Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2374

Gotta Find a Way, a Better Way

Leaving aside the irony of the fact that author Matt Continetti is, himself, in part Koch-funded the problem with his article accusing American liberals of anti-Koch paranoia is that the charge is too easy. If you take a deep breath and think about it, it's clear that the Koch brothers account for substantially less than 50 percent of all funding of the American conservative movement and yet substantially more than 50 percent of all progressive complaining about conservative money-men. This is easily explained in terms of attention dynamics and threshold effects without need to resort to any notions about paranoia.

But the larger issue, as Kurt Cobain knew well, is that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. To the best of my knowledge, David Koch's interest in the science of human evolution is completely genuine. It's also true, however, that the Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum involves a slightly bizarre whitewash of the dangers of climate change. I don't think it's paranoid to suggest that the decision to include this material reflects the fact that David Koch is not just a rich guy interested in human evolution, he's also a rich guy who got rich largely in the fossil fuel industry. My concern about this is re-enforced by the fact that a three-episode miniseries on PBS' Nova about human evolution featured similar problems and was also financed in part by David Koch.

Now neither the Smithsonian nor PBS are exactly hotbeds of conservative political activism. And yet you can see that these two institutions are not above distorting their mission somewhat in the pursuit of fundraising. Nor is David Koch above using his philanthropic interests to advance his own personal financial stake in persuading people to take a blasé attitude about climate change. So is it really "paranoid" to posit that the activities of fossil fuel barons like the Kochs partially accounts for the fact that the American conservative movement has a view of climate science at odds with what you hear from center-right parties in most countries? Is it "paranoid" to wonder if this is part of the explanation of why American libertarian institutions don't follow Friedrich Hayek's line about the need to regulate air pollution? That there's some paranoia afoot on the American left isn't something I doubt. But the more important question is whether or not there's also truth to the allegation that the financial influence of the Kochs is influencing the intellectual climate of this country is a pernicious way.

Rick Scott's Self-Enriching Medicaid Plan

The wave of hard-right governors who swept into office in 2010 is remarkable, but no figure among the bunch is as remarkable as Florida governor Rick Scott. It's a big state, and you'd think the conservative movement could have found a standard bearer who's not a crook whose company was specifically involved in defrauding the government. But between resigning as CEO of Columbia/HCA because of his involvement in Medicare fraud and becoming governor, he founded a company called Solantic. Upon becoming governor he could have rid himself of Solantic-related conflicts of interest by selling his stake in the company and investing the funds in something else. But instead he deployed the fig leaf of transferring his ownership share to his wife.

Now, as Suzy Khim explains, he's rapidly moving to use his authority as governor to enrich Solantic and therefore himself:

As part of a federally approved pilot program that began in 2005, certain Medicaid patients in Florida were allowed to start using their Medicaid dollars at private clinics like Solantic. The Medicaid bill that Scott is now pushing would expand the pilot privatization program to the entire state of Florida, offering Solantic a huge new business opportunity. [...]

On Tuesday, he signed an executive order requiring random drug testing of many state employees and applicants for state jobs. He's also urged state legislators to pass a similar bill that would require drug testing of poor Floridians applying for welfare.

Among the services that Solantic offers: drug testing.

There are two possibilities here, neither of which reflect well on Scott. One is that Scott is pushing a bad policy agenda in order to enrich himself. The other is that Scott is pushing a good policy agenda whose political sustainability he's undermining by creating the appearance that he's just looking to enrich himself.

Density-Facility Transportation Infrastructure In Tyson's Corner Is Facilitating Denser Construction

Susan Straight in The Washington Post writes that new infrastructure construction in Tyson's Corner is kind of a pain in the ass:

Now, construction of Metro's Silver line, Beltway HOT lanes and other projects have made regularly traveled routes unpredictable and driving much more difficult. There have been nighttime pile-driving marathons, lane closures on I-495 and overnight closures of I-66, ramp closings, lane reroutings, and a temporary shutdown of Metro rail service between the East and West Falls Church stations.

But it's not keeping people away:

When stacked up against Zip codes for comparable suburban commercial hubs such as White Flint Mall or Largo Town Center, home sales around Tysons are faring no worse, and in some respects, better. The Zip code overlapping White Flint Mall, 20852, had a 15 percent drop in the number of sales but a 6 percent gain in median sales price last year. Largo Town Center's Zip code, 20774, saw a 15 percent increase in the number of sales, but the median price fell 11 percent.

