Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately (organized by topic):

Economics

• HBS Cases: iPads, Kindles, and the Close of a Chapter in Book Publishing — HBS Working Knowledge

Source: hbswk.hbs.edu

“Book publishing is changing before our very eyes, even if the industry itself is fighting the transition with every comma it can muster. Harvard Business School professor Peter Olson, former CEO of Random House, wonders if books themselves may be in jeopardy.”

• The Recent Health Care Bill – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com
  

Source: freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt notes that “…the health care bill that passed recently is a disaster for at least two reasons. First, it seems to do little or nothing to deal with the single most important shortcoming of our current system: the fact that people pay very little on the margin for the medical care that they receive. The second huge flaw … is that health care is provided through employers, leading to job lock, lost coverage when people become unemployed, etc. While the bill does have some elements that weaken the link between employers and health care, it also has other features that strengthen it. Ultimately, it is hard to believe that this bill will be a net positive. It remains to be seen whether it will be a wash, or far worse.”    Levitt’s views line up well with my own; see my August 27, 2009 posting entitled “My preferred approach for reforming health care…”.

Miscellaneous

• Signs of Spring, 2010

“The Northern Hemisphere once more begins its tilt towards the Sun, awakening flowers, ushering in new life, and coaxing people outdoors once again. The changing of the season is easily observed in gardens, parks, zoos, farms, festivals and more. Collected here are a handful of photographs showing signs of Spring, 2010, as the final remnants of last winter start to melt away. (27 photos total)”

“A five-week-old Chinchilla rabbit nibbles grass at a rabbit farm in Moosburg north of Munich March 22, 2010. The rabbits at the farm are bred to compete in rabbit shows. (REUTERS/Michaela Rehle)”

 

 

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

 

Source: www.boston.com

Today is Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Good Friday is part of Holy Week, a series of religious holidays and observations commemorating the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

• Why Are Fewer and Fewer U.S. Employees Satisfied With Their Jobs? — HBS Working Knowledge

Source: hbswk.hbs.edu

With the increasing emphasis by business organizations on ‘green’ initiatives for sustainability, maybe we are overlooking ways to improve the ‘sustainability’ of workers, too, says HBS professor Jim Heskett .

• Robert Barro | FiveBooks

Source: five-books.com

The Lessons of the Great Depression There’s a strong tendency for the economy to recover on its own. A year ago governments saved their biggest banks from collapse, but now they are wondering how big really is too big.

• John Steele Gordon: As Peaceful as a Tea Party – WSJ.com

Source: online.wsj.com

In The Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon writes that the only person arrested in recent days for threatening violence against a politician targeted Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

ObamaCare and the Constitution – WSJ.com Source: online.wsj.com The Wall Street Journal argues that if Congress can force you to buy insurance, Article I limits on federal power are a dead letter.

• Stumbling in the Dark

Source: www.project-syndicate.org

“At the stroke of 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. But the main thing that anyone accomplished by turning off the lights at nighttime for an hour was to make it harder to see”, says Bjørn Lomborg, who is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.    

The Permanent Mortgage Crisis – WSJ.com Source: online.wsj.com The Wall Street Journal: One more housing bailout to prolong the market agony.

America’s Precarious Net Position — The American, A Magazine of Ideas Source: www.american.com Our financial future is darker than generally expressed through deficit numbers—way darker.

 

• Daniel Henninger: Would the Founding Founders Love ObamaCare? – WSJ.com

Source: online.wsj.com

Daniel Henninger writes in The Wall Street Journal that the resistance to ObamaCare is about a lot more than the 10th Amendment.

 

• Inflation: ‘Financial Death by a Thousand Cuts’ – Knowledge@Wharton

Source: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

According to Wharton insurance and risk management professor Kent Smetters, inflation “destroys the value [of investments] gradually by eroding real returns over time.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

Excessive Outrage on Retiree Subsidy Accounting – Business – The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
“So as blogged yesterday, the new health care plan changed the tax treatment of a subsidy for…”

Geithner and Bernanke Are Wrong about Fed Power — The American, A Magazine of Ideas
www.american.com
“Letting the Federal Reserve keep a hand in bank supervision and regulation is a mistake.”

Strategic Defaults: Lessons From the Great Depression – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
“A study about debts during the 1930s calls into question current government policies that try to make mortgage payments more “affordable,” an economist writes.”

Taxes Per Person
gregmankiw.blogspot.com
Professor Mankiw crunches the numbers and observes that “The United States is indeed a low-tax country as judged by taxes as a percentage of GDP, but as judged by taxes per person, the United States is in the middle of the pack.”  

