This is excellent:
It’s Still Aggregate Demand
I was very happy to see Krugman post today about the structural unemployment-education issue that I’ve been repeatedly flogging here. As usual, he’s got the goods:
via Mark Thoma, the very cautious Dave Altig looks at recent studies and concludes that
“we’ve been pretty sympathetic to structural explanations for the slow pace of the recovery. Nonetheless, we have yet to find much evidence that problems with skill-mismatch are more important postrecession than they were prerecession. We’ll keep looking, but—as our colleagues at the Chicago Fed conclude in their most recent Chicago Fed Letter—so far the facts just don’t support skill gaps as the major source of our current labor market woes.”
Am I totally certain that the problem isn’t structural? Hey, I’m not totally certain of anything! But there really is no evidence, none at all, for a story that nonetheless gets asserted as absolute fact in op-ed after op-ed.
Maybe the word will get out. It had better. To pick just one example, from the Atlantic yesterday:
In a structural crisis, employers rid themselves of employees who had the skills appropriate to earlier stages of economic development, but who are no longer increasing their productivity, and replace them with workers that have new skills that lead to faster rises in productivity. During such junctures, economic growth does NOT simply lead directly to more jobs and higher wages.
Gladstone, I should be quick to point out, identifies other causes for the recession, and his piece is overall worthwhile. It just seems to be another case of the temptation of the structural narrative to overwhelm the need to show evidence.
I grow discouraged!
Open Thread
World’s saddest cookbook?
Could be! Discuss sad cooking or whatever.
Rooting Around
Spoiler alert: BIG MONEY lost.
Netroots Nation doesn’t get started until later this morning, but I wanted to put up a thread for suggestions, comments and questions. Heteroflexible Pasty White DougJ (or whatever he’s calling himself these days) is in charge of the meetups so I’m sure he’ll be posting about that later today. In case you want to play at home, they’re live streaming a lot of events. I couldn’t find a concise list anywhere online, so I pasted the list of sessions and links to the streams from an NRN email after the break.
Friday Morning Open Thread: Legacies
(Ballard Street via GoComics.com)
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Matt Taibbi, it seems, achieved the first and possibly last successful Thunderclap, reports The Verge:
Yesterday at noon Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibi sent the inaugural Thunderclap, when he and 1,921 other people Tweeted simultaneously at a pair of U.S. senators. Taibi used an app, Thunderclap, built by a small team in New York. The service lets Twitter users break above the din by organizing for a mass messaging, a wave of tweets that hits at the same time.
Twitter suspended the startup’s OAuth token today, after it sent its second “thunderclap” to Congress. Twitter told the Thunderclap team it was violating the site’s terms of service by “sending multiple @ mentions and automating sending tweets.”…
Speaking of taking all the fun out of things, Paul Constant at the Stranger reports that the Paulistas are distraught:
Last night, Ron Paul announced that his delegate total was not enough to win the Republican presidential nomination. Instead, he says that his delegates—about a fifth of the delegates available—could “grow our movement and shape the future.” How he intends to “grow” his “movement” is unclear—he’s not even angling for a speaking spot at the convention…
Much more nutpicking explication at the link. Dr. RonPaul’s fiercest supporters cannot understand why their standardbearer should fail them now, but perhaps RandPaul’s shiny new endorsement of Willard “Mitt” Romney has something to do with it…
ETA: If something about the blogosphere seems just a little less ugly and rancid today, consider TBogg’s explanation of “The Silence of the Lames“…
Apart from leaving defiant graffiti in the wet cement of history, what’s on the agenda today?
This is the Genius I Was Looking For
While I was licking Bush’s scrotum in 2003, the Poorman was writing things like this:
While watching FOX News Sunday this morning, and seeing Brit Hume finally call William Kristol out as the pinko Americaphobic Saddam-smoocher he is for daring to suggest that the complete absence of WMD in Iraq means that the doctrine of Bushian Infallibility may need to be called in to question, I was struck with new-found respect for the man’s journalistic courage and integrity. And I thought to myself, have I been unfair to Mr. Hume in my writing? Specifically, have I moved beyond the factual truth in my descriptions of Brit’s large, oddly-shaped, sickly-complexioned head (which I recently compared in conversation to a demented planetoid papered with chicken skin, a comparison I now regret.) As many in the liberal media are now offering up public apologies for distorting the truth in service of their dastardly political aims, I thought that I should follow suit and review my coverage of Brit Hume’s big bean, and make sure that I have been, at all times, Fair and Balanced.
1) January, 2003: In a post which I subsequently removed, I refer to Mr. Hume’s head as “a bloated, malformed astronomical anomaly, which draws viewers into its powerful gravitational field of pure evil.” This is absolutely false. There is no credible scientific data that Brit Hume’s head generates a gravitational field that is significant in astronomical terms, as this has been verified to great precision by looking for tell-tale differences in the Earth’s motion around the Sun when Mr. Hume is in the New York and Washington studios. I was perfectly aware of this at the time I wrote it, and, although I did take the post down, I was never disciplined for making this outrageous charge. It is probably this initial laxness which led to all subsequent abuses.
2) March 4, 2003: I compare Mr. Hume’s head to a “Frankenstein melon.” This is indisputably fair.