I don't think this is really all that surprising. It's a mistake to think that an area whose underlying economic fortunes are bleak can be "turned around" by a shiny new piece of infrastructure. But when you have an area whose underlying economy is doing well the question then becomes how do you make it possible for people to participate in the economic dynamism. Transportation infrastructure and upzoning then become key.

The Alternative To Deflation Is Inflation

Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley have an excellent article detailing the economic research Republicans are relying on to make the case that layoffs of government workers will lead to an increase in employment. It's all about liquidating labor:

For example, the paper predicts that cutting the number of public employees would send highly skilled workers job hunting in the private sector, which in turn would lead to lower labor costs and increased employment. But "lowering labor costs" is economist-speak for lowering wages — does the GOP want to be in the position of advocating for lower wages for voters who work in the private sector?

Probably not. Digby remarks:

Personally, I think it goes without saying that they want to lower wages and I don't know why the Democrats haven't been pounding them for it relentlessly already. I am, however, surprised that they'd openly attach themselves to it.

I think part of the reason this debate hasn't been well-joined is that neither side of it really understands what the debate is about. When an economy takes a hit, there has to be some kind of adjustment process. In a small country, you'd generally see that adjustment come in the form of a currency depreciation. Suddenly everything—salaries, assets, debts, contracts—has a lower real value. Living standards take a hit, but the hit is broad-based, and workers whose real wages are too low are now in a strong position to argue for nominal raises.

America is just too big to adjust primarily through the currency channel. So one possible route is nominal deflation. You cut nominal public sector salaries, lay off public sector workers, and reduce nominal transfer payments (Security Security, SNAP, etc.). This ought to drive down wages in the private sector, too, and eventually everyone is making sufficiently little money that it makes sense to start hiring more people. But there are major problems with this beyond the messaging challenge associated with "our agenda is to make you take a pay cut." The key thing is that the economy is full of nominally denominated debts. That's everything from your cell phone contract to your mortgage. So when you drive nominal wages down, you're driving debt burdens up and leaving people with less and less money to do anything new. This is a huge problem for any possibly expanding businesses, since all your potential clients will have their money tied up with existing commitments.

The coherent alternative to this, which Democrats don't seem to be able to focus on, involves inflation. Not falling-sky 37 percent inflation, but somewhat higher than usual inflation so that wages and debts can rebalance.

What Do We Want To Know About?

Annie Lowrey and Angela Tchou run the numbers on the tags used in "content farm" websites to find out what it is the web-searching public is demanding articles about:

Rather, the top tags prove reassuringly banal: money (which appears 6,204 times in the tags), movie, show, school, family, students, business, game, years, and film. We want to know about our kids, our schoolwork, our travel, and our careers. We want to know about jobs, and what industries are growing.

Adding up and recombining the tags, one gets a better sense of what content farms are giving us. We want to know about news, but not just any news. Actual news sites—like Slate and the Huffington Post and Yahoo! News itself—have the real, newsy news covered. Publications are also increasingly savvy about performing some search-engine optimization of their own, making it harder for the farms to compete and pushing down their ad prices. Thus the big stories of 2010, like the Haiti earthquake and the midterm elections, do not make up much of the Associated Content canon. Likewise, celebrity sites have celebrities down pat—so not as many stories about Britney Spears and Lady Gaga as you would expect.

You can maybe think of this as a guide to where "real" news organizations are falling down on the job. Both hard news and celebrity news seem well-covered, but people are also looking for advice and self-improvement. And why shouldn't they be? This stuff is important. Good personal health advice is incredibly valuable.

Land and Houses

Via Yves Smith, a very cool chart from Visualizing Economics:

Yves comments:

This serves to confirm the idea that from a policy standpoint, housing is best regarded as a forced savings vehicle or a store of value rather than an investment.

I think the best analogy for it (borrowed from Robert Shiller) is that a house is like a very large boat. It's a depreciating durable good. The fact that the boat has resale value is relevant to your decision-making process, but you don't generally buy a boat expecting to sell it down the road at a profit. You buy a boat because you want to cruise around in a boat, or else because you have some kind of business venture that involves using a boat.

