From the site:
In Washington-speak, “means-testing” is a scheme to deny or reduce Medicare and Social Security benefits for people who are “too wealthy” in the name of saving money. It’s a counterproductive, harmful idea, but one that well-intentioned liberals often end up embracing.
From the site:
It was a bad idea from the get-go but new research shows that America’s 401(k) revolution has left us even worse off than we thought. Here’s a look at how we got into this mess and where it will take us if we don’t wise up.
From the site:
Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: “The End of the Segregated Century.” U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated–something this incredible map makes clear in vivd color.
From the site:
Of course, you can understand why these people are so upset. Miss America, after all, is a very powerful position — she signs all of our laws and treaties. That's why the crown should only go to a white girl from Texas with big horse teeth.
But Nina Davuluri just won a beauty contest. She didn't do anything truly evil, like giving people health insurance. But her parents are from India, so she's an Arab. (audience laughter)
http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/19/0146167213501699.full#aff-1
From the site:
Americans may be more narcissistic now than ever, but narcissism is not evenly distributed across social strata. Five studies demonstrated that higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism. Upper-class individuals reported greater psychological entitlement (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2) and narcissistic personality tendencies (Study 2), and they were more likely to behave in a narcissistic fashion by opting to look at themselves in a mirror (Study 3). Finally, inducing egalitarian values in upper-class participants decreased their narcissism to a level on par with their lower-class peers (Study 4). These findings offer novel evidence regarding the influence of social class on the self and highlight the importance of social stratification to understanding basic psychological processes.
http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/27/a-plutocracy-ruled-by-self-centered-jerks/
From the site:
Two studies released last week confirmed what most of us already knew: the ultra-wealthy tend to be narcissistic and have a greater sense of entitlement than the rest of us, and Congress only pays attention to their interests. Both studies are consistent with earlier research.
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/jay-bookman/2013/sep/11/there-tipping-point-wealth-concentration/
From the site:
Mining anonymous tax-return data compiled by the IRS, economist Emmanuel Saez reaches some telling statistical conclusions about the aftermath of the Great Recession and its disparate impact on American families:
http://toomuchonline.org/federal-regulators-finally-mind-the-gap
From the site:
Watching grown men fulminate in public can be an unnerving experience. Michael Piwowar and Daniel Gallagher — two distinctly CEO-friendly members of the five-person federal Securities and Exchange Commission — did plenty of fulminating last week.
http://otherwords.org/trumped-war-welfare/
From the site:
One way the top 1 percent is trying to ease concerns about inequality is pretending that our safety net is too generous to the bottom 1 percent.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101038089
From the site:
The 400 richest Americans are now worth a combined $2 trillion, according to Forbes.
From the site:
If you know anyone who still believes in a "liberal media," here's 15 things everyone would know if there really were a "liberal media" (inspired by Jeff Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/income-inequality_n_3814333.html
From the site:
Income inequality increased dramatically between 1979 and 2007, when a global financial crisis rocked not just the U.S. but the entire world. But maybe things have turned around since then? No. Just take a look at what happened in 2011:
Chris has it right – watch this video to understand how best to achieve political change in our society.
Researcher Paul Piff is really onto something with his research. Google his name to read more about his excellent work.
From the site:
The rich just love to look at themselves in the mirror. And that's only one of many signs that they're more narcissistic than everyone else, according to new research.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/how-dr-king-shaped-my-work-in-economics/?_r=2
From the site:
I had the good fortune to be in the crowd in Washington when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his thrilling “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963. I was 20 years old, and had just finished college. It was just a couple of weeks before I began my graduate studies in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4004
From the site:
In a new version of its report from 1995, the Cato Institute claims, “[t]he current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work.” Cato’s analysis has several fatal flaws, rendering its conclusions meaningless.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/dr-king-the-march-on-washington-and-full-employment/
From the site:
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the historical civil rights march on Washington, a number of analyses have raised hard questions about the lack of economic progress among African-Americans. The WaPo notes, for example, that:
[f]ifty years ago, the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Today, it is 6.6 percent for whites and 12.6 percent for blacks. Over the past 30 years, the average white family has gone from having five times as much wealth as the average black family to 61 / 2 times, according to the Urban Institute.
