Slandering the 70s →

...Yes, the US economy was troubled in that era. But the performance wasn’t nearly as bad as later legend had it, especially when we consider the incomes of middle-class families. Furthermore, the preferred right-wing narrative about why the 70s were worse than the 60s has absolutely no empirical support.

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What you can see, however, is that this pattern of recessions followed by disappointing recoveries has been the norm for the past 40 years; it began in the 1970s, but it didn’t end then...

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The 73-79 cycle was lousy by pre-73 standards, but real median income did end up notably higher despite sharply rising oil prices. Perhaps surprisingly given the legend, “morning in America” didn’t do much better, despite a sharp fall in oil prices — in fact, the annual growth rate was almost exactly the same. And the “Bush boom” was much worse, with essentially no gain in incomes even before the financial crisis struck. The only halfway convincing boom, at least as far as middle-class families are concerned, took place in the 1990s. 

So whence the impression that the 70s were completely horrible, while Reaganomics was a triumph? Part of the answer is inflation, which did feel out of control even if it was largely matched by wage increases. But one suspects that the trashing of the 70s also reflects the reality that those doing the trashing don’t really care about ordinary families; what they care about is this...

What would change if there were more women in Congress? More than you think. →

...Although male and female members of the House once voted in at least somewhat different ways, this was no longer true as of the mid-2000s.

However...

But “congressional action” involves a lot more than roll call voting. And here’s where larger differences between male and female legislators emerge — differences that could affect Congress as a whole if the representation of women were increased.

For one, women are more likely than men to advocate for issues often associated with women’s interests — child care, women’s health, abortion, pay equity and the like. There are many studies, but see Michele Swers’s two books to start with. This shows up, for example, in in floor speeches and legislative debates, where women are more likely to discuss issues in terms of women’s interests. (Women are also more likely than men to give floor speeches, period.)

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Other research suggests that women may be more effective legislators than men. Craig Volden, Alan Wiseman and Dana Wittmer find that, within the minority party, women are able to get their sponsored bills further through the legislative process.  Sarah Anzia and Christopher Berry have shown that women sponsor and co-sponsor more bills than men do, and deliver about 9 percent more funding to their districts.

This broken 700-ton generator demonstrates everything that went wrong with the reconstruction of Iraq →

Almost immediately after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the country faced persistent energy problems. Rolling blackouts were common and Iraqis could count on a scarce few hours of power a day. To rectify this, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) bought a $50 million Siemens V94 generator which was designated for a new power plant in Kirkuk. It was supposed to single-handed increase Iraq's power generation by six 6%.

But the program encountered programs from the get go...

The Few Oil "Spills" We Hear About

Two last week:

EPA: Illinois oil train derailment threatens Mississippi River

An oil train derailment and spill in northwest Illinois poses an “imminent and substantial danger” of contaminating the Mississippi River, the U.S.  Environmental Protection Agency said Saturday. 

The spill from the derailment, which occurred Thursday, also threatens the Galena River, a tributary of the Mississippi, and the  Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, one of the most complex ecosystems in North America.

Train carrying crude oil derails near Gogama, Ont.

This is the 4th train derailment in northern Ontario this year

...Police said the train was 30 to 40 cars in length and 10 cars went off the track four kilometres northwest of Gogama, Ont. There were no reports of injuries.

Some of the rail cars that caught fire entered the Mattagami River System, CN and police said.

Occasionally severe damage to our homes and environments are the price we must pay for an oil-based economy. We seem to be willing to do so, as a society, yet most "spills"/"accidents" receive little, if any, news coverage.

Data and Goliath's Big Idea →

But there's a big idea here too, and that's the balance between group interest and self-interest. Data about us is individually private, and at the same time valuable to all us collectively. How do we decide between the two? If President Obama tells us that we have to sacrifice the privacy of our data to keep our society safe from terrorism, how do we decide if that's a good trade-off? If Google and Facebook offer us free services in exchange for allowing them to build intimate dossiers on us, how do know whether to take the deal?

There are a lot of these sorts of deals on offer. Waze gives us real-time traffic information, but does it by collecting the location data of everyone using the service. The medical community wants our detailed health data to perform all sorts of health studies and to get early warning of pandemics. The government wants to know all about you to better deliver social services. Google wants to know everything about you for marketing purposes, but will "pay" you with free search, free e-mail, and the like.

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Again and again, it's the same trade-off: individual value versus group value.

I believe this is the fundamental issue of the information age, and solving it means careful thinking about the specific issues and a moral analysis of how they affect our core values.

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When possible, we need to figure out how to get the best of both: how to design systems that make use of our data collectively to benefit society as a whole, while at the same time protecting people individually.

The world isn't waiting; decisions about surveillance are being made for us­--often in secret. If we don't figure this out for ourselves, others will decide what they want to do with us and our data. And we don't want that.

ASTRONOMERS WATCH A SUPERNOVA AND SEE RERUNS →

The star exploded more than nine billion years ago on the other side of the universe, too far for even the Hubble to see without special help from the cosmos. In this case, however, light rays from the star have been bent and magnified by the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies so that multiple images of it appear.

Are Pilots Deserting Washington’s Drone War? →

The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.

There are roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as “18Xs,” working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another 180 pilots graduate annually from a training program that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those same 12 months, about 240 trained pilots quit and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (The better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.)

On January 4, 2015, the Daily Beast revealed an undated internal memo to Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh from General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle stating that pilot “outflow increases will damage the readiness and combat capability of the MQ-1/9 [Predator and Reaper] enterprise for years to come” and added that he was “extremely concerned.” Eleven days later, the issue got top billing at a special high-level briefing on the state of the Air Force. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James joined Welsh to address the matter. “This is a force that is under significant stress — significant stress from what is an unrelenting pace of operations,” she told the media.

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The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

But is it possible that a brand-new form of war — by remote control — is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological strain? Some have called drone war a “coward’s war” (an opinion that, according to reports from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?

Krugman Nails It on NAIRU →

So, we must make tradeoffs all the time. There can be too much of a good thing...

One economic concept most probably haven't heard of is the NAIRU. In short, it's about balance between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. If we step on the economic gas to try to provide more jobs, that's likely to lead to higher inflation. At some point, chasing the lowest possible unemployment rate, we'll start hurting the economy through too-high inflation. Figuring out that point, though, is not easy; the exact number will never be perfectly known, and it's subject to change over time, as the economy itself changes. But some people get stuck on one number, and won't forget it:

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Krugman points out that we really don't know the level of unemployment that is low enough to trigger accelerating inflation, although many people have put it in the 5.3-5.5 percent range. If the Fed acted on this view then it would be raising interest rates very soon to keep the unemployment rate from falling below this level.

But there was a widely held view back in the 1990s, back up by a considerable amount of evidence, that the magic number was close to 6.0 percent. Alan Greenspan had the good sense to ignore this view and allowed the unemployment rate to continue to fall, eventually bottoming out at 3.8 percent in some months in 2000. The result was that millions of people had jobs who would not otherwise have been able to, and tens of millions saw pay increases. And, we had trillions of dollars in additional output.

The gains from lower unemployment contrasted with the risks of higher inflation seem so asymmetric that it is difficult to see why the Fed should move to dampen growth until there is real evidence of higher wage growth and accelerating inflation. There clearly is none now, so why shouldn't the Fed be prepared to take the Greenspan gamble?