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Showing posts from July, 2012

Inflation and Racism, ctd

I was struggling with this post yesterday—must have rewritten it five or six times. The basic point is that, as far as there is any consensus in economics, there is no danger of serious of hyperinflation. Yet comparisons are routinely made to Zimbabwe to argue against further stimulus, while millions languish in poverty and misery. Like racism, this is a major moral error which should bring shame on those who hold it. Can you think of a better way to put it?

Inflation Paranoia Is Like Racism

[I'm blogging at Political Animal this weekend, and I wonder what you guys think of this cross-post .] For most of human history racially-based prejudice has been very common. It’s simple, easily understood, and based on deep psychological roots. Generalizing things based on how they look makes a lot of sense most of the time, but taken too far it can lead to monstrous results. Inflation paranoia is like that, on a smaller scale. It’s a simple, intuitive, easily-understood sort of belief which can lead to catastrophic mass suffering. Witness this prediction from Peter Schiff, pointed out by Paul Krugman: SCHIFF: You know, look, I know inflation is going to get worse in 2010. Whether it’s going to run out of control or it’s going to take until 2011 or 2012, but I know we’re going to have a major currency crisis coming soon. It’s going to dwarf the financial crisis and it’s going to send consumer prices absolutely ballistic, as well as interest rates and unemployment. Though

Weekend Jams

Really digging this Madeon chap. (As it turns out , he actually just turned eighteen.) Good show:  

Salmon River Report

The truck and the boat. The first thing you need to know about my kind of river trip is that it's not "whitewater rafting." That boat you see on the trailer is my folks' dory, and it's rigid, made out of wood (though you can also make them out of aluminum, foam, or plastic). Those kinds of boats are more fun, more difficult to row, and especially if they're wood, extremely vulnerable to rocks. If a kayak is like a whitewater motorcycle, and a raft is your sensible Toyota Corolla, a dory would be a BMW. A bit pricey and silly, but well-built and a joy to operate. We also took a raft, which I rowed. Rafts (that is, inflatable boats) are easier to row, a bit cheaper, can bounce over rocks where a dory would get smashed, and can roll up into a smallish size. However, they're also sluggish, often leak, and with new techniques, are approaching parity with the cost of a dory. On the trip one of our friends had built himself a wooden dory from scratch in 2.5

New Madeon!

Just can't get enough of this kid. And I'll stop calling him a kid when he turns 18.

I'm back!

Day I Can't Remember and Wouldn't Want to Well, it was a great trip with my folks down the Salmon. I'll give you a more detailed update in a bit, but in brief it was about a week, we took four dories (here's a picture of one of those), four rafts, and I rowed my own boat (a raft). We started from the Corn Creek put-in and did our take-out slightly above Riggins. It's good to be back, though it was marvelous being disconnected from everything. The Great Electronic Hivemind has a way of denting one's focus that I'm going to try to avoid more in the future. As in this idea of the Slow Web --I like that a lot. Finally, thanks very much to my guest bloggers! You guys are the best. That's the first time I've done that and it worked out rather well, I'd say. More to come soon.

Americans Disapprove of Supreme Court More Post-ACA

A new New York Times   poll finds that Americans' opinion of the Supreme Court fell in the aftermath of the health care decision: The nation is now evenly divided, with 41 percent of Americans saying they approve of the job the court is doing and the same share voicing disapproval, according to a new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News. In a poll a few weeks before the health care decision, the court’s approval rating was 44 percent and its disapproval rating 36 percent. More than half of Americans said the decision in the health care case was based mainly on the justices’ personal or political views. Only about 3 in 10 of them said the decision in the case was based mainly on legal analysis. This surprise anyone else? If the Court had truly voted along it's political preferences, I would have expected a 5-4 decision to at least toss the mandate out, if not strike down the entire law. But Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberal justices to uph

Internet-Proofing Malls

A interesting article in the New York Times  today on the future of malls: Glimcher Realty Trust , which owns and manages shopping malls, is experimenting with making them Internet-proof. The company concedes that if shoppers can buy something online, they will. So it is trying to fill one of its malls, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with businesses that do more than sell stuff.   There are still clothing-only retailers at the mall,   Scottsdale Quarter , but more than half of the stores offer dining or some other experience that cannot be easily replicated on the Web. That has Glimcher executives taking some unconventional approaches to finding suitable tenants — like testing out laser salons, getting hairstyling lessons and watching movies in a theater that serves food. Matt Yglesias and others have been talking about the "end of retail" for a while now and I'm on board. There's just no way brick-and-mortar stores can compete with the convenience of online shopping, e