“If you look at 50 years after the 1960s civil rights movement, the most stubborn and persistent challenge when it comes to the nation’s racial challenge remains in the areas of economics and wealth,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
That’s unquestionably true, and yet, these sweeping analyses risk overlooking some important evidence right there in the data that Dr. King would have recognized as entirely consistent with where he was trying to take the movement when his life was so tragically cut short.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/25/richard_wolff_detroit_a_spectacular_failure
From the site:
Kicking off a series of speeches about the economy, President Obama told a crowd in Illinois on Wednesday that reversing growing inequality and rejuvenating the middle class "has to be Washington’s highest priority." During his remarks, Obama failed to mention the bankruptcy filing by Detroit, where thousands of public workers are now fighting to protect their pensions and medical benefits as the city threatens massive cuts to overcome an estimated $18 billion in debt. Detroit’s bankruptcy "is an example of a failed economic system," says economist Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts. "There are so many other cities in Detroit’s situation, that if the courts decide that it is legal to take away the pension that has been promised to and paid for by these workers, you have [legalized] theft. It is class war, redistributing income from the bottom to the top."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all
From the site:
HAVING the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/ari-berman#
From the site:
I’ve been in Texas this week researching the history of the Voting Rights Act at the LBJ Library. As I’ve been studying how the landmark civil rights law transformed American democracy, I’ve also been closely following how Republicans in North Carolina—parts of which were originally covered by the VRA in 1965—have made a mockery of the law and its prohibition on voting discrimination.
Late last night, the North Carolina legislature passed the country’s worst voter suppression law after only three days of debate. Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog called it “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades” The bill mandates strict voter ID to cast a ballot (no student IDs, no public employee IDs, etc.), even though 318,000 registered voters lack the narrow forms of acceptable ID according to the state’s own numbers and there have been no recorded prosecutions of voter impersonation in the past decade. The bill cuts the number of early voting days by a week, even though 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012. The bill eliminates same-day voter registration during the early voting period, even though 96,000 people used it during the general election in 2012 and states that have adopted the convenient reform have the highest voter turnout in the country. African-Americans are 23 percent of registered voters in the state, but made up 28 percent of early voters in 2012, 33 percent of those who used same-day registration and 34 percent of those without state-issued ID.
From the site:
North Carolina Republicans have introduced a major overhaul of the state's election system, adding dozens of amendments to a voter ID bill that will authorize voter vigilantes, end election day registration, cut early voting, make it harder to register, and even create loony protections against "zombie voters."
From the site:
Sanders tweeted that "the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America."
The statistic correctly compares the combined net worth of the bottom 41.5 percent of American families with the six Walton family members. We think the additional points -- that many people with a negative net worth are not necessarily poor and that percentages about wealth distribution can be deceiving -- are important and interesting. Nevertheless, Sanders’ claim is solid. We rate it True.
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/new-study-wealthy-are-more-unethical
From the site:
Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on other new research from the University of California, Berkeley collaborating this, and the impact of wealth on people’s behavior in a new 10-minute video from PBS (posted at YouTube)
This might help explain why some people like Wal-Mart's Christy Walton can rake in $1.2 million a day in unearned income with stock dividends, while at the same time, refusing to pay her employees a living wage in earned hourly income --- costing the taxpayers $6,000 per employee in government entitlements (aka "wage subsidies"). It seems that some of these people just can't help themselves...they're mentally ill!
From the site:
Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. But forget individual years. That data is noisy. A single year can see its temperatures rocket for reasons having little to do with climate change.
http://www.epi.org/blog/debating-rise-top-1-percent-incomes/
From the site:
Our argument (shocker) is that the rise of the top 1 percent of incomes is not simply the result of a competitive, well-functioning market rewarding skills and capital to the precise degree necessary to elicit their supply. Instead, lots of the rise in top 1 percent of incomes is about the creation and/or redistribution of economic rents.
From the site:
Readers were duly exercised about a paper published by Greg Mankiw which had to go through so many hoops to promote the idea that inequality was the result of merit as to be worthy of our Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity.
Suffice it to say further ridicule of Mankiw is in order, and Parramore provides a useful contribution.
From the site:
Here’s some pretty grim news about U.S. manufacturing -- employment in that sector fell below 12 million this year for the first time since 1946, and is now at the lowest level (11,648,000 manufacturing jobs in November) since March of 1941 (see chart, BLS data here). Since the onset of the recession in December 2007, manufacturing employment fell for 24 consecutive months, as the U.S. economy shed an average of 89,000 manufacturing jobs each month for the last two years.