Supply and Demand (in that order): Employment Reducing Policy List Updated
caseymulligan.blogspot.com
“The basic tools of supply and demand help immensely to understand and predict everyday events in our world. These days, many of those events are related to the financial crisis — or the Panic of 2008 as I call it. …”

Supply and Demand (in that order): Where’s the Continued Decline?
caseymulligan.blogspot.com
“At the end of 2008, with housing data through Oct 2008 in hand, I predicted that housing prices would continue to fall, but begin to recover in the Summer of 2009 and perhaps as early as Spring (I also …”

The ObamaCare Writedowns—II – WSJ.com
online.wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal writes that Democrats blame a vast CEO conspiracy. 

Notable & Quotable – WSJ.com
online.wsj.com
Mark Steyn on complications being discovered in the new health-care law. 

EnergyScam – Business – The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
“Thank God we have government programs like EnergyStar to help us live a greener lifestyle.”

Kathleen Parker: Too many Democrats are hiding behind Hyde
www.lacrossetribune.com
“Health care is the next-to-last thing I want to write about. The last thing is abortion, so this column is a banquet of tortures.

Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg: Unleashing American Broadband – WSJ.com
online.wsj.com
“Google and Verizon support a policy of minimal government involvement.”

The Ballad of Sallie Mae – WSJ.com
online.wsj.com
“A cautionary tale for our times about public subsidy, arbitrary politics and doing business with the government.”

 

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

Greg Mankiw’s Blog: David Brooks on the State of Economics

gregmankiw.blogspot.com

“In today’s NY Times, David Brooks has an interesting column on the field of economics. While the column is well worth reading, I think it is more wrong than right. Journalists are fond of writing articles…”

Should taxpayers subsidize underwater homeowners?|KeithHennessey.com

keithhennessey.com

“The Obama administration will announce a major new stock market initiative on Friday that will directly tackle the problem of the millions of Americans who lost money betting on stocks. The government …”

Gary Becker: ‘Basically an Optimist’—Still – WSJ.com

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal, Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker says ObamaCare will do serious damage, but the American people will vote for limited government in November.”

Charles Krauthammer – Obamacare’s next trick: the VAT – washingtonpost.com

www.washingtonpost.com

“It won’t be long before we’ll be paying European levels of taxation.

FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford – At last the con has been taken out of econometrics

www.ft.com

“The ‘identification problem’ muddies any statistical analysis, says Tim Harford”.

Marginal Revolution: Is the mandate penalty large enough?

www.marginalrevolution.com

Tyler Cowen provides some compelling arguments to the effect that healthy individuals will opt out until they get sick. Both Professor Cowen and Megan McArdle argue that the so-called “mandate” probably is not all that enforceable anyway, so this seems to be a nearly ideal setup for adverse selection (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection) to occur on a rather massive scale. I doubt whether the CBO scoring of the Senate Bill which has been passed into law even considered this type of behavior as being within the realm of possibilities!

Can the Individual Mandate Be Enforced? – Business – The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com

“Big Government has written a post suggesting that the individual health care mandate will not actually be enforced by the IRS.  It will be assessed, but if you refuse to pay it, the normal enforcement mechanisms under Subtitle F of the tax code–such as liens and garnishments–may not be employed.”

 

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics and Happiness

• Are economics students happier? One estimation from Germany, by Tyler Cowen

Health Care Reform

• Single Payer, Many Faults, by Joseph Rago

“Roger M. Battistella argues in “Health Care Turning Point” that the last thing the health-care system needs is more government involvement. His prescription: market competition.”

• Obama’s Misleading Assault on the Insurance Industry, by John Calfee

“The president knows better than his demagoguery suggests.”

• Why Health Reform Is Bad Politics, by Kim Strassel

“Contrary to all the theories, Democrats will not benefit from ObamaCare.”

Politics

• Road to the Nut House, by Peggy Noonan

“You have to be crazy to run for president. Seriously, you do.”

Magic and Science

• The magic of the placebo, by Eric Mead

“Sugar pills, injections of nothing — studies show that, more often than you’d expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something’s not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. ”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics and Public Policy

• The Stimulus Evidence One Year On, by Robert Barro

“Over five years, my research shows an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. That’s a bad deal.”

