Yearly Archives: 2013

Cathy O’Neil: College Ranking Models

Last week Obama began to make threats regarding a new college ranking system and its connection to federal funding. Here’s an excerpt of what he was talking about, from this WSJ article:

The president called for rating colleges before the 2015 school year on measures such as affordability and graduation rates—”metrics like how much debt does the average student leave with, how easy is it to pay off, how many students graduate on time, how well do those graduates do in the workforce,” Mr. Obama told a crowd at the University at Buffalo, the first stop on a two-day bus tour.

David Dayen: Click-Bait Law Enforcement as Schneiderman Ignores Systemic Wall Street Fraud, Sues Trump University

The pitch-perfect parody of the year goes to The Onion for their editorial from CNN.com’s managing editor (whose actual name was used in the story), “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning.”

It goes on from there, basically defining the phenomenon of click-bait, where websites run deliberately titillating stories with little or no redeeming value in a desperate stab for attention.

I think yesterday counts as the first-ever clickbait lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Why the US Economy Won’t Fully Recover

Yves here. It almost seems quaint to think that someone (in reality, large swathes of the investor and orthodox economics community) thinks the US economy will someday bear a passing resemblance to its former bubble-stoked vigor.

The US Wastes Enough Energy Each Year to Power the UK for Seven Years

Yves here. Let me underscore that the source for this article is not a granola-head organization but the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the US national labs, or more formally, the United States Department of Energy national laboratories and technology centers.

Links 8/26/13

Stephanie Kelton: The Good Society: Lessons Not (Yet) Learned

John Kenneth Galbriath’s book, The Good Society: The Humane Agenda, creates a blueprint for a more just, prosperous and stable world. I’m re-reading it for the nth time because I continue to believe we might just get there one day. Indeed, I’m convinced we must.

David Dayen: Productivity Rose 7.7% Post-Great Recession; Workers Have Seen None of It

I’ve said this before in other venues, but this really is the chart that explains modern America:

Fed’s Jackson Hole Participants to QE-Exit Whacked Emerging Economies: Drop Dead

The latest Fed confab at Jackson Hole is demonstrating that central bankers were so keen to avoid taking much blame for the global financial crisis that they also failed to learn critical lessons from it. That lapse in turn is directly related to the present emerging markets upheaval that has the potential to morph into something worse.

How Milton Friedman’s NAIRU Has Increased Inequality, Damaging Innovation and Growth

Yves here. Advocates of Galtian “winner take all” markets frequently invoke both moralistic and efficiency-based arguments for more income inequality. The problem with their argument that “creators” should get to hoard their winnings is that their success does not take place in a vacuum, but is built on the back of generations of cultural, technological, and procedural advances, as well as public-provided infrastructure. And as the post below describes, the idea that a more Darwinian economic order produces higher growth is also spurious.

Links 8/25/13

ObamaCare Staggers Toward the October 1 Finish Line

ObamaCare’s capricious lack of fairness is, I think, a subject readers are now familiar with. Clearly, a program as big as ObamaCare will help some people; my beef is that ObamaCare, by virtue of its system architecture, will not and cannot treat all people equally, as single payer Medicare for All would do. People will be sent to Happyville or to Pain City randomly, and not when buying flat-screen TVs, but when buying a complex product costing many thousands of dollars that may (or may not) prevent bankruptcy or save a life. Moreover, ObamaCare’s system architecture, in consequence of Obama’s decision to preserve and protect the rental streams extracted from the body politic by the private health insurance industry, is needlessly complex, resulting in requirements abandoned and deadlines slipped, as is normal when a bloatware software project goes out of control. It may be that Obama’s public relations machine and career “progressive” enablers will be able to paper over these issues during ObamaCare’s launch phase, but they will become increasingly evident to the general public forced to enter, mandated to enter, the ObamaCare “marketplace” (the Exchanges). Whether what the general public experiences matters to policy makers is another question, of course.

So this week I’d like to take a quick survey of major ObamaCare implementation issues: The state of the California exchanges, the Pruitt v. Sebelius case, and whether ObamaCare will “make projection” and sign up 7 million people.

Col. Morris Davis Interviewed about Manning Trial: “We talk about the war on terrorism, and it seems more like a war on information.”

By The Unknown Transcriber. Originally published at Corrente.

From The Scott Horton Show program notes for August 21:

Col. Morris Davis, former Guantanamo chief prosecutor, discusses his resignation after “torture memo” author Jim Haynes took over command; how much time Bradley Manning is likely to serve of his 35 year sentence; the chilling effect on potential government whistleblowers; and why the war on terror is really a war on information.

Podcast here, and transcript below the fold:

Links 8/24/13

“The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History”

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

This is a Zeitgeist Watch piece, or what Yves calls a “mother-in-law story” (“My mother-in-law says…”). In other words, an anecdote. But maybe a little bit more than that? Anyhow, I’m in the local coffee shop…

US Households Continue to Bleed

From Unconventional Economist, who has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs. Originally published at MacroBusiness

Two former Census Bureau officials working at Sentier Research have released a new report claiming that median US household income is recovering, but remains 6.5% below its pre-recession level in real (inflation adjusted) terms: