Health Links

The Washington Post presents what is says are "five myths" about why Americans are fat

Which is better: eating one big meal, or many small meals?  It depends which study you believe.

The Senate has successfully blocked the FDA from limiting the amount of potatoes served in school meals

Here's the rundown on the study we discussed in class finding that decrease in smoking rates explains a small portion of the weight gain in the U.S. over the past few decades.

And here's a discussion of another study that finds that the average American needs to cut 240 calories per day to bring Americans' weights back to 1978 levels . . . and includes a discussion of how we could go about doing that

Lastly, here's the chart examining the 100+ causes of obesity that we discussed in class

Economic Links

Here's an excellent piece from Sunday's NY Times comparing the growth in societal equality with the concurrent decline in economic equality in the United States.

It's a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream. At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

Sociologist Jerome Karabel's explanation is that no “advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition.”

Meanwhile, the Wall St. Journal ran a piece discussing the increasing volatility of wealth in America: at the same time that the incomes of the top 1% began to take off, those same incomes started to rise and dip far more than other Americans'.  The piece also looks at the unfinished 90,000 square foot house in Florida that would have been the largest in the country.

A new poll on the Occupy Wall Street movement finds that 32% approve, 29% disapprove, and 40% don't have an opinion:

But opinions are clear about Wall Street itself. Eight in ten say Wall Street bankers are greedy, 77% say they're overpaid, and two-thirds say Wall Street bankers are dishonest, a number that has gone up by a third in roughly two decades.

Economists say the next decade will bring many new jobs for machines, but few for people.

Nick Kristof argues that the real solution to income inequality in this country is intensive early childhood education.

Here's a report comparing growth in inequality across OECD countries

Links 10-24-11

Here are some interesting graphs from a forthcoming book on shifts in the American electorate.  Among other trends, professionals have voted increasingly for Democratic candidates while Owners and Proprietors and have voted increasingly for Republican candidates.

Here's an analysis of Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan that finds that the bottom 90% of wage-earners would pay more under the plan.  Those findings have received a great deal of media attention . . .

So watch to see if Cain's poll numbers fall . . . as of the writing of this post, he leads Romney and Perry 26% to 25.5% to 12.5% in the average of the past six polls.

The NY Times Editorial page runs down a list of problems Alabama has experienced since the implementation of their new immigration law and concludes that "it's what they asked for"

How Congress shapes your commute

For those of you who wrote papers proposing policies that would encourage more commuters to use public transportation or bikes, or to carpool, you may want read about how Congress shapes your commute. Under federal law, employers can reimburse employees up to $230 per month in parking costs, tax-free. For the moment, they can do the same for public transportation, but that will soon revert back to the previous cap of $100.

Read more to find out what happened when workers were offered cash instead of transportation reimbursements . . .

Occupy Wall Street

In case you've had your head in the sand the past couple weeks, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is the new media sensation.

CNN compares the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Tea Party movement.  So does Jon Stewart.  And, writing for the Washington Post, David Meyer argues that the movement learned a lot from the Tea Party.

On many levels, the comparison makes sense.  Read the beginning lyrics to this newly popular anthem and try to decide for which movement it was written:

Pay no attention to the people in the street,
Crying out for accountability.
Make a joke of what we believe;
Say we don't matter 'cuz you disagree.
Pretend you're kings, sit on your throne;
Look down your noses at the peasants below.



Here's the back story on the song

Who are the Protesters?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) first expressed his concern about the "growing mobs" of OWS protesters, but later expressed some empathy, saying that "people are upset and they're justifiably frustrated."

Though unpopular in many places, most New York residents approve of the protesters.  Writing for the NY Times, Nick Kristof compares the OWS folks to those who protested in Egypt.


But, counter to conventional wisdom, Nate Silver points out that protests had larger turnouts in the West than in the East, and argues that the movement is much more popular in places with lots of self-identified liberals than registered Democrats.


The NY Times asked bankers privately what they thought of the protests, and the reaction wasn't too kind.

“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager. “It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”

What do They Want?

Many protesters cite economic inequality and disproportionate accrual of wealth by the top 1%: the upstart website New Bottom Line has the simple tagline "fighting for an economy that works for all of us".  Business Insider posts four charts that might explain the movement, which focus on the fortunes of corporations and the wealthiest Americans relative to the country as a whole.

Here's an updated version of the chart that we discussed in class, which displays the median income of each quintile plus the top 5% from 1966-2010 in addition to the median income of the top 1%, 0.1% and .001% from 1966-2008.  From 1966-1979, all grew relatively equally (between 6 and 25% total), while from 1980-2008, growth ranged from 0% for the bottom quintile to 641% for the top .001%.

Sources: Current Population Survey posted by the U.S. Census Bureau and IRS calculations posted by Emmanuel Saez

What will Happen?

Nobody's quite sure whether the protests will strengthen or fizzle out or whether they'll bring about any policy changes.  Indeed, many of the protesters seem rather unsure exactly what type of policy changes they want.

