Got To Love Ezra Klein

How did he get so smart? Nate Silver eat your heart out. Ezra has a splendid article and interview with Yale Law professor Dan Kahan  out on VOX that deals with partisan thinking from a very different point of view.

Ezra Klein April 6, 2014, 4:30 p.m. ET

How politics makes us stupid

But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe.

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." 

Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

Updated 4/8/2014 4:22p.

Paul Krugman has his take on Ezras Vox venture, and he don't say too much hateful about it.

A New Low For the 1%

This article from CNN is difficult to read and even more difficult to comprehend, unless we believe in Paul Krugman and  his view that the GOP is a failing institution. How much deference can wealth really buy? We have become a pitiful nation when we don't, at the very least, put on a show of justice.

Is This the Face of America?

The Dirt

March 31 (UPI) -- The probationary sentence a Delaware judge gave a DuPont heir in 2009 for raping his young daughter [3 years old] has become an issue because his ex-wife has sued him. 
Robert H. Richards IV was sentenced to eight years after pleading guilty to fourth-degree rape. But Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden suspended the custodial sentence."Defendant will not fare well in Level 5 setting," Jurden wrote in her sentencing report, using the state's legal term for prison.

We may view the rich as models, but this type of behavior and outcome is becoming more common and is probably attributable to wealth rather than the possibility of rehabilitation. "A rich boy goes to college, a poor boy goes to war."

Do We Really Consider These People Employees?

It's that crazy Arizona again...from CNN:

16 arrested after crowds get rowdy following Arizona's loss to Wisconsin

By Ralph Ellis and Joe Sutton, CNN

updated 7:55 AM EDT, Sun March 30, 2014

(CNN) -- Police in Tucson, Arizona, arrested 16 people Saturday night after rowdy crowds threw bottles, beer cans and firecrackers at officers following the Wildcats' overtime loss to Wisconsin.
Wisconsin beat Arizona 64-63 on Saturday night and earned a spot in the Final Four of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
Arizona was the No. 1 seed in the West Region and Wisconsin the No. 2 seed.
About 20 minutes after the game ended, several hundred people blocked a road on the University of Arizona campus, said Sgt. Pete Dugan.
When they refused officers' orders to disperse and began lobbing objects, police used pepper balls and canisters, Dugan said.
Police reported some damage to property.
Those arrested were charged with resisting arrest, unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct.

Not exactly a Pete Seegar Rally. 

I'm Thinking

And that ain't good...I enjoy my family and friends, who are the primary people I interact with...Am I short sheeting them? Should I spend my time teaching my grandchildren to fish, garden, ride a horse, run a tractor or pontificate? Should I get drunk with my buddies or curse the Koch bothers? Everyone but me seems sure of the answers. I guess old fucks is just old fucks...

 

Looking Thru A Small Lense

Shooting At A Birds Tale

I am hearing an uncomfortable and persistent message from both sides of the political universe:

Democracy sucks as an economic arbiter and distributor of economic gains...

This may be true...a cow sucks for transportation but tastes just fine. So what are we to make of this fake equality between prosperity and de-enhancement of personal rights? Does prosperity and its manic pursuit make us richer than inclusion and diversity of wealth and income? Or is our present system of allocation a zero sum game except for the "levitation effect" of opportunity and inclusion? Looking at the data and a few graphs tells a very clear story:

"The figure and its data come from Janet Gornick, the director of a CUNY research centre on international inequality. The dark-blue lines tell a now-familiar tale: America boasts the highest post-tax-and-transfer income inequality of any highly developed country in the world. The metric at play is a number between 0 and 1 known as the Gini coefficient. In a hypothetical country with a coefficient of 0, everyone has exactly the same income, while a nation with a coefficient of 1.0 is home to one fat cat who takes everything while everyone else earns nil. At 0.42, America’s level of post-tax-and-transfer inequality outranks Israel, Britain and Canada, and dwarfs the figures in Japan and Scandinavia."

Now, about that zero sum game...it won't win the Warren Buffet bracket, but the returns could be considerably higher with a tweaked model of our economy. Equality of opportunity and freedom certainly have some non-zero value. The challenge of the working folks is to enhance this value and make it the "point of the spear". Be happy.

Who Could Have Guessed We Were at Full Employment?

Greg Mankiw

Who else?

The Evidence:

      Measuring Slack in the Phillips Curve
According to a new paper coauthored by Alan Krueger, the short-term unemployment rate works better than the standard unemployment rate in explaining changes in inflation, and according to this measure, the economy was about at its NAIRU in 2013.  This finding is related to issues I discussed in a recent Times column.   (emphasis mine)

And we get this from his NYT column:

"One possible reason for hysteresis is that the long-term unemployed lose valuable job skills and, over time, become less committed to the labor market. In some ways, perhaps, they should be thought of as effectively out of the labor force...Policy makers at the Fed may have to accept that lower employment is the new normal."

 There are somewhere between 9 and 25 million people in America that know GM is full of shit...maybe more.

We Can Only Hope

From USA Today:

Fred Phelps' death may mean end of Westboro church

"With the death of Fred Phelps, the vitriol-spouting leader of Westboro Baptist Church who picketed military funerals and espoused hatred for gays, the future of his church is hazy.
Phelps, 84, died late Wednesday, according to online postings of his church. The cause of death was not reported.
"It's unclear whether this so-called church will survive the death of its founder," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has closely monitored the group. "In some ways, it was a cult of personality."

 Perhaps, when enough of the monsters die off, we can get back to a civil conversation about our nations future.