3) April 11, 2003: I call Mr. Hume’s head “tenebrous”, and state further that it is “enormous, misshapen, [and] fungoid.” I received much criticism for using the word “enormous”, with several pundits pointing out that countless animals, from the mighty T. Rex to the Blue Whale, have heads which dwarf Mr. Hume’s, and that many people, for example Goliath and the 50′ Tall Woman, have had heads of equal or greater volume as well. While I concede that this is true, I maintain that a head may still be “enormous” even if it is not the biggest head in history, provided it is significantly larger than the heads of most examples of that species. To this, my critics responded with archeological evidence pointing out that Mr. Hume was in fact not of our species at all, but had evolved from a primitive cousin of Homo Sapiens known as Homo Pompousius Cranius Giganticus, and that my comments were therefore speciesist and offensive. I think the evidence here is inconclusive; nonetheless, I should have tried to avoid using words as charged and polarizing as “enormous”. Alas, I did not.
4) April 17, 2003: I note that his head reminds me of “frame seven of the Nazi head-melting scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.” Completely true. It does remind me of that, particularly when that frame is projected onto a five-story tall screen. Also, I noted that Tony Snow’s head was “this enormous, bobbing, rectangular monument sprouting up out of his neck.” Again, the word “enormous” was pure editorial, and should have been removed.
5) June 2, 2003: The low point. I remark that Mr. Hume has a “galaxy-sized rotten pumpkin wrinkle head”, that it is “very large and unpleasant”, and that it is “too frightening for children under the age of 107”. This is outrageous slander. Brit Hume’s head is far smaller than any galaxy, or indeed any star in any galaxy. This can be shown simply by watching FOX News, and noting that his head fits completely within the confines of the FOX studio! This charge was completely outrageous and had no basis in fact. Also, I reported that Tony Snow had been giggling into his Trapper Keeper while interviewing the object of his school-girl crush, General Tommy Franks. This was also false: he was clearly attempting to muffle his nervous laughter with a sticker album. I was excoriated by the media for both of these mistakes, and rightly so.
But acknowledging that mistakes have been made is not enough – I must also take positive action to ensure that such carelessness never happens again. As managing editor of The Poor Man, I hereby inform you that I have fired myself, and I will have no input in any future posts in this web page. From now on, all writing and editorial duties will be performed by a completely different person who has the same name as me. I know that none of this can undo the damage that I have done to the reputation of this web page, but I hope that, with time, you will come to trust it once again. And I would also like to extend my personal apologies to Brit Hume, firstly for the hurtful statements I made, but also for not understanding how hard it is to find a few thousand tons of nerve gas hidden in a country far, far larger than his head. The truth will, no doubt, soon be revealed.
My mistake was misremembering all of this as being about Russert, rather than Hume. I still think this is one of the funniest posts to ever appear on a blog. And remember, the context was editorial apologies for being COMPLETELY FUCKING WRONG about the WMD in Iraq.
Dr. Parkinson Declared I’m Not Surprised to See You Here
Ever just feel like you are in a rut you can’t get out of? Everything professionally is fine, and despite the dad health scares, my family is fine, the piglets are joyful hot messes whom I love dearly, the garden is in, the yard looks good, I’m not too totally freaked out about the 2012 election (the choice is clear- If Americans choose Romney, then we deserve what we get and we deserve to get it hard), the weather has been just great the last couple of days at 75 degrees and blue skies and a nice breeze, but for some reason I just feel like I am in a rut. Every day feels like the next. I don’t want to get out of bed, but I do because THE PIGLETS DEMAND IT AND NOSES TO THE ARMPIT BECOME ROSIE SITTING ON MY HEAD (for real), but then I just want to go back to bed but can’t because once I am awake I can’t fall back asleep (they never told you that shit when you were a teen and trying to wake you up). The last time I felt this way I think I was 15 and hormonally imbalanced, but I just feel lethargic all the time. And no, my health is fine. Other than a “lose some weight you fat bastard,” I have a clean bill of health. And when I say my health is fine, I just mean I am not dying or diabetic or have cancer- I’m fat as hell and need to exercise more and what not. But I mean there is no big stuff.
But just the last couple of months I have felt all “blah.” Every time I look at the news, my eyes start to glaze over and I go into “SSDD” mode. It’s just an unrelenting mountain of bullshit. I’m no longer interested in MMORPG’s even though I log in and go through the motions with SWTOR every now and then. Maybe I am just depressed- I have a history of GAD that we have discussed, so maybe that is it. Who knows.
I turn 42 on the 22nd. Maybe I am going through my mid life crisis- which would be heart warming, because I have no expectation to make it to 84. In fact, I’m hoping for a massive heart attack somewhere around 68 so I don’t have to deal with any long term hospital stays or cancer treatments. But maybe this is where I’m supposed to have a teenage kid, a wife who is no longer sexually attracted to me, and go out and buy a convertible and get a job in a fast food joint before getting shot dead by a gay closeted retired Marine… I would like to look good naked.
Maybe my mid-life crisis doesn’t involve a corvette and a nasty divorce, but a couple months of the doldrums and a bunch of emo blogposts? I guess if that is the case, I’m coming out ahead.
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