Month: May 2009

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Avent is befuddled:

Greenpeace is not alone among environmentalist groups opposing (or preparing to oppose) [the Waxman-Markey bill]. There’s no denying that the bill is very imperfect, and inadequate, but what does Greenpeace think is going to happen here?

What unnecessary concessions did Waxman make on this bill? Which Senators are going to magically change their mind on this issue when Obama and congressional leaders bring them into a room and say, “Come on now, guys, get serious.” I read this press release, and this is what I see:

Phase 1: Oppose best hope for climate legislation

Phase 2: ???????

Phase 3: Pass perfect climate bill!

Auckland, New Zealand, 12.14 pm

by Patrick Appel

Bainbridge makes a shrewd point:

by Richard Florida

This spring's 2.3 million newly minted college grads are understandably worried about their economic future. Unemployment among their peers is on the rise, according to this analysis by Chicago-area employment services firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, which found the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds jumping to 13.2 percent this spring, up from 9.2 percent a year ago.

Saturday's Wall Street Journal reports that many of the past decade's "youth magnet" locations are losing their appeal as economic opportunities whither in cities like Phoenix, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Las Vegas, and others which led the nation in attracting young college grads from 2005 to 2007.

So where are this year's college grads heading?

This recent survey lists the best places for college grads to launch their careers. New York City topped the list – despite the financial crisis – with eight in 10 survey respondents listing it as one of their top destinations. Second-place Washington, D.C. was named by 63 percent. Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and San Diego round out the top 10. And, remember, this is a list of the places that are best to find a job, not to have fun, go to great restaurants or clubs, make friends, or get lots of dates.

The list is heavy on big cities. It differs considerably from the Wall Street Journal's youth magnet list, but it's quite similar to a list my research team and I developed of the best places for recent college graduates which put big cities like San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, and New York on top. (D.C. jumped to the top of the list when we factored affordability and cost into the mix).

The appeal of big cities stems from a simple economic fact – they offer thicker labor markets with more robust job opportunities across a wide number of fields.

Getting ahead in your career today means more than picking the right first job. Corporate commitment has dwindled, job tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency. The average American changes their job once every three years; the average American under the age of 30 changes their job once a year.

In today's highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success also turns on picking a thick labor market which offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. For new grads, picking the most vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.

So for you newly minted college graduates ready to jump at the first job you're offered, now more than ever it's important to gauge the vibrancy of the job market and economy you're signing onto. Moving is an expensive and time-consuming proposition; mistakes are hard to undo. Maybe this place finder tool will help.

And, here again, the economic crisis appears to be reinforcing the position of America's leading talent magnets while further eroding the status of both older manufacturing centers and sprawling Sunbelt centers, for a simple reason: the location decisions of young college graduates are critical to shaping the future of cities and city-regions. The likelihood that a person will move peaks at around age 25 and then declines steeply with age: a 25-year-old is three times more likely to move than a 45- or 50-year-old. The combination of declining housing prices and concentrating economic opportunity in large U.S. city centers is only likely to compound this trend.

by Chris Bodenner

Michael Reagan, conservative radio host and son of the former president, writes:

[Republicans] lost in 2006 and 2008 because they stopped listening to the “nostalgia” for the conservative principles which guided my dad’s administrations. … If [they] want to know what the conservative majority among voters want and are thinking about, all they need to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and — in all modesty — Mike Reagan. Our voices are the voice of the majority of Republican voters and open-minded independents. We don’t have tens of millions of listeners every day because we have a message that contradicts the opinion of our audience…

He may have missed this recent poll by Fox News, which asked non-Democrats their preference for the 2012 GOP nominee. Palin ranked fourth among Republicans and nearly fifth among Independents. (But even if Reagan had seen the poll, or others like it, would his op-ed have changed?)

by Lane Wallace

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently running an exhibit called "Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West." The exhibit's premise is that photography and the American West essentially grew up together, and that photography played a key role in "shaping our collective imagination of the West." But one of the key questions raised both in the exhibit and in this Slate review of it, is: did that photography help create a myth of the West that isn't true, or isn't reflective of the full reality of the place?

Is each of us, as the Slate review put it, "the victim of a great Western fantasy"?

A couple of thoughts (one here, one in a later post). First: Without question, photography has helped form our vision of what "The American West" is like. Just as photography and stories, whether journalistic, cinematic, or artistic, construct our visions of event, place, or group of people we don't know from personal experience. But do photographers create myth? Or is myth something we create ourselves, from a lack of connective detail in between the selected moments a photographer … or writer … captures? 

In the case of Hollywood movies and advertisements, of course, the myth-making is both clear and intentional. For anyone who saw "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" one too many times and has any lingering thoughts of how romantic it might have been to be a woman on the Western Frontier, I suggest Pioneer Women–writings and journal entries from actual women on the frontier, collected by Joanna Stratton–as a sobering reality check. 

But myth or fantasy, like the aura of "fame" surrounding celebrities, is an illusion that requires a little distance, and a limited amount of information, to maintain. I, too, had a somewhat unrealistic vision of California and the American West  … until I moved there. But after 18 years there, I have a fuller context in which to put the MoMa exhibit's photos. And in that context, they're not misrepresentational. Each one is simply a piece taken out of a vast and multi-faceted puzzle. True in its particulars, just not the whole story. Any more than a single photo of my niece on my refrigerator tells the whole story of the person she is. If you really want to know the reality of a place, or person, you have to fill in the dots between the images yourself–not from a distance, but up close, in person. More on this in a bit …

(Photograph by Dorothea Lange, The Road West, New Mexico, 1938)

by Patrick Appel

Ed Kilgore wasn't impressed by polls from last week showing that more Americas call themselves pro-life. He writes:

More thoughts from John Sides here.

by Patrick Appel

Hilzoy is "trying to track down the truth behind the various claims that are being made about the Uighur detainees at Guantanamo." Start here and work your way back. From her first post:

But once we have engaged in extralegal practices, we are forced to compound an error.

by Richard A. Posner

My book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, published just days ago by the Harvard University Press, was finished on February 2 of this year. Much has happened in the more than three months since, and so I decided that as soon as the book was published I would begin to blog on the economic situation in an effort to keep the book up to date, as well as to enable me to rethink my views about the situation on the basis of criticisms of the book and of comments on the blog. I have written a number of blog entries in accordance with my plan, and they can be found at "A Failure of Capitalism," http://correspondents.theatlantic.com /richard_posner. This week, as a visitor to Andrew Sullivan's blog, I will be highlighting a handful of issues arising from the book and the blog entries and whatever exciting developments occur during the week.

The title of the book has aroused concerns in some quarters, and this first entry in the new blog series is addressed to those concerns. First, the preferred word for our current economic situation is "recession"; readers wonder why I insist on using the more ominous "depression." Second, they wonder whether I want to replace capitalism with some different economic system.

Most economists would reserve the word "depression" for a situation in which either output or employment has fallen by at least 10 percent. But that is round-number thinking. There is no basis for drawing the line between "recession" and "depression" at a particular percentage rate of decline. One month of 10 percent unemployment cannot be thought more serious than ten years of 9 percent unemployment. What marks our current economic situation as a depression in a meaningful sense, though not one likely to match in severity the Great Depression of the 1930s, is the intensity of the anxiety that it has aroused, the enormous costs that the government has incurred to try to stop the downward spiral of the economy, the possibility that those costs will bite us as the economy begins to recover and by doing so will knock the recovery off its path, and the further possibility that the recovery will be extremely protracted because of long-term changes in consumer preference. To illustrate the last point, the sale of automobiles has fallen by almost a half in the last year. Millions of people evidently decided to keep their "old" car a year longer than they were planning. They may discover that modern cars are extremely durable, that one can be quite content with another year or two years or three years driving their "old" car, and so in the future that they will buy a new car less frequently. Then hundreds of thousands of jobs that have disappeared from the auto industry in the last year, because of the economic downturn, will not return. The occupants of those jobs will not be rehired. They will have to find jobs for which they may have no skill or training. That may take a long time, and if so (and if the pattern is repeated in other industries) unemployment may remain high for a long time.

Another thing that marks our economic crisis as a "depression" is its potential for profound political consequences. There is a rage to reregulate the banking industry, and more broadly to increase the scope of government intervention in the economy, perhaps dramatically. It has increased dramatically–with the bank bailouts and the auto bailouts and the conditions attached to the bailouts and the $787 billion stimulus package–and while these are emergency measures, which can and should be ended when recovery from the depression is well under way, there is fear that they have given the federal government an appetite for permanently redrawing the line that separates government in a capitalistic economy from the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services, which are tasks of the private sector.

There is a sense, in short (turning to the second concern that I flagged), that capitalism has failed us, and we need something different, and that the title of my book signals support for that view. But that is not my intention. "Capitalism" is not a synonym for free markets. Capitalism is a complex economic system with many moving parts, and buying and selling and investing and borrowing and other activities carried on in private markets are only some of those moving parts. Others include a system of laws for protecting property and facilitating transactions, institutions for enforcing those laws, and regulations of markets designed to align private incentives with the goal of achieving widespread prosperity. One of the key regulatory institutions is a central bank, which in the United States is the Federal Reserve.

The part of capitalism that consists of a private banking system is unstable and can fail and can bring down much of the rest of the economy with it, and that is one reason a capitalist system cannot consist just of free markets. A central bank has a key role to play in preventing the banking system from failing; so do the other government agencies involved in the regulation of banking. These "moving parts" failed crucially in their responsibility for preventing the banking system from failing. And for reasons that I will explain in subsequent entries in this series, the blame for the depression should be allotted primarily on the Federal Reserve, on other parts of government (including the Treasury Department and Congress), and on the economics profession, rather than on the banks.

by Patrick Appel

After lambasting "Evidence Based Medicine," Abraham Verghese responds to his critics and points to this article from the Annals of Internal Medicine on Obama's heathcare savings proposals. From the conclusion:

If the United States is to control health care costs, it will have to follow the lead of other industrialized nations and embrace price restraint, spending targets, and insurance regulation. Such credible cost controls are, in the language of politics, a tough sell because they threaten the medical industry's income. The illusion of painless savings, however, confuses our national debate on health reform and makes the acceptance of cost control's realities all the more difficult.

On a related note, Jonathan Cohn has an exclusive on the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary healthcare estimates:

Bottom line: If you're a wonk like me, trying to figure out how much money it will cost to get reform done right, it's safe to assume the number will be north of $1 trillion, but perhaps not as far north as a lot of people thought, albeit with a modest group of people still uninsured.