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This year’s prize for National Reporting was awarded to an unlikely recipient:

InsideClimate News reporters Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer are the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. The trio took top honors in the category for their work on “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of,” a project that began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issues, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil.

This reach-out to the new brood of lean, small reporting web outfits is really, really gratifying. Their total budget? $550,000. They have no office. Sound familiar? There are only three of them on the Pulitzer team. Dan Nguyen puts the award in further context:

At just 5 years old and with only 7 full-time reporters, InsideClimate News is likely the smallest news organization ever to win in the National Reporting category …

Here’s another size measurement: According to the AP, InsideClimate had about 200,000 page views last month. The winner of last year’s National Reporting Pulitzer, the Huffington Post, is also an online-only news site. But it reportedly racks up a a billion page views a month: i.e., 5,000 times the page views at InsideClimate.

Numbers may seem like a superficial metric, but there’s a reason why big papers dominate every Pulitzer category (except for maybe Public Service) – big investigations require big resources. InsideClimate’s investigation occupied 3 of their reporters for 7 months, a major commitment for a news organization still struggling to draw a daily readership. Even more impressive: InsideClimate is based in Brooklyn, but they invested time and money (i.e. a travel budget) for a story several states away.

Yglesias takes another whack at Reinhart and Rogoff’s research, which a new paper calls into question:

Throught this whole process, R&R—and especially Kenneth Rogoff—keep equivocating about what causal links they’re trying to establish and for what purpose. Attack their strong claims and they retreat to weaker ones. But to establish the political argument that Rogoff has advanced in sworn testimony before the United States Congress requires strong evidence that there’s some reason other than interest rates and debt service costs that high debt burdens lead to slow growth. A broad correlation does not constitute evidence for that proposition. Only a tipping point does. And it’s clear that the evidence for a tipping point is extremely weak and depends on a series of contestable methodological claims that smack of specification-searing.

Krugman piles on:

There is a negative correlation between debt and growth in the data; we can argue about how much of this represents reverse correlation. There is not, however, any red line at 90 percent. And that red line has been crucial to R-R’s influence — without the “OMG, we’re going to cross 90 percent unless we go for austerity now now now” factor, the paper would never have had the influence it’s had.

Karl Smith’s perspective:

The power of RR was that they claimed they had derived the critical mass for government debt. Stay below 90% of GDP and everything proceeds more or less according to traditional models. Reach critical mass and hold on to your hats.

Naturally, this scared the crap out people. There are things in this world to be afraid of, and criticalities are among them. Rogoff, in particular, was delighted at this. He wanted to protect the world from the dangers of debt and now he had in had the tool to do it. No more hemming and hawing. We needed action immediately or we might hit critical mass.

Chait adds:

[The study] claimed to establish a correlation between high debt/GDP and low growth, and its fans turned this into proof that the high debt caused the low growth. But low growth also causes high debt. And what this suggests is that people seized on Reinhart and Rogoff’s finding because it validated an intuitively correct notion, that debt was dangerous. It established a nice, clear cut-off line, which is always handy when you’re trying to warn people of an amorphous long-term danger.

Both these arguments lead back to the same place — namely, that the political debate has been dominated by an imaginary fear. As a result, we’ve endured mass unemployment, a phenomenon with enormous and very long-term consequences.

Marijuana meets the farmer’s market:

Northern California’s first pot farmers’ market is like most other farmers’ markets, except you buy weed instead of kale and there’s the possibility you’ll go to prison – which gives visits to the Organicann Harvest Market in Sonoma County a bit of an edge this chilly morning.

It’s not the country’s only cannabis market:

[As public policy analyst Dominic] Corva notes, a similar indoor bud market has existed in Tacoma, Washington since 2010. Scattered reports indicate sporadic markets have also been held elsewhere in California and Washington as well as in Arizona– all symptoms of the normalization of the commodity, he said. And part of that normalization includes a new demand for pot grown locally, sustainably, in small batches, outdoors, and rather cheaply; a key draw at the Organicann Market. “Sungrown” or outdoor marijuana, is making something of a comeback in California’s medical scene, watchers say.

Indoor-grown pot has dominated stores for about a decade, because it tends to be more potent, pretty, and fragrant, while outdoor weed is reputedly weaker, weathered and less pungent. But outdoor growers and certain dispensaries have rebranded it, offering “sungrown” cuts that compete with indoor, if not on looks, then on price, potency and carbon footprint.

Previous Dish on the upscale marijuana market here.

