Abstract Labor

Shirking?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:14:00 +0000

When capitalists optimize they call it efficient, when workers optimize they call it "shirking."

Karthun Dad Jokes

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 14:04:00 +0000

The hover-text for this comic inspired me to make this thing:

The road not taken

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 21:05:00 +0000

Delicious:

. . . this is pure Brooks, a seemingly epigrammatic heap of nonsense, structured to give him both the appearance of gnomic wisdom and plausible deniability.

For bonus snark click on over to Charlie Pierce and Driftglass.

Had some fun on the radio last night....

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 18:25:00 +0000

Playlist for Stürm und Drang, April 12, 2015:

Track	Artist	Album	Label	Date	Time	Source
Aton I	The Ceyleib People	Tanyet	Drop-out	1968	0:10:00	mp3
Dawn	The Ornette Coleman Trio	At the "Golden Circle" Stockholm Volume 1	Blue Note	1965	0:08:30	cd
Meadow Meal	Faust	Faust	Polydor	1971	0:08:02	yt
Son of Mr. Green Genes	Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention	Olympia Theatre, Paris France, October 26, 1968		1968	0:07:47	cd
Hallogallo	Neu!	Neu!	Brain Records	1972	0:10:07	mp3
Dirty Boots	Sonic Youth	Goo	DGC	1990	0:05:29	yt
Love on a Real Train (Risky Business)	Tangerine Dream	Risky Business Soundtrack Album	Virgin Records	1984	0:03:19	mp3
It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl	Faust	Faust So Far	Polydor	1972	0:07:31	yt
The Robots	Kraftwerk	The Man Machine	Capitol Records	1978	0:06:11	cd
Outside My Door	Can	Monster Movie		1969	0:04:11	yt
The Model	Kraftwerk	The Man Machine	Capitol Records	1978	0:03:38	cd
Neon Lights	Kraftwerk	The Man Machine	Capitol Records	1978	0:08:56	cd
The Girl You Want	Devo	Freedom of Choice	Record Plant Studios	1980	0:02:59	yt
Innocent When You Dream (78)	Tom Waits	Franks Wild Years	Island	1987	0:04:15	cd
Autobahn	Kraftwerk	The Mix	Elektra	1991	0:09:27	cd
Phaedra	Tangerine Dream	The Virgin Years 1974-1978	Virgin Records	2011	0:17:39	cd

sincerely, DJ Zerstörung.

Best Journal Spam? Or Best Journal Spam EVAR?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 18:03:00 +0000

Got this in the old inbox today:

"Dear Dear Author,
We short listed you after reading your thoughfull research work :
"Research Article"
International Journal of Case Studies Impact Factor 3.582 has just published its Latest issue (Vol. 3, Issue. 5) at: http://www.casestudiesjournal.com/ We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest. .
Case Studies Journal Honors
1)Editorial Board: 24 board members / 14 institutions / 12 different countries â€“ 2)Three year of operation, 21 issues on Monthly basis. 3)115 published papers (3.50 authors per paper) 4)335 different authors from 42 different countries and 114 different 5)institutions/organizations 6)acceptance rate: 40% 7)days to review (all rounds):30 .
Publication Packages for Individuals
(1)International Authors (Up to 10 Pages & 2 Authors) $ 50 USD
(2)International Authors (Up to 10 to 20 Pages & 5 Authors) - $ 100 USD-.
(2)Masters / PhD Thesis (20 to 50 Pages- 5 to 10 Authors) - $ 300 USD -

Life Time Publication Package for Universities, Research Institutes
(1)International Authors (No Authorâ€™s and Pages Limit) $ 500 USD â€“Life Time Offer
(2)10 Papers publications in this package life time no time limit â€“
(2)Normal fee is $ 1500 just pay $500 Save $ 1000
(2)All Papers reviewed under â€œDouble Blind Peer Reviewed Processâ€
(2)Acceptance Letter and Review Copy must be free
(2)A chance to more free Publications in case of win Best Paper Award.
NOTE: We believe on Fair and Quality service on very low rates for the sake of Researchers. 25th-July-14It would be greatly appreciated if you could share this information with your colleagues and associates.

