The Dish

A reader writes:

Don’t knock Dutch container housing! In the Netherlands, container housing is more prevalent and respected than you might think. And they’re well-executed, like much the Dutch do. I was just back in Amsterdam last month and saw a couple other container buildings they’ve put together. It’s a smart thing to do, since these days there’s an imbalance in container flows – full from Asia, lots of empties back from the West. Or they just stack up, as a drive along the New Jersey meadowlands will confirm for you.

Now, relocating abusive gypsies is a fair point to question, but I wouldn’t automatically associate container housing with degradation.

Another questions the notion that the Roma family was mistreated:

A little trawling around other websites, including some Dutch ones, suggests that this family has been causing serious trouble for at least 13 years.

There have been court cases. Earlier this summer the city installed surveillance cameras in their block just because there had been so many complaints, including of intimidation.

It is really hard to evict a tenant in Amsterdam. The housing association has been trying for years. I think they accused the family of causing structural damage to the building where they lived (not sure about the translation here). The judge finally allowed the eviction on the grounds that the neighbors were afraid of them.

In another picture of their two-container home, you can see a tram stop in the background, probably a five-minute walk away. According to one commenter, an Albert Heijn (major grocery store) is two stops away on this tram – so Mr. Lonis’s mother-in-law is not going to find it hard to do the grocery shopping! While Zeeburgereiland does seem pretty sparsely built at the moment, the Zeeburg area in general is an up-and-coming area of Amsterdam with lots of nice homes, shops, etc. The comment from Geert Wilders is just a loony right-winger stirring up bad feeling. They have not been sent to a concentration camp.

Daniel Engber deflates the pro-breakfast hype:

A study published last week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition starts with this simple fact—that in spite of all these association studies, no one knows exactly what skipping breakfast might be doing to our bodies. The study goes on to make a disturbing claim: Scholars in this field of inquiry—breakfast science—have been fudging facts and misinterpreting the science. The literature shows signs of research bias.

That doesn’t mean any of the studies described above is fraudulent or dubious. There certainly is a link between skipping meals and getting fat, but Andrew Brown, a nutritionist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and lead author of the new critique, points out that large surveys of people’s diets and their health are at most suggestive. Lining up several dozen of them in a row doesn’t add much more value to their claims. It could be that my yuppie morning ritual really keeps my BMI in check, perhaps by changing my metabolism or helping to control my appetite. But it’s also possible that my breakfast habits do nothing for me on their own, and that they only correspond to some deeper determinants of health.

Derek Thompson explains a key element of our jobless recovery – the public sector’s “unprecedentedly bad post-crash performance”:

The public sector collapse was not Obama’s plan. It is not his fault, really. It is scarcely his responsibility, since the vast majority of government jobs — and of government jobs lost — have been at the state and local level. The recession devastated state tax revenue, and states cannot borrow from international lenders like Washington. So most had no choice but to cut workers. The stimulus delayed, but did not indefinitely defer, the blood-letting. And, since Congress refused to extend support even as interest rates clung to historically low levels, it’s been brutal.

If we held government employment perfectly steady since Day One of Obama’s presidency — not one more government job, nor one less — job creation would have seen a 25 percent boost. Instead, Obama’s legacy will include an historically strange post-recession collapse in government unemployment — and a powerful lesson in the limits of presidential power.

Update from a reader:

Derek Thompson’s post about the recovery is correct to note that the plummet in government jobs largely explains the lackluster recovery, and for that piece of information it is really Bill McBride at Calculated Risk who should be thanked. But when Mr Thompson says “The recession devastated state tax revenue, and states cannot borrow from international lenders like Washington. So most had no choice but to cut workers,” he makes a series of errors and gross misrepresentations.

States can and do borrow from foreign sources in exactly the same way the Federal government does, which is by selling their bonds to foreign buyers. Not only was Mr Thompson wrong about that, but he implies that Federal borrowing is that Federal borrowing comes from a “lender,” which makes it sound like going to a bank for a mortgage. But that is not right. The “borrowed” money comes from bond buyers.

What States generally cannot do is engage in deficit spending. They have balanced budget laws to follow. States also cannot print money or engage in quantitative easing. These are all things that the Federal government can do. Mr Thompson gets this all wrong.

And then there is Mr Thompson’s most pernicious error. He claims that Federal “borrowing” comes from foreign “lenders,” and that is a damnable misrepresentation. Most US Treasury Bonds are held by US citizens and US-based financial entities. The debt we owe is largely to ourselves.

Getting all of this right is crucial for understanding how and why the implementation of austerity and campaigns demanding austerity (like Simpson-Bowles) have been so damaging to the economy during the recession and nascent recovery.