Eminent Domain and Underwater Mortgages

Hey guys. I'm Danny and I'm interning at the Washington Monthly this summer. I'll be a senior at Duke University next year where I'm majoring in economics and public policy. I have my own blog at Across All Sports , which was mainly sports-focused but I've now expanded into political and policy blogging. Feel free to go check it out though I admit I don't update it as frequently as I would like. And big thanks to Ryan for letting me add a few posts here while he's off crushing the rapids out West. Hopefully I can live up to the excellent posts he normally puts up. So let's jump right in: I recently posted an article on the Monthly about the government acting on behalf of a private company using eminent domain to buy underwater mortgages at a slight discount. The company would then lower the principal on the mortgage to bring the loan back above water and allow the homeowner to refinance at a lower rate. The company would make a profit from buy

Thinking real hard while watching TV

On "Morning Joe" yesterday, Joe Scarborough took a stand against President Obama's plan to raise taxes on income above $250,000, saying that if you're a small business owner making $265,000, raising taxes during these difficult economic times will burden you so much and make you so much less likely to hire more workers. (Sorry, I can't be bothered to find you the quotes showing exactly what he said.) I guess he used $265,000 because that's only, what, five times the median household income in this country, and any number beyond that would seem to validate the point that these people who might pay higher taxes on their income above $250,000 next year are rich enough that they can afford it. As I listened to Joe pity those poor small business owners struggling to get by with only a quarter million dollars a year, I did some basic math: Of the $265,000, it's only $15,000  that's going to be affected by the rates reverting to pre-2001 levels. A

Vacation Time!

I'm heading out of town for awhile, going on a trip with my parents in northern Idaho on the Salmon River. Therefore you probably won't hear from me until about July 24th. (So excited!) I have, however, gotten a couple of guest bloggers, Minjae Park and Danny Vinik. I encourage them to post as little or as often as they like (make sure you introduce yourselves, guys). With that, I leave you. Be back soon!

Power Failures in South Africa

Sorry for the light posting folks, I've been real busy trying to prepare for a river trip coming up next week. But I had a quick thought when thinking about the recent ginormous power failures here compared to my two years in the Peace Corps. (James Fallows has some good thoughts here , here , and here .) So, the background: we had a huge storm here, and the power was out at my house for almost five days. When I was in South Africa, this never happened. My village , about 100 km away from the nearest sizable town, way out on the rim of the Kalahari, would lose power pretty frequently during the summer from lightning storms, but it would almost always be back on within 12-24 hours. These lightning storms , by the way, were by far the most intense I have ever experienced. Bolts so close together that there was more light than darkness, and a continuous cannonade of thunder. Wind that tore off part of my roof. But the longest period of outage that we had during those two years was

This One's For You

This cat is awesome: (You know who you are.)

Book Announcement

So, I'm heading off for a vacation for the next few days, so posting will be pretty light until next week. In the meantime I'd like to announce that I'll be putting a book out, probably sometime in the next several months. It's a collection of short stories from my father and myself. Longtime readers know that I've been posting my dad's stuff here for a long time, and it will be some of that material. It's partly to just get all that collected in the same place, but there will be some new stuff as well. It will be self-published (if you're a publisher, feel free to contact me), done as a family thing and to see how the system works. If you like good adventure stories, you'll like it. More news to follow as I finish compiling and editing. Happy Fourth everyone, and I hope all is well out there. As always, thanks for reading and commenting.

Central Banks and Inflation, ctd

This is what I was talking about : Doesn't additional easing amount to little more than pushing on a string? It does not, in my view. The reason is that, in my opinion, a determined central bank cannot fail to raise inflation expectations. The Fed has the ability to create as much money as it wants and can use that money to purchase every scrap of federal-government debt, every scrap of outstanding mortgage-backed securities backed by federal housing agencies, and as much foreign exchange as other governments will sell it. It strains credulity to think that the Fed could use its printing press to entirely fund the government and most of the mortgage market and to devalue the dollar with reckless abandon without having an impact on inflation expectations. In practice, it seems to take nothing like that to move expectations; a bit of tweaked language or a few hundred billion in QE purchases are enough to do the trick. If you concede that the Fed can raise inflation expectation

Programming Update

Sorry for the downtime, folks, the power has been out at my place. Above you see my backyard, featuring a victim from the DC storm. Trees fall over surprisingly easily here. In case you didn't notice, I was blogging at Political Animal over the weekend. Here are a few of the better posts: 1. A view from our dystopian future . The power was (and is!) out at my place, and I had to hunt around for a cafe that wasn't packed. Thus, a bit of a rant about climate change. 2. Drug policy and argumentative positioning . Self-proclaimed moderates should recognize the value of the wings. 3. Generational warfare . Trying to find some common ground between young and old. 4. Batman as financial regulator . The banksters are the real lawbreakers in this world. 5. Better ways to promote public health . Liberals should lay off the elitist paternalism. It's annoying. Hope everyone made it through the storm okay. Regularly scheduled posting should resume soon.