Robert Samuelson says that while "inequality is a new fault line . . . the backlash against the rich is the start of debate, not the end".

David Brooks seems unimpressed. He writes that "The Occupy Wall Street movement may look radical, but its members’ ideas are less radical than those you might hear at your average Rotary Club" and refers to them as "small thinkers"

Don’t be fooled by the clichés of protest movements past. The most radical people today are the ones that look the most boring. It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom.

Links 10-19-11

Here's one way to spur innovation and job growth: pledge hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and infrastructure improvements to the prestigious school that will open a branch engineering campus in your city.  That's what NYC is doing in order to spur an East Coast version of Silicon Valley: Cornell and Stanford currently look like the front-runners.

Grover Norquist says he's not a huge fan of Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan because "it gives you three taxes, all of which could grow".  Norquist said he'd prefer to keep the present system and "prune it back like a rose bush".

And here's a chart capturing the liberal objection to the plan: that it (according to one calculation) lowers taxes for the rich while raising them for the poor and middle class.

Despite the criticisms, Cain's fast-rising poll numbers seem to have convinced Rick Perry that he should introduce his own flat-tax proposal . . . which he plans to do next week

We talked about Pigovian taxes in class . . . a new CDC study found that each serving of alcohol costs the country about $2 in social costs spread across federal, state, and local governments, drinkers, drinkers' families, health care providers, and victims.  The CDC director summarized the study as finding that "binge drinking results in binge spending".

David Brooks argues that while the media focuses on the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protesters, most Americans are in the middle of a "great restoration" with a back-to-basics financial focus characterized by three things: 1.) people returning to spending more than they take in (e.g. no more credit card debt); 2.) re-establishing the link between effort and reward (e.g. no more bailouts); and 3.) the resurgence of loyalty (e.g. working for one company rather than 5 or 10).

A new CNN poll finds declining support for the death penalty: from 56% in 2003 to 53% in 2009 to 48% (versus 50% who'd prefer life in prison) today.

Another new poll (this one by Gallup) is the first to find that a plurality support marijuana legalization, with 50% in favor and 46% opposed (the link also looks at trends in support over time).

If Republicans are right, we might be seeing an unintended consequence of the financial reform legislation.  The bill passed in Congress capped banks' processing fees for a debit card swipe at 24 cents -- the previous average was 40 cents.  Bank of America was recently the first major bank to announce consumer fees for debit card use ($5 per month, in their case).

And in a story that has nothing to do with politics but has generated substantial interest, the owner of a zoo in Zanesville, OH allegedly released most of his animals and then shot himself.  Police have been busily tracking down either 48 or 51 wild animals, including bears, tigers, wolves, and monkeys.

Environmental Policy Links

The shrimp haul in the Gulf of Mexico this year may be down by as much as 80% according to preliminary reports.  It's too early to draw conclusions yet, but many suspect it has something to do with the BP oil leak of last summer.

The Economist argues that while the solar industry is taking off, the wasteful subsidies that created it remain unjustifiable

The NY Times asks "where did global warming go?" and compares beliefs, rhetoric, and actions regarding climate change in the U.S. now to the U.S. in 2009 and the rest of the world now.

Here's an interactive activity that illustrates how cap and trade works under various scenarios

Links, 10-17-11

A rundown of some interesting links from the past week

The NY Times argues that voter fraud occurs far less often than does voter disenfranchisement in response to a new study finding that 14 states with Republican-dominated legislatures have recently passed 19 laws stiffening the requirements to vote.  The most popular change is requiring government-issued photo ID, which 5 million citizens do not possess (mostly low-income Americans, who tend to vote Democratic).

A new calculation by former Census Bureau workers finds that median income dropped twice as fast in the two years since the recession officially ended as it did during the year-and-a-half long recession itself.  Since 2007, median income has dropped 9.8% to just under $50,000 per household.

The small towns that will lose their post offices under USPS's new plan to avoid bankruptcy are crying foul.

Amazon's expansion makes for an interesting case study in politics.  When Amazon first announced plans to open a distribution center in TN, they did so on the promise that TN residents would not have to pay sales taxes on Amazon purchases.  This promise upset some businesses and legislators, but Amazon threatened to not open any distribution centers in TN if it was not upheld.  After a year of wrangling, the state and Amazon have negotiated a deal to not charge TN customers tax until 2014.  The Governor and many legislators seem to think this was a fair a deal, but a number of competing businesses remain outraged.

Paul Krugman criticizes the Republican candidates' economic plans and concludes that "the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself"

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.  

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.  

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

And last, but certainly not least: here's a story from right here on campus about a focusing event that opened a policy window and resulted in policy changes.  Click the link to read about how a professor flying through the air resulted in visible changes . . .

