breakdown of corporate profits.

Although the US corporate income tax is an almost continual subject of dispute, most people don't know any details about what kinds of corporations that earn the profits. For example, are the companies earning profits disproportionately large or small? What industries earn the most in profits? How much corporate profit falls outside the corporate income tax, because it is earned by "Schedule S" corporations which distribute profits to their owners, instead?

War, war never changes.

Horton's experience is a telling example of the many ways moral injuries can affect veterans. 

Stephen Colbert is donating $800,000 to South Carolina teachers.

Comedian Stephen Colbert announced Thursday that he would fund every existing grant request South Carolina public school teachers have made on the education crowdfunding websiteDonorsChoose.org.