Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think →

...a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make the lucky less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible.
Happily, though, when people are prompted to reflect on their good fortune, they become much more willing to contribute to the common good.
Psychologists use the term hindsight bias to describe our tendency to think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t. This bias operates with particular force for unusually successful outcomes.

Top Infrastructure Official Explains How America Used Highways To Destroy Black Neighborhoods →

The long arm of history casts a shadow that extends well into the present. But the past is often much closer than we realize.

In the first 20 years of the federal interstate system alone, Foxx said, highway construction displaced 475,000 families and over a million Americans. Most of them were low-income people of color in urban cores. It was Foxx’s second speech in as many days about how federal infrastructure projects contribute to inequality and poverty, and how the agency wants to make up for it now.
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The tool wasn’t always roads, and the decisions themselves weren’t all made way back in the mists of pre-Civil Rights Era social order.
In the early 1980s, for example, the city of St. Louis started buying out middle-class black residents of Kinloch, Missouri so that nearby Lambert International Airport could expand its runway network. 
For the airlines and other businesses at Lambert, the project promised hundreds of millions of dollars in new profits by speeding up the flow of traffic through the airport. With planes spending less time idling on the tarmac, studied predicted that nearby residents would also benefit in the form of better air quality.
But for the state’s longest-standing black city, its bakeries and and drugstores and public schools, the project spelled doom. After a series of buyouts that locals say felt more like arm-twisting than a genuine personal choice to stay or sell, Kinloch’s population plunged from over 4,000 to below 300. 
“I think the interesting thing about that is where they went,” Foxx said Wednesday. “Many of them, most of them, ended up moving to a town called Ferguson.”
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America can do far better at balancing needed infrastructure expansions with the interests of local communities, Foxx said. It just has to try. 

Columbus, Ohio, offers a for-instance. Interstate construction left communities literally walled off from the city’s business hub for decades. But last summer, the city officially opened a grass-lined car, pedestrian, and bike bridge over I-71 that stitches the highway wound closed and reconnects people to opportunity.

The sugar conspiracy →

This represents a dramatic shift in priority. For at least the last three decades, the dietary arch-villain has been saturated fat. When Yudkin was conducting his research into the effects of sugar, in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. Yudkin led a diminishing band of dissenters who believed that sugar, not fat, was the more likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated.
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If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us.
We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone around him turns 180 degrees. When, in 1957, John Yudkin first floated his hypothesis that sugar was a hazard to public health, it was taken seriously, as was its proponent. By the time Yudkin retired, 14 years later, both theory and author had been marginalised and derided. Only now is Yudkin’s work being returned, posthumously, to the scientific mainstream.

A Trade Deal for the 21st Century: An Alternative to the TPP →

It looks like the major media outlets are doing their full court press to lay the groundwork for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In recent weeks the news and opinion pages have been filled with articles and columns on the wonders of trade and why all good people should support trade deals like the TPP. 
In fact, some of what these pieces say about the wonders of trade is true, there can be large benefits to countries from trading and there is no doubt that the United States is enormously richer as a result of international trade. But that hardly means that everyone was benefitted by the patterns of trade over the last three decades, nor is it a reason to support the TPP.
But let’s be positive about trade. It is possible to envision a different pattern of trade which will offer benefits for the bulk of the population of the United States and also for our trading partners in the developing world. 
Let’s start with my favorite area in which to expand trade, highly-paid professionals. Our doctors and dentists, and to a lesser extent our lawyers, make far more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is not the case for our autoworkers and steel workers. They earn considerably lower pay than their counterparts in Western Europe. 
We can correct this imbalance by removing the barriers that make it difficult for foreign professionals to practice in the United States...

The Elite's Comforting Myth: We Had to Screw Rich Country Workers to Help the World's Poor →

From that point forward developing countries like China and Vietnam ran enormous trade surpluses. This implied huge trade deficits and unemployment for manufacturing workers in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe. The U.S. trade deficit eventually peaked at almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005, the equivalent of a deficit of $1080 billion in today's economy. This trade deficit led to the loss of close to one-third of all jobs in manufacturing.
So Cohen is giving us this impressive display of hand-wringing, telling us that it is unfortunate that rich country workers had to get whacked, but it was necessary to allow for the poor in the developing world to improve their living standards. It's very touching, but in the standard economics, it was hardly necessary.
The standard economics would have allowed the pattern of growth of the early and mid-1990s to continue. In that story, rich country workers would still have their jobs. Instead of producing goods for people in rich countries, people in poor countries would produce goods and services for their own populations. This should have allowed for even more rapid gains in living standards.
The fact that the textbook course of development was reversed, with massive capital flows going from poor countries to rich countries, was due to a massive failure of the international financial system. Workers in rich countries did not suffer from any inevitable process that allowed the world's poor to improve their living standards, they suffered because of the ineptitude and corruption of the folks at the Clinton Treasury Department and the I.M.F.

The one chart that explains almost everything →

If you want to understand the state of the economic and financial world right now, this is the best chart to have...
This is what it helps explain: slowing global growth (The emerging market investment boom is kaput.); the weakening Chinese economy and currency (Cash is pouring out the middle kingdom.); the relatively strong dollar and the weakness of US exports; the movement of real estate in Vancouver, Sydney and London; the Chinese corporate foreign acquisition spree; the sharp collapse of iron prices; the surging prices of gold; and, on and on and on.
Numbers released from Institute for International Finance Friday show net capital outflows from emerging markets hit roughly $755 billion in 2015, including the group’s best guess for so called “unrecorded outflows.”

Why the Banks Should Be Broken Up →

The call to break up the banks is not some socialist clarion call to end capitalism. (Well, it might be from Bernie, but not from everyone.)
In fact, it's just the opposite. The lessons of the crash era are that these megabanks have grown beyond the organic controls of capitalism. They were so big and so systemically important in '08 that the government could not let them go out of business.
This alone was an argument for breaking them up. The banks emerged from '08 with the implicit backing of the federal government. They became quasi-state entities, almost immune to failure. Not just Bernie Sanders worried about this. Voices as diverse as Louisiana Republican David Vitter and Krugman's own New York Times editorial board have argued for hard caps on bank size.
What's happened in more recent years, with LIBOR and the money-laundering scandals and Forex and the London Whale episode and so on, is that these firms also proved too "systemically important" to regulate and prosecute. They grew too big not only for capitalism, but for criminal law.
When a company is not only too big to fail, but too big to prosecute, it's too big to exist. Krugman may believe otherwise, but he shouldn't pretend that others – including his own paper – don't have legitimate concerns.