Election Update

It's still too early for these polls to mean a whole lot, but the shift is undeniably dramatic regardless:

A little over two weeks ago, on September 27th, the two-week rolling average of polls was:
Perry: 27.7%
Romney 21.5%
Cain: 5.5% (5th place)

As of Sunday night, October 16th, it stands at:
Romney: 23.5%
Cain: 23.2%
Perry: 12.8%

Despite the shift in results, Cain badly trailed Perry and Romney in third-quarter fundraising: here's a table of all the candidates' fundraising totals

Superfreakonomics Controversy

The chapter on Global Cooling and Geoengineering set off a firestorm of controversy.  Now that you've read the chapter, you can read a few of the responses:

Real Climate says the Global Cooling research was not the way Levitt and Dubner describe it; that a few articles in the popular press said the opposite of what thousands of papers in academia were saying at the time.

Economist Paul Krugman puts economist Martin Weitzman's paper in context, saying that the estimate of a 5% chance of a catastrophe convinced we need to act immediately.

The Economist, which gave the first Freakonomics a glowing review, argues that Levitt and Dubner tried to be overly clever and simplistic with the end result being that they wrote a bad chapter that had little to do with economics.

With “Freakonomics”, the authors made pop economists of everyone, to the general good. To give the sequel’s readers this distorted lens through which to view climate change and its solution is to do readers a grave disservice.

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker, reaches a similar conclusion.

And, on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner mounts a full-throated defense of the chapter, saying the he and Levitt are not climate skeptics and didn't do most of the things they were accued of

Election Links 10-11-11

After Chris Christie's and Sarah Palin's decisions not to run, the Republican primary field looks set. Charles Blow argues that this means the Republicans could be in trouble and points out that in past elections far more voters could name frontrunners than in this election cycle.

The most notable change of the past couple weeks has been the fall of Rick Perry and the concurrent surge of Herman Cain.  According to the latest polls, Cain is now in second place in the race.  The poll averages as of Monday night were:

Romney: 21.9%

Cain: 16.4%

Perry: 15.3%

Meanwhile, Intrade -- a market-based prediction site in which users can buy and share stock in candidates -- predicts these odds of victory (again, as of Monday night):

Romney: 61.1%

Perry: 18.6%

Cain: 8.9%

Huntsman: 3.4%

Paul: 2.2%

The shift in the polls has led to some changes in strategy.  Perry is now spending more time on debate prep and, at the urging of his aides, sleeping.  Romney, meanwhile, is referring to Perry as a "desperate candidate" in an attempt to de-legitimatize his candidacy.

Cain will certainly be the center of attention at tonight's debate.  Because seating is based on poll position, Cain will sit in the middle -- next to Mitt Romney.  Some don't expect that to go well.

Meanwhile, Bill Keller is skeptical of Cain and argues that Perry may be the last, best hope for a Tea Party movement that remains largely unenthusiastic about the candidates.

“Rick Perry is the only candidate who would actually close down a cabinet department,” one longtime admirer told me, when I asked whether a President Perry would disappoint the Tea Party. “You would see a very happy base — at least for the first term.”

Lastly, "Joe the Plumber" is running for congress in Ohio

Links, 10-5-11

The top two news stories may be good news for Democrats:

1.) Chris Christie has, once again, announced he will not be running for President this year, disappointing many Republicans who saw him as the only potential candidate who would have a really good change of defeating Obama in a general election

2.) In an election watched across the nation, the Democratic incumbent retained his position as Governor of West Virginia despite a recent rightward shift in WV politics at the national level and an intense campaign to nationalize the election and link Governor Tomblin to Obama and the new health care law

In what turns out to have been perfect timing given the first story, David Brooks yesterday wrote a column entitled In Defense of Romney, arguing that Romney is a perfectly good candidate for the Republicans, despite what many see as a major flaw:

The central problem is that Mitt Romney doesn’t fit the mold of what many Republicans want in a presidential candidate. They don’t want a technocratic manager. They want a bold, blunt radical outsider who will take on the establishment, speak truth to power and offend the liberal news media

Last week, it appeared that even though Perry was falling in the polls that Romney wasn't rising to take his place.  This week, it appears that Romney is starting to become the favored candidate.  But a look at the trends in the polls shows that Herman Cain is the fastest riser; the 4 polls since September 25th have Romney at 17-25%, Cain at 17%, and Perry at 12-19%.

In an ever intensifying debate about spending, the House and Senate have passed very different bills, with the House bill cutting funding for the health bill, education, Planned Parenthood, Pell Grants, NPR, and other programs

Here's a relevant online debate related to yesterday's class debate: Do Taxes Narrow the Wealth Gap? - Room for Debate

I don't usually post from overtly liberal and conservative blogs, but this is an interesting economic analogy relevant to what we discussed in class yesterday.  In Short-term Gimmicks, the author compares the Republicans' insistence on spending cuts to a doctor who recommends diet and exercise to a patient having a heart attack

Here's an interesting piece about the thousands immigrants -- both illegal and illegal -- who are fleeing towns in Alabama after a court ruling upheld a strict new anti-illegal immigration law

The two-week old "Occupy Wall Street" movement is now receiving official endorsements from various local unions -- meaning the ranks of protesters could soon swell with union members