Tag Archives: jonesreader

Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

by JoanSanderz Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Who’s responsible for increasing political polarization? Andrew Gelman suggests that one of the “cleanest pieces of evidence” is public attitudes toward abortion. If you look at the polling data, what you see is that attitudes between Democrats and Republicans start to diverge markedly around 1990. If you dig a little deeper, you find that the change is almost entirely among whites. If you dig a little deeper among whites, you get this:

The biggest change in party polarization on abortion appears among those with mid to high incomes; those with college degrees; and those who are heavily tuned into politics. Among the fabled blue-collar whites, party ID doesn’t really predict attitudes on abortion very well at all.

Gelman avoids drawing any broad conclusions from this, and so will I. But it’s interesting, especially since we’ve seen lots of evidence like this before. It’s elites who have largely turned our major parties into polarized war zones, not the heartland.

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Raw Data: It’s Elites Who Drive Polarization, Not the Working Class

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

by HalinaFreitas Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Generally speaking, global investors are pretty optimistic. According to a new Bloomberg poll, they think China is a trouble spot, but they’re bullish on prospects in Europe and the US, and a large majority are more confident than they were at this time last year. But take a look at this:

After the great crash of 2008, investors sure are sensitive about bubbles. They think equity markets are close to being a bubble; fixed-income markets are close to being a bubble; and even US treasuries are inching toward bubblicious territory. That accounts for just about everything except real property, which investors are still sanguine about—in the US, anyway.

This is just raw data, and it might not mean anything. On the other hand, no matter what investors say about the economy, if they’re bearish on real-world ventures (factory expansions, etc.) and they’re getting cold feet about financial ventures, does this mean that more and more money is going to be sitting on the sidelines? Or does it mean that all this money is going to suddenly start pouring into the safe haven of US housing until everyone gets scared of that too? Or something else?

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

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Earmarks are Back, Baby!

by NLZGeorgina Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did so many Republicans vote for last week’s budget bill? One reason is that they wanted to avoid getting blamed for another government shutdown. As you’ll recall, the last one didn’t turn out so well. But Stan Collender says there’s another reason:

This is real inside-baseball: An omnibus appropriation provided an opportunity for the leadership to buy support from reluctant members by providing more dollars for their pet programs and projects. The demise of earmarks several years ago plus the use of continuing resolutions (which generally don’t provide dollars on a program-by-program basis) to fund the government took that ability away. This was the first appropriations bill in five years where that wasn’t the case.

More…. Virtually every Republican who voted for the bill got some dollars devoted to something, if not many things, that her or his constituents will be very happy to have. In other words, this was the first real return of earmarks since they were banned several years ago and even anti-spending members couldn’t resist.

Earmarks are back, baby! But really, I shouldn’t be so flippant about it. Nobody likes to see the sausage being made, but the truth is that earmarks are a useful part of the legislative process. Sure, they’re a little inefficient, and sure, they can get out of hand. But they don’t increase overall spending, and they do provide congressional leaders with a way to whip their troops into line. Human nature being what it is, leaders need at least a few carrots and sticks in order to get anything done, and this is something they’ve largely lost over the past few decades. It would be a good thing if they got some of them back.

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Earmarks are Back, Baby!

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Teen Employment Isn’t Really Very Well Correlated With the Minimum Wage

by AlfredoMoffet Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Tyler Cowen, here is a chart from Kevin Erdmann that shows raw teen employment figures during periods after the minimum wage was increased. What it shows, roughly speaking, is that in nearly every case, the trend rate of teen employment declined when a minimum wage hike went into effect. He asks: “Is there any other issue where the data conforms so strongly to basic economic intuition, and yet is widely written off as a coincidence?”

But but but…..what about the long-term trend? Between 1954 and 1970 the minimum wage went up steadily in real terms, and so did teen employment. Since 1980 the minimum wage has been declining steadily, and so has teen employment. Is it really possible that changes in the minimum wage would have immediate effects in one direction but long-term effects in the exact opposite direction?

Sure, maybe. But it doesn’t seem likely. In terms of short-term effects, what I mostly see are employment declines in 1973, 1979, 1990, 2000, and 2007. And guess what? Those are the dates of the last five recessions in the United States. What’s more interesting about this is that teen employment recovered from its immediate decline during the Carter and Clinton years, but didn’t recover during the Reagan and Bush years. (And probably not during the Obama years either, though the final results aren’t in yet.) Why? That’s an intriguing question.

Bottom line: Teen employment has dropped substantially since about 1980. But during that time the real minimum wage has declined from $8 to $6 and then gone back up to a little over $7. Maybe there’s a correlation there, but it sure isn’t easy to see. Whatever’s happening, the minimum wage seems to be a pretty small part of it.

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Teen Employment Isn’t Really Very Well Correlated With the Minimum Wage

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Today’s Health Tip: Cough Medicines Don’t Work

by zdtadaqod1 Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Whenever I’ve been sick for more than a few days, I start to get really tired of coughing. So I trudge over to the drug store, stare at the long aisle of cough medicines, and eventually pick one out. It never seems to do much good, though. So the next time I try a different one. But none of them ever seems to do much good. What’s up with that? R. Morgan Griffin explains why I’ve had so much trouble finding a cough medicine that works:

“We’ve never had good evidence that cough suppressants and expectorants help with cough,” says Norman Edelman, MD, chief medical officer at the American Lung Association. “But people are desperate to get some relief. They’re so convinced that they should work that they buy them anyway.”

