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Showing posts from August, 2012

New Madeon!

Hasn't had a bad one yet.

PM Jams

Old school.

Capital Gains Taxes Aren't About Investment

Will Wilkinson, citing Econ 101, says old Mitt " 13.9% " Romney might be paying too much in taxes: In any case, the substantive intellectual question is whether it is a good idea to reduce capital-gains taxes, either a little or a lot. If it's a bad idea to raise rates, then Mr Romney might not be paying too little . If it's a good idea to cut rates, then he he might be paying too much . Now, I happen to be in broad agreement with Scott Sumner, who argued in an episode of "Economics by invitation" earlier this year that "The proper tax rate on capital income is zero". Indeed, I agree with Mr Ryan when he says :  "Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy. Mainstream economics, not to mention common sense, teaches that raising taxes on any activity generally results in less of it. Economics and common sense also teach that the size of a nation’s capi

Is Autism Actually an Autoimmune Disorder?

This is just a first pass at this article , but it's very good and tracks quite closely with the little that I know about the subject. Money quote: Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged. The idea is that autism is one of a whole slew of disorders that have been increasing at a galloping rate, all tied to autoimmune problems, and the problem is a too-clean environment is leading to poorly calibrated immune systems. I have a special interest in this because my father (an otherwise quite healthy guy in good shape) was diagnosed with Type I diabetes awhile back. That kind (which has little to do with your diet) has also been on the increase , and some have postulated a similar hypothesis there. This theory has been around for awhile (check

RIP Neil Armstrong

Devastated. ...adding, strange voice, but amazing how precise and controlled he sounded. Quite good at speaking for such a notorious recluse.

My Shutterstock Career Begins

This is a chunk from the cover of the latest Washington Monthly: Full article here . Yegads.

The Context of Chris Hayes' Racism Quote

Last Saturday, Chris Hayes had Richard Belzer, the actor and comedian on the show, and during and exchange with him, said  "It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other." Alex Tabarrok attacked  criticized him for that, citing survey data showing equal racist representation in each party, while John Sides added some nuance showing racial resentment weighted more towards Republicans. Kevin Drum has the best case for Chris, I think, saying that while there are surely racists in every party... [Republicans] tolerate racism in their ranks far more than Democrats do. Bernie Goldberg, a liberal turned conservative, admitted this on air earlier this year when he told Bill O'Reilly, "I am immensely uncomfortable with the bigotry on the right, and I don't care how many people don't like it. I am sick of it." Republicans are also more willing to make political appeals with an anti-minority r

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am  at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge

Storytime

Just watch:

Friday Night Jams

In the honor of Paul Ryan, rock on: ...adding, good track, but what a lousy video. "Gore = Bush" looks singularly idiotic from this vantage point.

Rational Expectations and Assuming the Consequent

Here's John Kay giving an example of something that has always bothered me: I used to tell students who queried the premise of “rational” behaviour in financial markets – where rational means are based on Bayesian subjective probabilities – that people had to behave in this way because if they did not, people would devise schemes that made money at their expense. Here's another example from David Levine : Take an example: how we might predict stock market crashes? Suppose that two behavioral psychologists, call them "Kahneman and Tversky," produce a model of " cognitive biases " that predicts when crashes will occur. The model tells us that the stock market will crash on October 28. Since the model is reliable and has a perfect track record, we naturally believe this prediction. So what would you do? You would sell all your stock on October 27. But of course if enough people do this the stock market will crash on October 27 and not October 28. So this

The DC Housing Market is Insanely Tight

We've been looking for a non-basement place as I might get a slightly better job at the Monthly and the girlfriend is going to grad school at American. But here's a quick view of how tight the housing market is in DC. From Craigslist: I need a roommate to share a fully furnished 1 bedroom apartment in the Berkshires. The space available is a part of the living room that has been partitioned off and comes with a bed, nightstand and desk if you want it. Partitioned off living room, got it. Price? $921.50 . More housing, please?

Quote for the Day

"July was the warmest month on record in the U.S. The average temperature for the month came in at 77.6°F overall, which was 3.3°F higher than the 20th-century average, and 0.2°F warmer than the previous hottest month on record, set in July 1936 back in the Dust Bowl era . This came at the same time as the so-called drought footprint -- the area of the country affected by drought conditions -- reached a record high, and the worst drought since at least 1956 laid waste to hopes for a bumper corn and soybean crop, spurring the Agriculture Department to issue the largest-ever disaster declaration in its history." -- Climate Central .