From the peak manufacturing employment of 19.55 million jobs in 1979, the American manufacturing workforce has shrunk by more than 40%, as almost 8 million manufacturing jobs have been eliminated over the last thirty years, with almost 6 million of those losses taking place just since 2000. And there’s nothing to suggest that the trend won’t continue, so we can expect a continued contraction of U.S. manufacturing employment
But what about manufacturing output? That news is a little better. The chart below shows the decline in manufacturing employment plotted against the Gross Value of Final Products and Nonindustrial Supplies (in billions of constant 2000 dollars), as calculated by the Federal Reserve (data here). In the thirty year period between 1977 and 2007, U.S. manufacturing output doubled from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion, before dropping to a ten-year low in June 2008 of $2.6 trillion, from the contractionary effects of the recession. Manufacturing output has been rebounding lately and it increased in four out of the last five months, after falling in ten out of the previous 11 months, signalling that the economy moved from recession to expansion in the middle of the year.
From the site:
For those that don't know, the GIni Coefficient is a crude way of measuring inequality (You can see the math behind it here). The basic idea is that on a scale of 0-100, 0 would represent a country where everyone had identical amounts of money, and 100 would represent a world in which just one person had all the money and everyone else had nothing.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-political-imbalance-facing-unions-in-america/
From the site:
But allow me to add this, learned from my many years as a DC wonk in that rarified space where economics, politics, and power intersect. The problem unions face in Washington can be summarized thusly: the Republicans dislike them a lot more than the Democrats like them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=0
Very prescient Paul Krugman op-ed from 2007 – predicts the 2012 election results.
From the site:
But to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base — and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.
And both Hispanics and Asians, another growing force in the electorate, are getting the message. Last year they voted overwhelmingly Democratic, by 69 percent and 62 percent respectively.
In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/10/1997231/richwine-resigns-heritage/
From the site:
Jason Richwine, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s report on the cost of the current immigration bill, has resigned after it emerged that his graduate dissertation on immigration was premised on the idea that Latinos were less intelligent than whites.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/05/09/18149430-a-familiar-economic-foe?lite
From the site:
There's no shortage of issues Americans would like to see elected policymakers address, but Gallup this week found that job creation and economic growth remain the public's top priority -- by a sizable margin.
With that in mind, President Obama will appear in Austin in just a couple of hours, placing renewed emphasis on his economic agenda and hoping to pressure Congress to focus on the issue that's been largely forgotten among many lawmakers: the fragile economic recovery.
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/the-facts-on-snap-part-3-snap-is-efficient/
From the site:
- SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program. Each year, states pull a representative sample of cases (totaling about 50,000 nationally) and review their decisions on which applicants received benefits and how much. Federal officials then double-check a subsample of the cases. States face federal financial sanctions if they don’t lower high error rates.
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/the-facts-on-snap-part-2-snap-supports-work/
From the site:
About two-thirds of SNAP recipients aren’t expected to work, mostly because they are children, elderly, or disabled. But, among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, 58 percent work while receiving SNAP — and 82 percent work in the year before or after receiving SNAP.
With the Senate and House Agriculture Committees considering changes next week to SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps), we are beginning a series of posts today that will lay out basic facts about the nation's most important anti-hunger program. This first one starts with the people it serves.
econjared: Reinhart & Rogoff shoot back…with a popgun: http://t.co/HFGdGz1yGY
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/econjared/status/327833211424092161
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Reuters: .@cafreeland asks: are we seeing the twilight of the American middle class? http://t.co/Czi6Taj0LF
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/Reuters/status/327854100819607553
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NYTimeskrugman: OP-ED COLUMNIST; The 1 Percent's Solution http://t.co/veIqxXx9gR
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/NYTimeskrugman/status/327611711987277824
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NicholsUprising: President Obama in #WestTX: "America needs towns like West. That's what makes America great." So, so true. @thenation @WeGotEd @edshow
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/NicholsUprising/status/327531322316836864
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LOLGOP: AMERICA WILL NOT LET BUSINESS TRAVELERS LANGUISH FOR HOURS! That's for cancer patients and disabled vets and immobile seniors.
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/LOLGOP/status/327587126092894208
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http://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-dangerous-debt-ceiling-2011-8
From the site:
And though nobody takes the "confidence fairy" argument very seriously, pro-cutting politicians are armed with some intellectual heft: Frequently during the debate we heard politicians cite the work of economists Carmen Reinhart (University of Maryland) and Ken Rogoff (Harvard), who have argued over the last couple of years that higher public debts contribute to lower GDP growth. And, conveniently, they've made a big deal over this idea that a 90% debt-to-GDP ratio represents some kind of tipping point, over which growth slows fast. Their ideas are outlined in the book This Time It's Different, which has been a huge hit.