Larry McMurtry reviews a book written by the legendary folk singer:

House of Earth was completed in 1947 but discovered only recently. It is a novel about farming; there aren’t many such. The one great one, Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds, was reprinted not long ago by the persistent professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, who was given it by an astute bookseller. It’s a great book, and House of Earth isn’t, though it is powerful. It’s a serious effort to dramatize the struggles of a young couple, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, who try to make a living as farm laborers in the most unforgiving years of an equally unforgiving place: the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s.

His conclusion? Stick with Guthrie’s songs:

Woody Guthrie wrote a fair amount, in letters, diaries, in journals, and on random pieces of paper. But it is not as a writer that we revere him, or that so many of his contemporaries and peers beat a path to his door or to his hospital bed—Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen—and my own son and grandson now. His genius was song, and House of Earth is a bit of an oddity, though certainly a readable one. It is the apprentice work of a man who became great in his real calling, his craft, his sullen art, as the poet Dylan Thomas would say. Are we glad to have it? Sure. Would we trade any of the best songs for it? No way.

(Photo: Woody Guthrie in 1943, via Wikimedia Commons)

A reader vents during tax season:

I’ve always wondered how any self-respecting gay man (or woman) could ever support the Republican Party. But a series of recent events in my personal life momentarily made me think about it. My partner and I have a beautiful baby girl. We begged, borrow and stole (well, not the last thing) to have her via surrogacy, and she is the great joy of our life. We love being dads, and would love to have another child – a little brother and sister for our baby girl.

So, we started the process, which is about 18 months to two years until birth. The financial considerations were a huge part of it. It costs about $160,000 for a surrogacy in California, and one has to pull out all the stops to even have a chance of making it happen.

And unfortunately, our chances appear to have been kaboshed. Two weeks ago I got a call from my accountant. As a self-employed composer and writer, I always pay my estimate tax payments, and I did so last year. But I earned a lot as many of my projects came to fruition, and I unexpectedly have a very big tax bill. Unfortunately paying that bill will completely deplete all of our savings, which were meant for our second surrogacy. I’ve never minded paying tax before, but this time it hit hard. I worked extremely hard to make all that money.

At the same time I had a long chat with my partner’s niece at a family gathering. She is 22 years old, and has three children. The first was born when she was sixteen. She subsequently dropped out of high school. The State of California and the federal government gave her all sorts of benefits because she was a poor single mother, and so she decided to have some more babies.

The father of the second and third is the same, and they have built a nice little family together (he has another daughter too, by another woman). They both work full time jobs but earn very little because neither has a high school diploma. But there’s no ways they’d support their family without those government benefits. That’s what I thought …

I was astonished to learn she recently paid for a boob job, and a new iPad for her son’s birthday, and just bought her mom a TV set. She refers to her partner on Facebook as her husband, but they’re not legally married. I asked why, and she told me many of their single mother benefits would evaporate if they did.

She’s a sweet person and frankly, I don’t think she knows better. In her mind, she’s working hard to support her family. I don’t blame her given her lack of education. I blame the government for setting up benefits in such a way that they create these odd dependencies and actually inspire poor people who can’t afford it to have more children out of wedlock and NOT get married. Most of all, I’m angry because my huge tax bill is going to pay for this type of stuff, when actually I really need the money so I can have another baby in my lovely gay family.

Of course, most of the Republican Party base hates the fact I want to legally marry my partner and have more children with a surrogate. And so yes, right now I’d never ever vote for them. But if they dumped their anti-gay base, and came out with a lower taxes and responsible spending (not necessarily spending cuts) philosophy, I might well find it very tempting.

Kevin Lees is unimpressed by Venezuela’s new president:

[Nicolás] Maduro, it’s safe to say, is no Chávez. A former Caracas bus driver, Maduro was a loyal Chávez lieutenant from the beginning of the proclaimed Bolivarian revolution, and he served as Chávez’s dutiful foreign minister for six years prior to his elevation to the vice presidency last December. But the skills that allowed Maduro to remain in the top echelons of Chavismo didn’t lend themselves to leading a compelling campaign. His win owes more to the Chavista electoral machine, coercive mobilization tactics, a largely state-dominated media, and the resources that come from a decade of blurring the lines among Venezuela’s governing United Socialist Party (PSUV), PDVSA, and the government. Maduro was undeniably a lackluster candidate, and he wrapped himself in the legacy, and in some cases, the actual godhead, of Chávez—one plucky website tracked how many times Maduro has mentioned Chávez during the campaign (over 7,200). After saying that the United States may have caused Chávez’s terminal cancer, Maduro claimed earlier this month that a little bird spoke to him to tell him that the ghost of Chávez had blessed Maduro’s campaign.

Alejandro Tarre’s view:

Maduro inherits a country in crisis.

Four novels based on Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott’s wife, are due out this year. Abigail Grace Murdy assesses her legacy:

Confined to a mental hospital, Zelda wrote a novel about her breakdown, Save me the Waltz, which she finished in a mere two months. She sent it off to Scott’s publisher without telling him. When Scott found out, he was enraged. He had been writing a novel about her breakdown himself, Tender is the Night.

“Everything we have done is mine,” he told her. “If we make a trip…and you and I go around, I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. This is all my material. None of it is your material.” He insisted that she remove the overlapping sections of her novel. “What’s left of Save Me the Waltz is a jagged, unfinished book. We don’t know what it could have been,” says Sally Cline, who wrote a biography of Zelda in 2002.

Therese Anne Fowler, author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, tries to set the record straight:

It is the persistent, damning mischaracterisation of Zelda as “insane” that most needs undoing. The trouble lies in the diagnosis she was given in 1930: “schizophrenia”. While today we know it to mean severe mental illness requiring delicate and often lifelong treatment with medications, therapies, and sometimes institutionalisation, in Zelda’s time it was a catch-all label for a range of emotional difficulties. It was often applied to women who suffered depression or exhaustion brought on by impossible circumstances. Zelda did suffer some mental health crises – depression, primarily – and was an uninhibited, uncensored woman who didn’t always think before she acted, but she wasn’t crazy. Unwise? Sometimes. Insane? No.

Last week marked the 93rd wedding anniversary of the Fitzgeralds. Steve King reflects on their bittersweet union: 

The Fitzgeralds’ personal life has the same sense of a long and irrecoverable springtime. The legendary champagne-and-dancing anecdotes begin with their wedding celebrations — the raucous party was forced out of two of New York’s finest hotels — and last for precisely a decade, until Zelda’s first mental breakdown in April 1930. The following letter is from April 26, 1934, Scott writing to Zelda with hopes for a new beginning even as she undergoes treatment for her third breakdown:

You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too — the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand — and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and — I find it to be you and you only…. Forget the past — what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever — even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you — turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back….

In an echo of the closing to The Great Gatsby (April 1925), the two would be borne back ceaselessly to only the most troubling and trying aspects of their past.

Mike Springer takes the above video with a grain of salt:

We’re not sure, for example, that the clip purporting to show Zelda being “very lively in a street” is actually of her. It appears to show someone else. And one of the captions claims that Fitzgerald is pictured writing The Great Gatsby, but according to the University of South Carolina’s Fitzgerald Web site, the sentence he is writing on paper is: “Everybody has been predicting a bad end for the flapper, but I don’t think there is anything to worry about.”

Proponents of austerity have repeatedly cited this paper (pdf) by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which found slowed growth among countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios, to make the case for cuts in government spending. Mike Konczal highlights a new study that casts some serious doubts on the strength of the Reinhart-Rogoff argument:

In a new paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadsheet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff’s data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don’t get their controversial result.

Dean Baker ponders the impact of the paper:

This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment.

In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.

Tyler Cowen’s view:

The “case for austerity” didn’t rest much on R&R in the first place, rather on the notion that the bills have to be paid, dawdling on adjustment is not always so easy, and the feasible sum of international redistribution is quite low.  For this reason the UK should be relatively uninterested in immediate austerity and many nations in the eurozone periphery more interested.

Jared Bernstein’s addition to the debate:

I suspect R&R will say, assuming they acknowlege they messed up, that it still shows slower growth.  But that’s been the problem with their work from the beginning.  As I’ve written many times, riffing off of Bivens and Irons for one, if you mush everything together they way they do, you’re likely to get the causality backwards.  You’ll convince yourself that higher debt leads to slower growth when it’s more often the opposite.  Certainly in the US case, the most progress we’ve made against our debt ratios have been in periods of fast growth (and the biggest increases have been in periods of recession, slow growth, or war).

Part of Reinhart and Rogoff’s response:

The JEP paper with Vincent Reinhart looks at all public debt overhang episodes for advanced countries in our database, dating back to 1800. The overall average result shows that public debt overhang episodes (over 90% GDP for five years or more) are associated with 1.2% lower growth as compared to growth when debt is under 90%. (We also include in our tables the small number of shorter episodes.) Note that because the historical public debt overhang episodes last an average of over 20 years, the cumulative effects of small growth differences are potentially quite large. It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1% growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small.