Wayne Slater, senior political writer for the Dallas Morning News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott allowing chemical plants to keep their contents secret, a move that benefits Koch Industries, and a campaign donor.
I first heard Georges Moustaki’s “Le Métèque” when I was six or seven. I couldn’t possibly have understood the lyrics in their entirety without an adult’s life experience, but there were parts, however, that struck me viscerally, as I heard it for the very first time. I knew the “metic” was me, too, even before I fully understood what it meant to be me. Continue reading The Metic ( Le Métèque )→
On Sunday The Times published an article by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan about a troubling aspect of the current American scene — the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened. It’s common to attribute such divisions to ignorance, but as Mr. Nyhan points out, the divide is actually worse among those who are seemingly better informed about the issues. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Beliefs, Facts and Money | NYTimes→
A few weeks ago, during the evidentiary dustup between Piketty and the FT, I quasi-favorably quoted a Matt Yglesias line re empirical evidence being overrated. A number of readers were understandably unhappy with that assertion, arguing that they come here to OTE for fact-based analysis based on empirical evidence (with, admittedly, a fair bit a heated, if not overheated, commentary). If facts all of the sudden don’t matter anymore, why not just call it a day and join the Tea Party?
So let me add a bit more nuance. The statement is about the quality and durability of evidence, which is not only varied, but, at least in the economic policy world, increasingly problematic. A number of developments have significantly lowered the signal-to-noise ratio. Continue reading Jared Bernstein: Evidence: Is It Really Overrated? | More on Evidence→
You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Build We Won’t |NYTimes→
For the past half-century or more, homeownership has formed the cornerstone of the American Dream. But ever since the economic crisis, America has been in the throes of a long-running Great Reset as it shifts gradually from homeownership toward renting. The number of “renter households” increased by more than half a million in 2013 according to a recent analysis on the state of the housing market from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
A recent post over at the economics blog Sober Look suggests that the shift is occurring faster than even I expected. This huge growth in the renting population means that, in the coming years, America’s housing crisis will have less to do with foreclosures and underwater homes and more to do with rental housing, as the supply of these units is falling far behind growing demand. Continue reading America’s Looming Rental Crisis – CityLab→
“I’ve been asking CEOs to give more long-term unemployed workers a fair shot at that new job and new chance to support their families,” President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address. “This week, many will come to the White House to make that commitment real.”
