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.