Best wishes,
Chief Editor
Dr.T.S Maria
New York, USA"

I had no idea when I was writing it that my paper "Research Article" would bring me to the attention of such a prestigious publication as International Journal of Case Studies Impact Factor 3.582. What can I say? I am deeply ~~troubled~~ honored. I am totally going for the life time offer.

MST3K: best show ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 14:38:00 +0000

Mrs. AL and I were listening to Peter Aaron's show last night on WGXC, to which you should immediately donate some money, when he played a recording of a radio interview with the Slits. Although that was interesting and chaotic enough all by itself, it also naturally lead Mrs. AL to recall what may be the best skit ever done on Mystery Science Theater 3000:

If you kidz are wondering why this makes us olds laugh, the reason is to be found in this 1970s beer advertising campaign:

The combination of the joke, done in the style of a Bergman film and in the form of a Sven and Olie joke is just too much (at least for olds like me). Genius.

No customers for Authority's power - Times Union

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 02:39:00 +0000

No customers for Authority's power - Times Union

This story, although about an underwater power line between New Jersey and Hell's Kitchen, is not unrelated to the big power line project being proposed for upstate New York, for a couple of reasons.

One reason is the fact that the company that built the line in the story, PowerBridge LLC of Fairfield, CT, is one of the partner corporations involved with the West Point Transmission project that would run through the center of Athens if the current plan is approved.

The most important reason this story is related with the new power lines being proposed in our area has to do with the question of why this project was done at all. The fact is that there aren't customers for the power it's bringing. The New York Power Authority is losing money on this power line, since it is still paying PowerBridge to lease the line. NYPA has the option to purchase it outright in 2033. So, is this just about really badly misjudging the demand for power in New York City? Well, maybe not:

They suspect . . . Cuomo and his former brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the leaders of the environmental group Riverkeeper, want to close the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County due to safety concerns.

Fair enough. It's an old plant. I'd like to see it closed. But bringing in power from dirty energy producers, whether they're in Ohio (as in the case of the line from this story) or upstate New York is not a great solution for this particular problem. Say what you will about Indian Point, it does not emit much in the way of greenhouse gases, compared to Pennsylvania and Ohio (or upstate New York) coal-fired power plants. And, coal-fired plants are much more hazardous to human health than nuclear plants. Ahem. Unless there's a meltdown, of course. That can be pretty hazardous. If you want to replace Indian Point's power generation capacity, do it with renewable energy sources, closer to the locations that require the power.

Greek Jewish Intellectual on Trial for "Defaming" Greek Neo-Nazi Party

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 18:35:00 +0000

The following is a letter sent to the mailing list for the Union for Radical Political Economy (URPE), followed by a copy of the letter I sent to Savvas Michael-Matsas. I urge you to send your support as well.

SAVVAS MATSAS NEEDS YOUR HELP AGAINST GREEK FASCISTS

Savvas Matsas is an exceptionally talented Greek philosopher, literary critic and Biblical scholar who is also the leader of a Marxist political party, the EEK, in his country. He is very well known in Left circles in the U.S., the U.K., and France for his invariably enlightening and spirited participation over the years in a variety of our conferences and seminars.

Today, Savvas stands charged with “defaming” the Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn – whose brutal assaults on immigrants and others most of you will have heard about - “inciting violence” against them, and “disturbing the peace”. His case goes to trial on September 3rd. The evidence for the charge of “defamation” seems to be that he called them “criminals”, for the charge of “inciting violence” that he appealed publicly for a fight against fascism, and for the charge of “disturbing the peace” that he wrote a tract calling for a demonstration against them.

Meanwhile, the Golden Dawn party, which continues its rise on the Greek political scene, has been conducting a virulent campaign against Savvas, whom they’ve called “an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy against the Greek nation who is trying to provoke a civil war in order to establish a Jewish-Bolshevik regime”. Sound familiar?

Perhaps as outrageous as the charges against Savvas is the fact that Greece’s conservative Government, which has several Cabinet members whose origins lie in the extreme right, should consider such legally protected behavior as worthy of judicial action. This may even be the first time that any country that pretends to be a democracy has made opposition to fascism into a crime, and if it succeeds in Greece it won’t be the last.