• How Not to Stop Healthcare Inflation, by Greg Mankiw
• Paul Ryan on Spending-Cut Specifics, by Jeffrey Miron

“In an earlier post, I stated that conservatives who decry federal spending are nevertheless loath to name specific programs they would cut.  One exception is Paul Ryan, whose “Road Map for America’s Future” advocates substantial reductions in Medicare and Social Security spending. 

You can read an interview with Ryan in yesterday’s NYTimes.  He’s from Wisconsin, so he’s a cheesehead!”

• Maybe Milton Was Right About the Euro, by Desmond Lachman

“At the time of the euro’s launch in 1999, Milton Friedman famously observed that the euro would not survive the first major European economic recession. In the end, Friedman will prove to have been right.“

Politics

• What can President Obama learn from President Bush’s bipartisan successes?, by Keith Hennessey

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics and Public Policy

• How to Destroy American Jobs, by Matthew Slaughter

“Obama’s proposals for increasing the tax burden on U.S.-based multinationals would harm our most dynamic companies.”

• From bail-out to bail-in, by Paul Calello and Wilson Ervin

“…Paul Calello, the head of Credit Suisse’s investment bank, and Wilson Ervin, its former chief risk officer, propose a new process for resolving failing banks.”

• Stop! (from The Economist)

“The size and power of the state is growing, and discontent is on the rise.”

Foreign Policy

• Where Is America in Asia’s Future?, by Claude Barfield

“Recent events and trends within Asia may well portend a stepped up pace for Asian regionalism—and heightened danger that the United States will find itself on the outside looking in.“

Politics

• How to Make a Weak Economy Worse, by Amity Shlaes

“FDR’s war against business showed that a president must choose between retribution and economic recovery.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

The Economy

• Why the Recovery Will Be Robust, by David Ranson

“It’s the normal V-shaped bounce after a deep recession.”

Economics and Public Policy

• The Crack-up, by Vincent Reinhart

“The administration might be settling for superficial progress on financial reform to avoid being on the wrong side of public anger; a better approach would channel the anger into making meaningful reform.“

• The Runaway Subsidy Train, by Wendell Cox

“In some corridors, ‘high-speed’ rail won’t be much faster than trains in the 1930s.”

Politics

• The Obama Contradiction, by Peggy Noonan

“Washington is sick and broken—and it can solve all our problems.”

• The Obama Spell Is Broken, by Fouad Ajami

“Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.”

Terrorism

• The handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect: the scandal grows, by Charles Krauthammer

“The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics

Peter Schiff provides some fascinating commentary on the American Samoan economy and the assortment of unintended consequences associated with the imposition of the federal minimum wage by the US Congress (recorded January 17, 2010):

Financial Crisis and Public Policy

• The President’s Bank Reforms Don’t Add Up, by Peter Wallison

Wallison’s analysis seems quite clear; specifically, that in failing to properly differentiate between banks and bank holding companies, an unintended consequence of the “Volcker Rule” may be that banks will be incentivized to overinvest again in real estate, thereby virtually guaranteeing yet another bank crisis in the future.

Foreign Policy

• Clinton for Haiti Czar?, by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

“If the country is ever to develop it will need less cronyism and more transparency.”

Health Care Reform

• It’s dead, by Keith Hennessey

Keith Hennessey officially pronounces Obamacare as Dead on Arrival, and also provides a interesting example of Photoshop!:

Humor

• NBC Will Regret Appeasing Leno, by Joe Queenan

“Conan was the Czechoslovakia of late-night TV.”

Politics

• The New Political Rumbling, by Peggy Noonan

“Massachusetts may signal an end to old ways of fighting.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Finance

• Restoring Faith in Financial Markets, by John C. Bogle

“It is time institutional investors exerted control over publicly held companies.”

Financial Crisis and Public Policy

• Obama’s Double-Dealing Bank Tax, by Holman Jenkins

“…it’s a formula for turning the banks into what Fannie and Freddie have become: profitless channelers of taxpayer-guaranteed money into whatever loss-making loans politicians happen to want made.”

Foreign Policy

• To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid, by Brett Stephens

“For Haitians, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity.”

Health Care Reform

• Health Care Is Hurting Democrats, by David Brady, Daniel Kessler, and Douglas Rivers

“How can a little known Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts? The culprit is the unpopularity of health reform, and it means that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in less liberal places than Massachusetts.”

Public Policy

• Missing the Target, by Martin Feldstein

Harvard Economics Professor Martin Feldstein provides a critical assessment of Obanomics…

• The U.S. Isn’t as Free as It Used to Be, by Terry Miller

“Canada now boasts North America’s freest economy.”