….No new licensed cough treatment has appeared in more than 50 years — and the evidence for older drugs is not strong. A 2010 review of studies found that there is no evidence to support using common over-the-counter drugs for cough. This includes cough suppressants, such as dextromethorphan, or expectorants such as guaifenesin, which are supposed to loosen up mucus in the airways. In 2006, the American College of Chest Physicians surveyed a number of cough medicine studies from the last few decades. It found no evidence that these medicines help people with common coughs caused by viruses.

It’s important to understand that these studies have not proven that cough medicines don’t work. Rather, they’ve just found no proof that they do. It’s always possible that further studies could show that they help.

Anything is possible! But apparently it’s not just me. This stuff just doesn’t help much. If it’s been working for you thanks to the placebo effect, I apologize for telling you all this.

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Today’s Health Tip: Cough Medicines Don’t Work

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 January 2014

by AngelikaHinder Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today you get an exciting Domino movie! At first glance, you might think that she’s begging for food. But no. This little song-and-dance routine has one and only one meaning: she wants me to come into the living room, get down on the floor, and rub her belly. So I do. This is an even more elaborately choreographed affair, and maybe someday I’ll make a video of that too.

In other news, check out the handiwork of German design company Goldtatze, which can turn any room in your house into an arboreal cat playground. Very tastefully, too. “The cat-sized architectural additions seem like a year-round dose of summer camp for the curious pets.” Uh huh.

Link:

Friday Cat Blogging – 17 January 2014

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Everywhere in the World, Governments Heavily Regulate the Home Mortgage Business

by s02xc3x Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I wrote about problems with the mortgage finance market, which are mostly due to the fact that private lenders aren’t interested in funding 30-year fixed-rate mortgages on their own. There’s just too much risk. This means that if we want the mortgage market to revive, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need to start guaranteeing these mortgages again in the same volumes they used to.

One obvious response to this is that the 30-year fixed mortgage wasn’t handed down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. It was an invention of the New Deal. Other countries get by just fine without them, and so can we. We should just get the government out of the mortgage market entirely and let banks make whatever kinds of loans they want.

We could do that. But it’s well to keep in mind that although other countries might not have outfits like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they do have plenty of government regulation of the mortgage loan market. If you’re curious about how mortgages work outside the US, Michael Hiltzik provides a useful rundown of Canada here. Other countries work differently, but the principle is the same: there’s always supervision of some kind. Getting rid of Fannie and Freddie is a defensible option, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting rid of government regulation. You’ll just end up with different government regulation.

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Everywhere in the World, Governments Heavily Regulate the Home Mortgage Business

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This Holiday Season, Brick-and-Mortar Stores Had Fewer Customers But Bigger Sales

by Hermine73K Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The Wall Street Journal reports that foot traffic in retail outlets plummeted this holiday season:

A long-term change in shopper habits has reduced store traffic—perhaps permanently—and shifted pricing power away from malls and big-box retailers.

….Traffic to U.S. retailers was hurt during the financial crisis and recession, when job losses soared and shoppers kept a tight grip on their dollars. But nearly five years into the recovery, it appears many of those shoppers may never be coming back….Shoppers don’t seem to be using physical stores to browse as much, either. Instead, they seem to be figuring out what they want online then making targeted trips to pick it up from retailers that offer the best price.

This is actually not quite the tale of woe that it sounds like. It’s more interesting than that. In the past, brick-and-mortar outlets complained about shoppers coming to stores to check out the merchandise but then buying online. Now the tables have turned: shoppers are going online to check out prices and products, and then making a quick trip to pick up their goods instead of driving around town to a bunch of stores to do comparison shopping.

The result is that foot traffic is down, but sales are up: holiday spending increased 2.7 percent in 2013 compared to 2012. That’s not a great number, and obviously profits have taken a big hit as stores try to compete with low internet prices. Still, if sales are up 2.7 percent and foot traffic is down 14 percent, that means your staffing cost per dollar of sales is down. This is not unalloyed bad news for physical stores.

I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish here. Obviously brick-and-mortar stores have big challenges. Still, they might be able to thrive if they can learn to adapt to an environment in which there’s less casual browsing and more serious, targeted shopping. Anybody who’s worked in retail knows that you treat these kinds of shoppers differently, and perhaps the brick-and-mortar world needs to transition to a model in which they treat their customers by default as targeted shoppers. After all, there are still plenty of us who don’t believe everything we read online and still want to see things with our own eyes before we buy them.

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This Holiday Season, Brick-and-Mortar Stores Had Fewer Customers But Bigger Sales

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Mother Jones Goes Old School. Really Old School.

by grycjanekg Posted on January 16, 2014

Mother Jones

And now for something completely different. A friend of mine has taken up stained glass as a hobby (you can see more here), and he recently made me a stained glass version of the banner at the top of my blog. It arrived yesterday, and it’s now hanging above my desk. Are you jealous yet? He even got a discount on the raw glass when the folks in the store found out what it was for. Turns out they’re fans of Mother Jones. All I need now to go along with it is an illuminated manuscript version of the blog itself.

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Mother Jones Goes Old School. Really Old School.

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WikiLeaks Exposes What Obama’s Secret Trade Deal Would Do to the Environment

by sipid34 Posted on January 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

WikiLeaks published a leaked draft of the environment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Wednesday, and environmental groups are lining up to take a swing.

Continue Reading »

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WikiLeaks Exposes What Obama’s Secret Trade Deal Would Do to the Environment

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