From the site:
There’s been an enormous amount of buzz since a study was released this week questioning the methodology in a published paper. The paper under fire is Reinhart and Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt” and the firing is being done by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin in their article “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff.” Herndon, Ash, and Pollin claim to have found “spreadsheet errors, omission of available data, weighting, and transcription” in the original research which, when corrected, significantly reduce the magnitude of the original findings. These corrections were possible because of openness in economics, and this openness needs to be extended to make all computational publications reproducible.
http://baselinescenario.com/2013/04/18/more-bad-excel/
From the site:
Now the macroeconomic world has its version of the death penalty debate, in the famous paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin released a paper earlier this week in which they tried to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff. They found two spreadsheet errors, a questionable choice about excluding data, and a dubious weighting methodology, which together undermine Reinhart and Rogoff’s most widely-cited claim: that national debt levels above 90 percent of GDP tend to reduce economic growth.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/04/05/report-partisanship-and-diversity-on-the-sunday/193482
From the site:
Each Network Hosted More Guests From The Right Than The Left. Republicans and conservatives outpaced Democrats and progressives on all four networks. Fox News Sunday had the largest discrepancy, with 53 percent of guests being Republicans or conservatives and only 24 percent being Democrats or progressives.
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/the-facts-about-disability-insurance/
From the site:
National Public Radio (NPR) is running a series of stories about the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program. Its first was extremely unbalanced and repeated some of the oft-claimed myths about DI. Here’s the truth.
DI provides modest but vital benefits to workers who become unable to perform substantial work due to a serious medical impairment, as I testified last week before a House subcommittee.
Most of the recent rise in DI’s rolls stems from demographic factors: the aging of the baby boom generation, the growth in women’s employment, and Social Security’s rising retirement age. In fact, when you adjust for these factors, the program has grown only modestly (see chart). Other factors — including the economic downturn — also have contributed to the program’s growth, but its costs and caseloads are generally in line with past projections.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/the-brave-and-serious-mr-ryan/237008/
From the site:
I mentioned earlier that if asked to choose an adjective to describe the budget plan presented by Rep. Paul Ryan, I would suggest "partisan" or "gimmicky," as opposed to "serious" or "brave." Most budget proposals are both partisan and gimmicky, so this is no particular knock against Rep. Ryan. But it's worth mentioning because so much of the pundit-sphere (excluding the Atlantic's Derek Thompson) has received the plan as a dramatic step forward in clear thinking about our fiscal future.
Paul Krugman mentioned the Max Planck quote (see below) in a recent column. Matthew Yglesias makes generally the same point here:
Richard Tsukamasa Green rightly notes that Thomas Kuhn would not be surprised by the fact that the Great Recession has barely changed anyone's minds about anything. Instead, as Scott Sumner (at the end) and Paul Krugman both in different ways imply if the intellectual climate changes for the better it will be because it changes what subjects and methods young people think are interesting.
"Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out," said Max Planck, "science advances one funeral at a time."
That's one of those quotes where I'm not sure the famous guy to whom it's attributed ever actually said it. But it correctly captures the contours of change. Ideas that are at the margins in one cohort may become mainstream in the next because they seem more appealing or fruitful or relevant. But already established figures very rarely change their views about anything that's important to them. Instead they apply their intelligence to rationalizing their own desire to not switch views. And since we're normally not interested in the opinions of stupid people, we find that smart people are very good at applying reason to the task of rationalization.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/11/are-republicans-beyond-saving/
From the site:
The spectacle of the Republicans, like teenagers longing to be invited to the prom, floundering about in search of more popularity with American voters, would be comical if it didn’t present the sad picture of a once great and proud party—the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower—working its way into near irrelevance. The Republican Party is having its own form of PTSD. According to one of the most respected party elders the Republicans firmly believed that the voters would reject Barack Obama for a second term and deliver the Senate back into their hands. Wishful thinking combined with erroneous polling assumptions left them totally unprepared for the thumping loss they sustained and they are still in something of a state of shock. “They’re still close in time to that event,” the party elder said. “You need to keep that in mind. Right now they’re groping around in a dark room.”
