"For the kind of profession where a practitioner is handling money or valuables for not-necessarily-sophisticated customers, like bail-bondsmen, insurance brokers, real estate brokers or even the auctioneers he mentions, there's a huge potential for fraud that realistically can't be addressed by generic law enforcement, even if the money that's now spent on licensing were redirected to prosecutors. ..."

"Meanwhile, though I’ve seen a lot of people mocking the Mars bit, Chavez is clearly correct that actually existing capitalism is putting the world on a path to catastrophe. If scarce natural resources like water and the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon emissions were actually being priced correctly, there’s no reason hypothetical capitalism would be unsustainable. But that’s not how the contemporary global economic system works, and unless we change it we’re going to face big problems. Unfortunately, the conservative movement in America is rabidly opposed to even modest efforts to conserve fish stocks through a system of property rights, being committed instead to an ideological vision of relentless exploitation of the commons."  --- How much of the right comes down to taking the tragedy of the commons as an instruction manual?

Make the central bank democratically accountable?  Heresy!

"So I hope this Libya policy works out. I have my doubts, but who knows. The world is full of surprises. I do know, however, that providing more bed nets to prevent malaria would be cheap and logistically simple compared to deposing Gaddafi and that the easiest step America could take to deal a blow to Arab autocracy would be to stop selling weapons to Arab autocrats that they turn around and fire on their people."

"Try to imagine a utopian version of earth in which everyone on the planet can obtain the material living standards of the average contemporary Dutch person without doing any paid labor. Well some people are going to be enjoying the life of leisure from a nice villa in the Tuscan countryside or from the stunning beaches of the Caribbean while others will be less-fortunately situated in Arkhangelsk or the suburbs of Houston."

"But of course the most straightforward way to provide banking services to poor people is to just provide the service—create a public option for small-scale depository banking. Since postal services generally already have widespread retail operations, this is often done in collaboration with the post office and is known as “postal banking.” But in an electronic age, you don’t really need physical banks at all. Everyone could just be given an account with a $5,000 maximum on a Treasury Department computer and they could mail you an ATM card with your draft registration card when you turn 18. The accounts could pay 0 interest and wouldn’t need to offer any services beyond basic “money goes in, money goes out” and nobody would have to be “unbanked.” It would cost the government some money to administer such a system, but it would also amount to the government getting interest free loans from Treasury Bank customers so if people actually used it it would be a wash." Or: banking as utility.

I find this rather plausible: "rapid economic growth in China is creating the largest pool of suckers the world has ever seen. Real world individuals exhibit bounded rationality, and lots of Chinese people who may have been extremely smart at getting rich in China’s industrial revolution may be quite foolish about their decisionmaking regarding complicated western financial products. American rich people are much better-positioned than Chinese rich people to avoid getting ripped off, and yet a large number of people were taken in by Bernie Madoff’s rather crude fraud. China is a treasure trove of potential marks and Pharo is getting in on the game."  (It also echoes some of the opening remarks in Maurer's _The Big Con_ on where the golden age of American con artists came from.  [Everyone should read _The Big Con_.])

"Narayana Kocherlakota (who the bankers of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have selected to exercise important public functions) certainly knows more about economics than me. So when he says “[m]ost of the existing unemployment represents mismatch that is not readily amenable to monetary policy” I’m prepared to defer to him or to leave the job of explaining why he’s wrong (if he is wrong) to other people. But ... as a reason to avoid monetary stimulus this makes no sense, and is just a piece of misleading rhetoric that distracts people from the real issue. ... Say that of that 5.1 percentage point increase [in unemployment], 2 ... are due to inadequate demand and 3.1 ... are due to structural factors... monetary expansion could reduce the unemployment rate by 2 percentage point ... [which would be] a big deal. ... we’d alleviate a substantial quantity of human suffering up to and including suicide."