Savvas has called for letters that support his “right” (I would have preferred “duty”) to fight fascism in all the ways listed in the charges above be sent to him as soon as possible. The trial, again, is on September 3rd. Even one line will do. Letters are already beginning to flood in from Greece and several other countries. We have a chance to make a difference here - for Savvas, perhaps for Greece, and maybe even for ourselves. Take a moment right now and write, and then forward this appeal to all your contacts who take – or should take – the fight against fascism (and the state’s protection, bordering on open support, of the fascists in its midst) as seriously as Savvas does.

Savvas’ email address is savvasmatsas@gmail.com.

In solidarity,
Bertell Ollman, Department of Politics, NYU

Dear Savvas Michael-Matsas,

I write to you in support of your stand against Nazism, fascism and anti-Semitism in Greece. I hope that the attention brought to your case will help to dismiss the ludicrous charges that have been brought to my attention. Certainly the precedent set by your trial on these charges are chilling for anyone interested in the free expression of ideas, regardless of their philosophical position on any other issue, but also for those interested in opposing hatred and persecution anywhere. As a German and an American, and so, a natural ally of Greeks and Jews, I am most alarmed at the rise of the Golden Dawn in Greece. As any student of history, particular of German 20th Century history, knows, the targeting of Jews and immigrants during economic crises, evil enough in and of itself, is an old yet effective tactic for dividing workers against each other and using that distraction to seize or maintain political and economic power. This never ends well for the people being targeted nor for the rest of those already suffering the crisis. In this context, your trial is of immense historical significance for both native Greek workers and immigrants, both Jews and Gentiles. I know which side I am on and I will urge everyone I know to send you their support as well.

In Solidarity,

Thomas Masterson

Your National Intelligence Apparatus

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 20:26:00 +0000

This:
Snowden Effect Goes Crazy Over Weekend - The Snowden Effect, Continued - Esquire
Then this (better sit down):
CIA Behind Iran Coup - Sixty Years On - Esquire
Which is why THIS is such a relief:
Tom Tomorrow at Daily Kos: Uniquely trustworthy

Entirely Necessary Palate Cleanser:

Best spam ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:17:00 +0000

I think so! How often do YOU get an email from DR.BEN S. BERNANKE informing you that someone has arrived at JFK with a "packaged box" containing $9.2 million? Not very, I bet. Too good not to pass along. Please note the mis-spelling of the first word of the subject line, for that extra idiosyncratically authentic feel.

Also, I'm betting that Ben is going to be embarrassed that he used his "nanninanni2" email account to send this to me rather than his fed account.

Also too, the added touch of the field names for the mass emailing is just great.

Australian Working-Class Films and Netflix queue as time capsule

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:15:00 +0000

After adding most of these movies to my Netflix queue I got to thinking about my queue as a sort of time capsule/practical joke I play on my future self. Half the time a movie comes up to the top of my queue I have no memory of putting it there, and sometimes I really have to wonder why I ever did. What possessed me to put Strangers When We Meet on there? Right now I have Astroboy, Strike, and Doctor Who Season 3, disc 4 at home. I guess that makes me well-rounded. Strike is obvious, of course. But Astroboy? Well played, past me. Well played.

(h/t Working-Class Perspectives, for the films)

Protecting whistleblowers? Or prosecuting them?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Gov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe. If this is part of an investigation into that particular case, it may not be a violation of President Obama's campaign promise, since it isn't clear that any waste, fraud, or abuse was being leaked to the press. However, conducting a spying operation on the Associated Press seems to be a little too close to violating the First Amendment. I thought corporations were people? Don't they have a right to privacy? No more than you or I do, it appears. Not even the press.
This, by the way, is the Obama transition team at change.gov's statement about whistleblowers on the "ethics" page under "Spending Taxpayers' Money Wisely":

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

I guess the part about aggressively pursuing and prosecuting whistleblowers was left out of the final draft.

Levy Hipster T-shirt ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:16:00 +0000

I was into financial instability before it was cool Minsky: You've probably never heard of him

Economics wins the internet today

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:26:00 +0000

We win! Only major with TWO panels!!!! W00T!! Every Major's Terrible

Econ 101: Speaking of Monopoly

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:48:00 +0000

Here's a video of the TED talk by Rob Reid, founder of the company that created the Rhapsody music service. Reid makes some interesting and funny points, in describing the exciting new field of "copyright math," to destroy the economic arguments of the advocates of intellectual property in music and video (primarily the MPAA and the RIAA, the movie and music industry associations that were such boosters of the SOPA/PIPA legislation). Those of you coming to this page because you're in my micro class will no doubt recognize the simple economic mistakes he makes. These don't negate the basic point he's making: that industry claims about losses resulting from piracy are wildly inflated and/or come from shaky reasoning if not thin air.

Is growth what we want?

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:12:00 +0000

I got an email from a participant at the Center for Popular Economics 2011 Summer Institute, which I was fortunate enough to be able to teach. It was, as always a crazy busy, exciting week. The question concerned growth: whether I thought growth was necessary, and how it is related to employment. It's a pretty big question. In economics, the questions don't get much bigger. So I promised to write a blog post to give my answer. And this is that blog post. I will do my best to answer broadly, simply, and, I hope, intelligibly for any audience no matter how much or how little economics they may have been subjected to previously.

First, some definitions are in order. What do we mean by "growth." In the U.S., growth is reported quarterly (every three months) by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, as the annual rate of increase of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shown in the previous quarter. According to the latest release: "Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011." That means that if the rate of growth in the third quarter was constant for a whole year, real GDP would be 2% higher at the end of the year. The definition of GDP is embedded in the quote, that bit about output of goods and services produced in the United States.

What does the "real" mean, you may ask. Real in this sense means that the amount of goods and services (which is measured in the dollar value of the stuff produced) is adjusted for inflation (a sustained increase in average prices, usually measured by the Consumer Price Index). The point is, we don't want to fool ourselves into thinking we're making more stuff just because the prices of all that stuff went up. So we pay attention to real GDP, not plain old GDP.

Now that we know what is generally meant by growth, we can ask if we need it or not. Many people might (and do) say, "Well duh! Of course we need growth!" I want a better answer than that, though. The mainstream economic argument for growth is the following. Because we have scarcity (defined as limited resources in a context of unlimited wants), we need growth. Growth is a necessary part of the human condition. We just all want as much stuff as we can get. Also, an auxiliary argument goes, look at all the poverty in the world. We obviously need to keep growing so all those people don't starve.

Let's look at the scarcity argument first. There are two parts: limited resources and unlimited wants. It is true that there are limited resources, at least in the short run. We don't look to be mining the asteroid belt any time soon (sigh). Of course, this means that continuous exponential growth is, sooner or later, going to be a problem. An interesting read on this topic is Limits to Growth (long story short, there are limits to growth on this planet, and we may be nearing them soon). As far as unlimited wants are concerned, this is an assumption about human nature that is, I think on shaky ground. Humans have needs: food, water, air, shelter, and other humans. There are still plenty of all of these to go around (but more on that, below). Humans may have an instinct to gorge themselves derived from our evolutionary environment, when our pre-iPhone ancestors could not rely on McDonalds drive-thru windows being open 24 hours a day. But this instinct, like others, can surely be reined in by reason. I am not sure how strong this instinct really is, at least pertaining to all of the stuff that we now produce. Much more money per minute is spent on advertizing than on content on television. I think this money is being spent to try to convince us that we want stuff we don't need.

"What about poverty then, you heartless bastard?" Indeed. What about poverty? People starve. Even in the United States, perhaps the most economically developed nation ever. Of course, malnutrition, starvation, even famine has never been the result of a lack of available food, at least in modern times. The phenomenon of hunger today is fundamentally a problem of distribution. There is enough food to feed everyone on the planet (let's leave aside the valid questions of the quality of the food, the nature of the food production system and the structure of food output). But not everyone can afford to eat. The last century has seen tremendous strides in the amount of food produced, which has grown faster than the global population. Yet we still have hunger. We are not now and never will grow ourselves out of the problem of hunger. The same basic argument holds for non-food production, as well.

Do we, as my friend Yosef asked me, need growth for employment? This is a great question. I think the answer is obviously, no. Now, it is true that, in our current economic system, in order for most people to live they must work and earn a wage with which to buy the necessaries of life. But, as stressed earlier, many cannot afford those necessities. Is it for lack of work? At a basic level, yes, BUT. But first, let's look at the relationship between growth and employment. Given the fact that the population (in the U.S. and the world at large) is growing, and that there is a large amount of unemployment, clearly we need the economy to grow so that more jobs will be created that will allow those people out of work and entering the labor force to find work. Oh, and since workers are also getting more productive all the time, we need growth to be even faster. If we want full employment, the economy must grow faster than the labor force and productivity combined, and just as fast, once we attain full employment.

This is the kind of growth that mainstream economics tells us is needed. It is also the kind of growth that Marx described as being inherent in capitalist economic systems. They must continue to grow, because individual capitalist firms must continue to grow or die in the competitive marketplace. Marx marveled at this system, which had already brought tremendous increases in living standards by the time he was writing. Growth is necessary for capitalism. That does not mean that growth is necessary for humanity.

Of course, there is an alternative to continuous, exponential growth of the kind I just described. Given that humans as a species are now so productive that we are seemingly running out of useful things for people to do (I know, I know, there are LOTS of useful things people could be doing, but nobody is hiring anyone to do those things, are they?), people could, say, work less for the same pay. That would be a good thing to do with all that extra productivity we've unleashed with our technology, wouldn't it? Of course, it would mean corporations taking smaller profits and hiring more individuals to do the same amount of work for less pay. It might even mean that less people work at making crap we don't need (I don't care how great a Sham-wow is; do we really need it?). It could also mean a very different way of organizing the production of our needs and wants. We humans are very smart. I think we're capable of coming up with a different way of doing things that makes sense, for us and the world around us and the world we leave for our descendants.

This has all been too brief and over-simplified. But, the general outline is what I wanted to convey. More detailed discussions should follow.

Nice piece on Mankiw's response to his students on Econospeak

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:50:00 +0000

Peter Dorman at EconoSpeak makes some good points about Mankiw’s Reply to the Walk-Out. Long story short: Mankiw is respectful, but wrong on some points and unfortunately right on others. Includes link to Mankiw's op-ed.

This about sums it up

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:51:00 +0000

Via DeLong: Matthew Yglesias's Theory of the Obama Administration in 2010: Excessive Reliance on the Second Derivative. Long story short: the Obama administration saw that it's intervention had stopped the employment free-fall of and concluded that it would just turn itself around. Wrong. That was the point at which more help was needed to reverse the damage. I would add that the Obama administration also under-estimated the extent of the damage that was already done when they came into office.

American Jobs Act. sigh.

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:42:00 +0000

Well, I commented last night on President Obama's speech to Congress on jobs on WGXC, my local radio station. I thought it worth putting down my thoughts on silicon, since I've already done all the thinking about it.

First of all, I thought that the delivery was one of the better than I've heard from President Obama since he took office. It reminded me more of candidate Obama. Maybe that's because this speech, more than the official announcement that he was running for re-election a while back, was the kick-off to his re-election campaign. He had that whole preacher cadence down, punctuating sections of the speech with the phrase "that's why you should pass this bill now." A nice touch, but one that was clearly not directed at the politicians in front of him, many of whom wouldn't support kibble for kittens if it was an Obama proposal.

Moving on to substance is a bit depressing. The American Jobs Act is equal parts weak tea and bitter pill. The weak tea is that as a job creation proposal, it does too little, too ineffectively. Much of the proposal the President outlined in the speech sounds a lot like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus passed early in 2009. I will talk about that bill's effectiveness in a bit, because I think a lot of people think very lazily about how to assess that policy's impact. But the parts are all there: lots of tax cutting; state aid; unemployment insurance; and infrastructure spending. There is also some mortgage finance relief thrown in for good measure.

Tax cuts will be welcome to most people, of course. Who doesn't want more of their paycheck going directly into their pockets (other than Warren Buffet, of course)? The proposal to cut payroll taxes in half is great in a couple of ways. It will add some stimulus to the demand for goods and services (people will buy more stuff if they get their hands on a bigger chunk of their paychecks). And the payroll tax is one of the more regressive federal taxes, since people pay a flat rate on their first $100K or so of wage and salary income and nothing above that cap, which means that people who make less than $100K (most of us) put a bigger percentage of our salaries into the Social Security system than those who make more.

The employer reduction in the payroll tax isn't going to be as helpful. Some small business owners will see that as a small bump to their bottom line, but it certainly isn't going to create a lot of jobs. Nor will the tax credits for hiring the long-term unemployed or veterans, although those are certainly worthy targets for encouraging employment. But businesses aren't making hiring decisions based on the tax implications of hiring more workers. Certainly, they take taxes they have to pay into account, but these are a small portion of the cost of hiring someone. The point is that businesses aren't hiring people because there is not enough demand for goods and services in the economy. Until demand for the stuff businesses produce or provide goes up, hiring will remain slow.

State aid is a simpler case to make. States lose revenue during recessions: fewer people working means lower income tax receipts, and lower sales tax receipts as well, as people economize. And state expenses for things like Medicaid naturally go up during recessions, since people are poorer. In addition, in many states, pension funds were hit hard by the financial crisis (remember that?), meaning that, because of the actions of fraudulent bankers, states had to come up with extra money for their pension systems right when their tax revenues were tanking. Those are the reasons why in every state for the last few years, budgets have been a huge problem: it's not spending, it's revenue. So state aid is a simple thing the Federal government can do to prevent layoffs of teachers, policemen and firefighters. Too bad Congress cut half of it out of the ARRA. That didn't have any bad consequences did it? I'm sure Congress wouldn't make the same mistake again (by the way, that was sarcasm).

Infrastructure spending was a good idea in 2009 and it's still a good idea today. Though it isn't a super-fast and effective way to get people back to work, it is better than nothing. It's not better than an old-school direct hiring program like the WPA, as my colleague Pavlina Tcherneva points out.
All in all, the proposal is OK, but it will not have a big enough impact, either to make a large dent in unemployment (it's just over half as large as the original stimulus package) or to influence the election in favor of the President. But it IS better than nothing. really.

The bitter pill in this proposal is the idea that cutting Medicare is how we're going to pay for it. Flabbergasting! On the one hand, there is a bit of clever play in the proposal, in which the President suggests that the "Super Committee" add the bill from this bill to the tally it's going to cut by Thanksgiving. Cute, but let's face it, that committee is doomed to failure anyway. So does that mean the across the board cuts will have to be even deeper? Back to Medicare, the problem with Medicare is health care in this country. The program itself is just fine and would be just fine (Americans are even willing to pay higher taxes to keep it, according to polls, but don't tell the Tea Party), if costs were not growing out of control. There are lots of good proposals to control costs, but I think looking at the fee-for-service model that we have right now is the prime candidate for reducing costs. Reductions in coverage are an unnecessary evil.

I want to take a moment to address some reactions to this plan from both the left and the right. I haven't actually bothered to check the latter. Were the words "failed policies" used? I knew it! I heard some from the former right after the speech, when my old professor Rick Wolff gave some commentary on Pacifica. Most of what he said I agreed with and he ended with a similar wish for a more FDR-like plan. But, he said that the ARRA hadn't worked, and this stuck in my craw a bit. We did some estimates of it's employment impact at the Levy Economics Institute, and came up with about 6 million jobs created or saved. Of course, by the time ARRA was enacted, the economy had already lost 8 million jobs, so it alone couldn't have brought us back to pre-recession levels of employment. And of course, the rest of the economy was still in free-fall. Below, I have a chart of employment and the employment-population ratio (the percentage of the adult population employed) which I made using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.

You can see that the economy was losing jobs rapidly (the blue line) beginning in October 2008. The employment situation only starts to stabilize in late 2009, after the stimulus plan went into effect. There has not been significant job growth since then. Without the spending in the ARRA, the economy would eventually have bottomed out on its own, surely, but at what level of employment? Would we even be at the bottom yet? We can't know, of course. And this is the point I want to make: the appropriate measure of the effectiveness of the ARRA in combating unemployment is a comparison that we can't make. To say that it didn't work because we have 9.1% unemployment (or pick any number), is an invalid argument.

We can however know some things, just by using a little logic, about the effectiveness of the ARRA has to look at. Money was spent by the Federal, State and local governments that would not have been spent, had not the ARRA passed. That spending increased incomes going into the pockets of the workers impacted, which would have been empty otherwise. Those workers spent that money, meaning the effective demand for goods and services was higher than it would otherwise have been. That increased demand meant people who would otherwise have lost their jobs kept them instead and spent their paychecks and so on, and so on.

