Month: September 2011

Drake Bennett evaluates efforts to train and retrain workers for "in-demand" jobs. The structural challenge: 

Even with 14 million Americans looking for work—and at least 2.6 million wanting work but not actively searching—jobs are going unfilled. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the total number of openings at 3.2 million, and despite the flood of applicants, companies sometimes struggle to find candidates that fit … Estimates of the size of the mismatch vary widely, but a May International Monetary Fund paper put it at a quarter of the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has suggested it accounts for a full third of the unemployment rate.

A reader writes:

Briefly, some other factors on this question:

1. Years ago, Asian restaurants were often the only ones open during Christian holidays. Thus the stereotype about Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas. There were frequently no other choices.

2. Building on the take-out theme, some Jews keep kosher on their everyday-use dishware but will bring in food to eat on paper plates, and for years Chinese was the only viable way to do this other than fast food.

3. Asian food eschews dairy, so that even if not technically kosher, it's relatively easy to eat "kosher style" Chinese as long as you stay away from pork and shrimp. This also explains the many truly kosher Chinese-themed restaurants in Jewish areas.

Another expands on those themes:

When Josh Ozersky questions the relationship because, among other things, Jews are not known for "intermingling," he comes tantilizingly close to the true answer to why American Jews eat so much Chinese food. 

At the turn of the 20th century, the Jews immigrating en masse to the United States, and particularly New York, were eager to assimilate and thus many were venturing out into the non-kosher world for the first time.  Restaurants that catered to the immigrant population in the neighborhoods where Jews settled were run mostly by Italians and Chinese.  Eating at an Italian restaurant would necessarily involve (a) looking at crosses and icons on the wall and (b) mixing meat and cheese.  Both of these things would make any recent immigrant more than a little uncomfortable – particularly the later as the law forbidding the mixing of milk and meat persisted among the Jewish population long after they had given up on worrying if the meat or poultry was killed in accordance with Jewish law.  In a Chinese restaurant, however, there were no pictures of Jesus looking over the diners and one never had to worry that there would be a layer of cheese on top of the kung pao chicken.

Oh, and where else are Jews going to eat on Christmas and Easter?

Another:

I'd suggest anyone interested in a casual history of the relationship between American Jews and Chinese food pick up Jennifer 8 Lee's "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles." In more than one chapter she addresses this very issue.

Another:

Ozersky's article is silly. The definitive paper on this has been written (pdf).

Brad Plumer admits the Solyndra loan process was "irregular" and the scandal surrounding the bankruptcy is legitimate. But he warns against concluding that the solar industry, as a whole, is doomed:

Prices for solar photovoltaic modules continue to tumble, even as fossil-fuel prices rise. A June report by Ernst & Young suggests that large-scale solar could become cost-competitive within a decade, even without government support. Of course, grid operators still have to grapple with the fact that the sun doesn’t always shine, but storage technologies continue to improve — in July, a solar plant in Seville, Spain, achieved continuous 24-hour operation using molten salt storage.

David Roberts hates that Solyndra is being used "to discredit not just the DOE loan program, but all government support for clean energy and indeed clean energy itself."

Anne Peters explains:

Many in congress see [military assistance] as a card to be played with Abbas because it is a scarce resource that is in high demand by the West Bank government. Yet this is a false lead. Trying to leverage U.S. security assistance is a self-defeating proposition, as David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy argued in congress yesterday. The health of the Palestinian security forces is too wound up with both U.S. interests in the two-state solution and IDF interest in reducing its number of occupational forces. Manipulating these resources — at least by threatening to decrease them– is to shoot oneself in the leg. Attacking the aid to the PA might satisfy angry members of congress, but would only undermine its own agenda.

Geoffrey Aronson makes the same point:

[Israelis] understand that these Palestinian security forces are doing stuff that saves Israel the energy of deploying more aggressively throughout certain areas in the West Bank — without precluding the Israeli forces from operating or restricting their operational freedom. They still go anywhere and everywhere at will, without coordination with the Palestinians if they so choose. So these Palestinian forces are really seen as a strategic adjunct to the Israeli security forces. I think this energy in Congress for cutting off aid is directed not specifically at the security aid, but more broadly at punishing the PA for having a mind of its own politically.

A gif-based music video:

(Hat tip: LikeCool)

Larison is fed up with Marco Rubio's approach to foreign policy:

I have followed Rubio on foreign policy since he was a candidate, and I have found that he doesn’t offer much except for “Wilsonian boilerplate” and party-line whining about how everything Obama has done has been too slow or insufficiently aggressive. He spends a lot of time in this new speech running through a Santorumesque check-list of governments he doesn’t like. He insists on treating them as intolerable threats, he makes a lot of broad claims about how America must fulfill its “rightful role” as hegemon, and he refuses to consider any meaningful cuts in military spending. Most of all, he’s predictably unsatisfied with almost everything the administration has done or not done.

Pareene uses pitch-perfect understatement to describe it:

Sarah Palin is a person! She's done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she'd dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody's perfect, laugh off the "gossip," and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

Actually, I think she is smart in an intuitive, practical way – smarter than she's often given credit for. You don't vault from housewife to veep nominee without smarts. What she doesn't have is any impulse control, or larger sense of perspective, or a strong ego. So she lashes out.

That's Shibley Telhami's belief:

Would Palestine be a stable state? The first measure is if it would be more stable than the alternatives. Instincts of both the Arab and Jewish publics are about right: The alternative would probably be more unstable and, importantly, more destabilizing, particularly for neighboring states. The stability of a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would depend less on Palestinian internal divisions and economic viability than on the stability of the political and security arrangements with Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

Aaron David Miller, on the other hand, worries about the new state's viability:

The fact is, it isn't the Israelis who have a demographic problem; it may actually be the Palestinians who simply cannot marshal enough control over their disparate parts to harness their people power into an effective strategy. Any Israeli government — even one that was serious about negotiations — would try to develop separate approaches to deal with these divisions: a military/security policy toward Gaza; a co-optation strategy toward the West Bank; and a border-security approach toward the diaspora. If it looked like the forces of diplomacy, rather than the forces of history, might dictate the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, perhaps these various pieces of the Palestinian puzzle could be worked out and addressed. But today, with no sustainable negotiations on the horizon, that does not appear to be the case. A Palestine in pieces does not bode well for a conflict-ending solution, and no paper resolution or upgrade in status in New York this month will change that.

World Politics Review has a series of essays that focus, respectively, on institutions, economics, and refugees in a Palestinian state (free registration required). Ali Ghraib argues it would have limited ability to use the ICC to charge Israelis with war crimes.

(Photo: Palestinian women walk along the road at night during one of the frequent power cuts across Gaza City on August 17, 2011 in Gaza City, Gaza. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.)

 

There have long been some very strange contradictions. The first is the notion that we need to control healthcare costs so they stop strangling the private sector and racking up massive debt in the public. The second is that the private sector is much more efficient than the public, as it fosters competition, and that any attempt to restrict treatments or make cost-benefit analyses in healthcare is a form of Nazi eugenics. Even a simple measure that would cut healthcare costs drastically – counseling Medicare patients on power-of-attorney issues if they are incapacitated – is demonized as "death panels."

The trouble with this argument is that while it is indeed doctrinally perfect, and therefore appealing to today's brain-dead GOP base, it is empirically wrong. The private healthcare sector is far more expensive than the public and enormously inefficient – especially compared with more socialized systems abroad. You can still legitimately defend the private over public model, but only if you confess that it means vastly more public spending, and an ever-growing and ever-more-expensive private system, with all its weight on profits, labor mobility and wages. If you cut off Medicare spending with a voucher, as in the Ryan plan, or raise the retirement age, you will either simply shift and increase costs to the private sector or you will simply be rationing in the most brutal way possible, by letting people die earlier than they should – in a country where poverty is growing and may be here for a long, long time.

Austin Frakt helpfully summarizes the empirical data we have:

The right argument for private options is not that they reduce health care spending. The evidence I’ve seen and the statements by the health care industry itself illustrate otherwise. The right argument is that private options offer more choice, greater flexibility, and rapid innovation. Those things are good, but they cost something. A well-functioning, competitive private market can drive that cost to a minimum, but that cost may still be above what we’d pay for a government health plan (albeit one with less or no choice and relatively slow to adjust to the changing needs and demands of Americans).

Private health plan advocates are right. Choice, innovation, and flexibility are all valuable. They’re so valuable, people may be willing to pay more for them. There’s nothing wrong with that. But paying more means, well, paying more. If you think you can get all that for less, show me the evidence. Until then, I don’t see any reason to, on faith, waive the fundamental law of economics: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Oamaru, New Zealand, 9.30 am