Paul Ryan and Pundit Herding

Starve granny! Because Serious Serious Serious! Witness Lord Saletan in Slate   earning a special citation to go with his Wanker of the Decade 5th Runner-Up award: A wonderful thing has happened for this country. Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee for vice president. Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals. My liberal friends point out that Ryan’s plan leaves many details unclear. That’s true. But show me another Republican who has addressed the nation’s fiscal problems as candidly and precisely as Ryan has. He’s got the least detailed budget proposal out there, except for all the others. What?? What kind of fiscal conservative starts out with a stupendous tax cut and refuses entirely to say how he'll pay for it? Wait, don't tell me. I think I smell me some  High Broderism com

At the Helm of Political Animal Today

Here's what I managed to wring out of my brain today: How cats always land on their feet. Behind a mysterious greenhouse gas that is 14,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The actual media has arrived. Elite lawbreaking roundup. Sorry I called you a gargoyle, Tyler Cowen, but you're still wrong about morality and monetary policy. Will France's ultra-wealthy go Galt?? Yep, hedge funds are a ripoff. Will the media punish Mitt Romney for bald-faced lying? It's time for The People to have some free money! Tomorrow I'll be over there as well, so check it out!

Book Recommendation: *Wall Street*

On the recommendation of Henry Farrell, I picked up Doug Henwood's Wall Street , and I agree with Farrell that it's really good. Here's a taste: In a soundbite, the U.S. financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings towards their opti-mal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment. Most money managers can barely match market averages — and there’s evidence that active trading reduces performance rather than improving it — yet they still haul in big fees, and their brokers, big commissions (Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny 1992). Over the long haul, almost all corporate capital expenditures are internally financed, through profits and depreciation allowances. And instead of promoting investment, the U.S. financial system seems to do quite the opposite; U.S. investment levels rank towards t

At the Oars

Before this Salmon trip , it had been three years since I'd rowed anything serious, but it worked out well. No flips or smashing into rocks.

M-A-R-S!

"Congratulations to the MSL team and NASA JPL for the most flawless execution of an utterly insane plan. Our species has landed a goddamn truck on the surface of another world using a parachute and a flying crane . There are no words." -- Maki Epic win.

Weekend Jams

I'm going to a wedding this weekend, so it'll probably be some light posting until I get back. In the meantime, enjoy some tunes: Also:

Excerpts from Bernanke

Just wanted to pull out a few excerpts from this brilliant paper which crystallizes a lot of my own monetary policy views: The argument that current monetary policy in Japan is in fact quite accommodative rests largely on the observation that interest rates are at a very low level.  I do hope that readers who have gotten this far will be sufficiently familiar with monetary history not to take seriously any such claim based on the level of the nominal interest rate.  One need only recall that nominal interest rates remained close to zero in many countries throughout the Great Depression, a period of massive monetary contraction and deflationary pressure.  In short, low nominal interest rates may just as well be a sign of expected deflation and monetary tightness as of monetary ease. A more respectable version of the argument focuses on the real interest rate.  With the rate of deflation under 1% in 1999, and the call rate effectively at zero, the realized real call rate for 1999 wi

Shark Week in Silver Spring

Behold the economic engine of this part of Maryland:

Why Are Small Countries Better at Economics?

Short answer: smaller banks. Matt Yglesias points out that Poland has weathered the recession fairly well due to an enormous devaluation to restore competitiveness: Polish Zloty to Euro exchange rate. Note the massive decline in mid-2008. Matt O'Brien notes that this is largely due to the fact that Poland engaged in massive currency debasement —seen above—at the height of the crisis. This is, I think, the closest thing you can find to a constant across countries that handled the crisis well. Smaller countries from Poland to Israel to Sweden were willing to engage in a form of expansionary monetary policy that primarily took the form of currency devaluation. Things look a bit different from the standpoint of a larger, less trade-oriented country but the same basic principle ought to apply. The question, then, is why smaller countries are so much better at macroeconomic management. I think we can dispense with the idea that it's a failure of intellect among elite po