"There’s an extensive political science literature on how campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures don’t make nearly as much of a difference in determining policy outcomes as people often believe. But if you probe this literature a little bit, I think what it’s actually saying is that these factors matter overwhelmingly, so overwhelmingly that the only items that make it onto the public agenda are ones that feature a rough balance of money and lobbying clout. That means that if you want to do something that’s helpful to low-income people—something like the Affordable Care Act—the only way to do it is to structure it as something that’s very helpful to a subset of business interests." --- This matches my own conclusions from some unpublished research on predicting whether PACs did better at passing bills if they had more money. Ans.: no, because their opponents then had more money! _Every_ issue had $$$ on both sides.

"Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion."

Bukharinites all!

In which MY is correct: "Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning. You could imagine the founder of a movement being afflicted by an unfortunate character flaw that his followers lack. But the argument is that Goldwater didn’t suffer from a character flaw. Instead, having acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions."

" The important thing that financial markets do is they aggregate information and risk-tolerance in a way that helps guide real world economic decisions. The question to ask about financial innovation is how it might help achieve that goal.... f you look back to the late 19th century, America’s financial markets were so threadbare that interest rates on mortgages were much lower in New York and Boston than in California. .... the gap didn’t close rapidly because the financial markets of the time were highly inefficient. Thanks to financial innovation, markets have become much more efficient and that’s a good thing. But this is also subject to diminishing returns and in a big way. ... To draw an analogy, past innovation to decrease the real cost of potatoes has been a huge boon ... —potatoes are now really cheap and nobody needs to worry about starving to death—but future innovation in this regard is not going to help people much simply because we’ve come so far already."

"One major analytic error I think liberals tend to make is vastly overstating the level of dishonesty among conservative pundits, analysts, advocates, etc. The crux of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of smart people with conservative political opinions are working as businessmen. If they think about public policy at all, they’re thinking about how to cheat on their taxes or clever knew ways to bilk the public, and certainly not talking about it. So you’re left with a kind of denuded population in terms of brainpower. But at the same time, smart conservative businessmen have financed a staggering array of conservative institutions creating a tremendous number of jobs for conservative pundits and so forth despite the shallow talent pool. The result is a lot of people saying dumb things that they genuinely believe."

"I totally get that Tom Coburn is a man of principle. He thinks that minimizing federal spending is very important and preventing the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is much less important. Those aren’t my priorities, but politics is all about the fact that priorities differ. To me, with interest rates so low, borrowing some money to minimize the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is an investment worth making, but Coburn sees it another way. Which is exactly why you need to settle these things through votes. If Coburn doesn’t like the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, the appropriate way for him to express that is by voting “no” on the legislation. Plenty of other people aren’t as nutty as Coburn and are happy to vote for it. But this business of holds is simply unacceptable." (A very Yglesian paragraph.)

"I worked for the American Prospect full-time for about three years and have written a column for TAP Online ever since leaving. And in all that time, no one has ever told me what to write or what position to take. But nobody thinks The American Prospect is an “unbiased” news source. It’s very biased! The thing is that if you staff your publication with reasonably intelligent people you don’t need to give them explicit orders to conform to the line. Nor does producing a coherent “line” require writers to sell out their integrity. I have a lot of views on a lot of things. When I was at TAP, most of my opinions were either in line with my editors or else were on subjects where the bosses didn’t have strong feelings. But there were also issues where my editors did have very strong feelings and I didn’t agree with their take, and so to make my life easier I tended not to focus on those issues." Must resist bias-variance trade-off joke...

"the real meaning of social democracy for a developed country—you get more equality and more vacation, with no real impact on the rate of growth. There’s a case to be made that less vacation and better televisions are a better deal than more vacation and worse televisions (the two things I like to do on vacation are go to Europe and watch TV, so I have mixed feelings about this) and there’s a tradition of philosophical argument which holds that the failure of modern mixed economies to be sufficiently solicitous of the interests of the wealthy is a major source of injustice. But though some level of income inequality would seem to be necessary to achieve economic growth, within the range that actual developed countries exist at there’s no evidence that inegalitarian policies boost growth."

"Kaplan is merely highlighting the fundamental difference between neoconservative thinking and thinking undertaken by people with a moral compass. As Alex Massie says, present-day Europe’s state of peace, prosperity, and physical security is a good thing. Neoconservatives, however, see war and death as good things. Irving Kristol told Corey Robin that market-oriented conservatism is too “boring” (”The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”) so you need to inject some death and destruction into the mix to keep things interesting.