Now you can argue, as many economists on the right do, that the government spending just meant less private spending by businesses, etc. That the economy is essentially a zero-sum game: if the government borrows to engage in stimulus, then there are less funds available for entrepreneurs to borrow and it all balances out, except the government is worse at knowing how to spend money wisely than entrepreneurs (like Donald Trump, the king of bankruptcies). But riddle me this: what were all those entrepreneurs doing in late 2008 and early 2009? Were they on vacation off-planet? Snarkiness aside, I don't think much of that line of argument. I'd like it if my colleagues on the left didn't give those people who make it more fuel for their fire by saying "the ARRA didn't work."

Finally, I wonder about how this proposal is ever going to get through Congress. The President is promising to go around, campaigning for it (and simultaneously, re-election, I assume). If he does manage to convince people to get excited about this proposal, will people be able to move Congress? Congress seems quite impervious to public opinion, when it is not in tune with corporate interests, so I don't think polling data will be sufficient. More will be required: active organizing to put pressure on congresspeople in both parties to vote for the bill. To engage that kind of mobilization, however, the President needs to be selling a bigger better deal than this American Jobs Act.

Listen to me!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:49:00 +0000

I'll be talking about President Obama's jobs speech tonight right after the speech on WGXC, 90.7FM in Columbia and Greene Counties in New York or streaming on line at wgxc.org. I'll be a guest on the Jazz Disturbance radio show hosted by the irrepressible Cheryl K.

Calculated Risk delivers the goods

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:13:00 +0000

And in this case the goods are graphs and data sources. Great list. Super blog!

Correcting CNN is really like shooting fish in a barrel

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:24:00 +0000

In an article entitled "People in affluent nations may be more depression-prone", Amanda MacMillan quotes Evelyn Bromet as saying:

Moreover, she adds, the richest countries in the world also tend to have the greatest levels of income inequality, which has been linked to higher rates of depression as well as many other chronic diseases.

I'm not qualified to comment on inequality's links to depression, but as far as the first claim? Right in my wheel-house. Consulting the extremely handy UNDP Data explorer (Go play with that data; hours of fun for the whole family!), I quickly produced the following graph (graphs are cool!):

There is no clear relationship between income and inequality. The United States, for example has high income (GDP per capita, in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars), but medium inequality (until you narrow the field to 'advanced' countries. So long story short, either the SUNY Stonybrook psychologist or the Health.com reporter got it wrong.

Taibbi stumbles close to the truth

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:45:00 +0000

In a blog post on Rolling Stone called "Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal," (go read the whole thing; it's short, I'll wait) Matt Taibbi is both right and wrong in his summary:

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch.

I don't think the Democrats would be worse off with most voters either. Some voters will be demagogued no matter what Obama and Congressional Democrats do or don't do. And then there's racism, of course. But the Democrats haven't retreated from bread and butter issues like job creation because they're afraid of "public criticism." They may well be, of course, but they're even more afraid of losing their lifeblood: campaign contributions from Wall Street and the rest of corporate America. That is why Obama and the Democrats enact policies that are pro-rich and pro-business. This is not rocket science.

Irony, Vibe and Erykah Badu

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:29:00 +0000

The Angry Black Woman has an interesting post on Erykah Badu's Vibe cover story. ABW clips a great quote from Badu, which I show in a screencap after the cut, along with Vibe's rephrasing of the quote.

I'll wait until your facepalm is over. If you did not immediately find your face in your palm, notice that Vibe turned the meaning around a bit with their injudicious editing of what Badu said. Sigh. Also, for your additional irony needs, when I went to the article, here's what I saw at the top of the page.

Good for Vibe for interviewing Badu about this subject. I await the results of any introspection this might prompt. With not much hope.

Rick Wolff on S&P in the Guardian

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Masterson) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:53:00 +0000

A familiar voice in the Guardian on S&P's judgment on US debt. He says there are "two sane responses: laughter and a yawn." My favorite is this paragraph:

The first [reasonable reaction to S&P's announcement] is sheer incredulity. S&P is famous for having issued what Senator Carl Levin (chair of the Senate investigations subcommittee) recently called "inflated credit ratings" prompted by "rampant conflicts of interest" in the US financial industry. Senator Levin named this company a "key cause" of the economic crisis. That is polite-speak for having published misleading information about credit risks and/or having shown monumentally poor judgment in assessing such risks. So, we now should take seriously what this utterly compromised company says? What?!

This nicely summarizes my own first thought when I heard that S&P was issuing a warning on U.S. debt. Please.