That said, a house does differ from a boat in one important respect. Generally speaking when you buy a house you also buy a patch of land that contains the house whereas when you buy a boat you don't become owner of a piece of the ocean. And while buying land probably isn't a very smart investment strategy for your average household, it's perfectly coherent to think about a speculative market in individual parcels of land. Climate change will alter weather patterns and destroy the value of some currently useful agricultural land. The invention of air conditioners made land in Miami more desirable. The decline of Michigan-based auto companies has made land in Detroit less valuable. The opening of the WMATA Green Line made land near the Columbia Heights Metro Station more valuable.

Smell The Freedom

Kate Sheppard reports on the latest liberty-enhancing measure from the freedom-loving tea party:

Anti-choice state senators in Arkansas passed a bill on Thursday that could limit access to abortions for women in the state by subjecting clinics to the same standards as outpatient surgical centers.

That bill would have the anticipated impact of making non-surgical abortions much harder to obtain in a state where it's already fairly difficult. The law would force clinics or doctors that provide women with abortion pills like RU-486 or Mifeprex to follow more stringent rules applied to outpatient surgical centers. The bill's Republican sponsor dubbed it the "Abortion Patients' Enhanced Safety Act"—creating the impression that the bill is only designed to protect women.

I especially like the way this takes the specific form of an overreaching government takeover of the health care system. Meanwhile, from Andrea Nill I learn that at least five babies have died in Nebraska since they started denying prenatal care to undocumented mothers. Life, after all, begins at conception, ends at birth, and doesn't count if you're from Mexico.

Fear of a Coalition Planet

The success with which Stephen Harper has wielded fear of a "coalition" government in Canada is really remarkable. Of the Canadian political parties, Harper's is the most right-wing. He's also never been able to secure a majority of votes or a majority of seats in parliament. Under the circumstances, it seems natural that a center-left coalition would present itself as an alternative. But it keeps not happening, and the accusation that the opposition Liberals are secretly plotting a coalition is so powerful that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is formally ruling it out before the election. How this all came about is a bit strange, but there's an excellent discussion of it here in the Crooked Timber comments.

I'd also note that from a south of the border perspective, Canada seems to have managed to park itself in a state of affairs where overall government spending as a share of GDP is lower than in the states, but where the welfare state is simultaneously more generous and more effective. This reflects well both on Harper and his immediate Liberal predecessors, and not so well on the past ten years' worth of legislating in the United States.

Jews Are, By Definition, Jewish

I think there's something very confused about this line of thought:

While it's difficult to grasp just how molecules can provoke international, politically-charged questions of identity, imagine the case of the world's most storied diaspora population: the Jews. Beginning in the late 1990s, the expansive and controversial field of Jewish population genetics has expanded from its original place as a subfield of medical genetics – weighing in pointedly on some of Jewish identity's most pressing questions. [...] However, a battery of new findings places European Jews somewhere in the genetic space between Italians and Palestinians, begging the question of whether a number can be put on the Jewish people's authentic Jewishness. Critics of Zionism have even raised the startling possibility that Palestinians might be more genetically Jewish than self-identified Jews themselves, implying that Israel's statehood might be based on faulty, unscientific myths.

Alternatively, Jewish national identity, like all forms of national identity, is a kind of "imagined community." And Jewish people are, by definition, authentically Jewish. Palestinian people are, by contrast, Palestinian. There are a lot of interesting questions that can be elucidated via genetics, but the particular claim that Jews and Jewish and Palestinians aren't isn't subject to that form of inquiry. Meanwhile, Israeli statehood isn't based on any kind of science at all it's a political project like Finnish statehood or Egyptian statehood.

Bob Herbert's Last Column

It's excellent.

One major difference of perspective between Herbert and myself is that to me if you take a global perspective then 2011 is the best of times. It's doubtful that the human race has ever been as prosperous or as free as it is today, and the prospects for further progress look good. I'm an optimist, and I feel relatively good about our recent trajectory.

But to plug that back into the Herbertian perspective, the wave of global success we're watching only underscores the frustration and tragedy of America's recent failures. This richer, freer, better world should be opening up horizons of opportunity for our country and instead I'm reading articles about a neighborhood in Detroit where people "chip in for services the city has trouble affording, like snow plowing."