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars."

"On a non-insane level, the idea of trying to build machines that suck CO2 out of the air and then somehow store it is pretty clearly worth researching. That said, trees already do this quite well and our tree-planting technology is fine. Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees? ... Which comes around to the overarching point that the term “geoengineering” often obscures more than it reveals. There’s a world of difference between offering financial incentives for people to build high-albedo roofs and building a miles-long hose to pump sulfur into the upper atmosphere. Do I get to be a bold contrarian thinker if I propose that surface parking lots should have more tree cover? Somehow it seems I don’t. But it makes much more sense to focus on practical deployments of proven technology (trees, white paint) than on trying to dream up the most fantastical possible solution."

In which young Mr. Yglesias describes the process of reactive identity formation from within: "I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplate. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper. Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!"

"Citi’s problem isn’t that it has toxic assets, it’s that it made loans backed with toxic assets. You don’t rescue banks by “tak[ing] distressed assets off the balance sheet of Citigroup or other troubled financial institutions.” The problem isn’t the assets, it’s the debts. You can deal with the problem by giving the banks vast sums of money in exchange for their toxic assets but in this case what’s solved the problem isn’t that the assets came off the balance sheet, it’s that the money you gave them got on the balance sheet." (My romans.)

Breaking up newspapers, and making actual reporting into non-profit enterprises. (This reminds me that I should read Zellig Harris's book on non-profit market economies.)

Preach it, Brother Yglesias!

"The United States isn’t a poor country dealing with some objective shortfall of national resources. And yet across a whole variety of dimensions—from broadband speed to train quality to the cleanliness of streets to life expectancy to the crime rate—we fall far short of standards that are reached elsewhere. What we do have, on the other hand, is the richest multi-millionaires in the world. And an awful lot of people’s first instinct is to try to explain these things away or explain why it would be impossible to bring some of these quality of life features to the United States. It seems to me people would do better to get more upset."

"Relative to, say, Kentucky, Europe is a continent full of countries featuring better educated, healthier, longer-lived people, with lower poverty rates and dramatically fewer poor children. It isn’t, however, as friendly to the interests of rich people or business managers."

Yglesias has seen Finland, and it works. Meanwhile, "we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems." Perhaps one might say our problem is, to coin a phrase, being beholden to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit"?

Yes: "I’m half inclined to say there should be neither truth nor reconciliation. Instead, George W. Bush should be kidnapped, drugged, flown to Spain in an unmarked plane, and wake up on the streets of Madrid tied up with a bunch of files and evidence pinned to his chest so Judge Garzón can sort the whole thing out. If anyone asks how that happened, deny knowledge and mention “executive privilege.” "

"That a lot of the people succeeding in business are sort of frauds (needless to say, other people get rich by inventing stuff that turns out to be incredibly lucrative and that’s a whole different sort of thing) doesn’t detract from the fact that the most successful among them are good at being frauds and that most people couldn’t do nearly as well."

For the academic version of this argument (as it applies to CEOs), read Rakesh Khurana's _Searching for a Corporate Savior_.

Yglesias calls for socialism-as-carry-trade. Works for me.

Just read it.

"Reform is hard. Promoting reform is harder. Promoting reform in the name of cheap oil and military domination is almost certainly impossible."

"They're acting, in short, like the demonic foreigners of their own anti-appeasement rhetoric, impervious to objective reality and hell-bent on total victory no matter what the cost or how dim the prospects of success."

Shorter Matthew Yglesias: For McCain, endless imperialist wars aren't a bug, they're a feature.

Somewhere in Santayana there's a line about how "our" relations with a particular nation is like our relations with a particular woman: too intimate to change honorably, too arbitrary to want to change. MY is giving an optimistic spin to the same message

For MY's "1.1 percent", read "2.1 percent". The point, however, stands.

Short but sane. "The more we give in to defense contractors and build pointless weapons systems while yelling "China threat! China threat!" the more likely it becomes that people in Beijing are going to start saying "holy crap, look at this giant anti-Chi

Word: "The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn't free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration."