The Economy
The Overview
Job finding rates are up! "There were 2.5 unemployed workers for every available job in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday. That’s down from a peak of 6.5 in 2009, though still above the average in the years leading up to the recession. The ratio is getting better for two reasons: more job openings and falling unemployment. The first is unequivocally good. Employers posted 4.2 million jobs in February, the most since January 2008." Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight.
Gender and the economic recovery. "'Men hold the overwhelming share of jobs in a group of goods-producing industries that are considerably more sensitive to changes in the business cycle, while women hold the majority of positions in the less cyclical service-providing industries,' … Since the labor market bottomed out, men’s employment has outpaced women’s, but not by enough to repair the damage from the recession … The female workforce has recovered all the jobs lost during the recession and then some. Men aren’t yet all the way back." Jeffrey Sparshott at the Wall Street Journal.
Economic gains, mostly from the ACA. "Personal income rose 0.3 percent in February, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday. Consumer spending rose 0.3 percent too (0.2 percent after adjusting for inflation). That’s fairly healthy growth, especially given a harsh winter that dinged other economic indicators. But there may be a little less to the gains than meets the eye. President Obama’s signature health law, the Affordable Care Act, accounted for nearly a quarter of the increase in income and nearly two thirds of the increase in spending." Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight.
Everything you need to know about income inequality. Matthew Yglesias at Vox.
Everything you need to know about federal taxes. Matthew Yglesias at Vox.
Fiscal Fights
Unemployment benefits passed the Senate. The House is another question entirely. "The Senate voted 59-38 to pass a five-month extension that would retroactively restore federal benefits to an estimated 2.3 million Americans who are long-term unemployed ... Democrats retooled the bill to satisfy Senate Republicans, who demanded that the benefits be paid for. The $10 billion cost is offset by tweaks to federal pension payments and higher customs fees. The bill also prohibits millionaires from receiving benefits. But no one quite knows what will happen next, given the fierce resistance to the extension from both the House GOP leadership and its rank-and-file." Suzy Khimm at MSNBC.
Well, at least the House GOP is honest. And pitiless. "Republicans have offered at least four reasons for refusing to extend unemployment insurance … Now Representative Tom Cole … has come up with a new one: House Republicans don’t feel any pressure to pass it … In other words, House Republicans will only help the long-term unemployed when they think there is political pressure on them to do so—not because it is sound public policy ... That’s not how the legislative branch is supposed to work. Then again, at least Cole is being honest: House Republicans don’t care about the long-term unemployed. They only care about the politics surrounding them." Danny Vinik at the New Republic.
Marco Rubio's antipoverty agenda would cut parents' benefits - do the math. "Rubio’s proposal builds on an idea from Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney … Right now, working parents benefit significantly more than childless, working adults from government antipoverty programs—especially the EITC. Cass’s plan equalizes that, but since the total amount of resources is unchanged, parents would have to face a benefit cut … Ultimately, since Cass is keeping the total money that working adults receive unchanged, any increased benefits for childless, working adults must come from working parents. There’s no way around the math." Danny Vinik at the New Republic.
This depreciation policy sounds really, really stupid. "The American government pretends a jet only lasts five years ... The government is pretending that other long-lived corporate investments … will also become useless far sooner than they will, five or seven years into a much longer working life. This willful blindness is an attempt to fool businesses into buying more expensive stuff, thus goosing the economy, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it actually works … What’s the tail of this particular dog cost American taxpayers? Perhaps $35 billion annually ... Obama would prefer to eliminate the write-offs, but hasn’t gotten anywhere." Tim Fernholz at Quartz.
Gender and the Economy
Everything you need to know about the gender wage gap. Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox.
Remember when the GOP kept killing the Paycheck Fairness Act? "Democrats first brought up the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2010 ... It passed the House, despite opposition from 97% of House Republicans. It then went to the Senate, and ... it had 58 votes, which wasn’t enough to overcome a Republican filibuster … The bill received exactly zero GOP votes. Dems tried again in 2012, but again couldn’t overcome Republican opposition. The RNC’s Kukowski said Democrats didn’t pursue this when they were in the majority, but that’s plainly wrong … Dems have pushed the legislation in three consecutive Congresses. Each effort fell short because of the GOP." Steve Benen at Maddowblog.
The White House and women. "An analysis from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute found this week that the White House has its own wage gap ... at around 11 percent). Women working in the White House have a median pay of nearly $62,000, while the median pay for men is $70,000 … The data does show that the White House staff does well on women's representation. According to AEI's breakdown of White House workers by gender, women accounted for 49 percent of 433 employees as of 2013. While that may not be remarkable, given that women make up over 50 percent of the population, it is notable in the sense that high-pay workplaces tend to be male-dominated." Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox.
Six facts on women and social mobility. Joanna Venator and Richard V. Reeves at Brookings.
The Labor Market
Reid punts on minimum wage hike. "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Tuesday that a vote to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour will not take place for another three weeks … The delays also highlight Senate Democrats’ inability to gather their caucus’s 55 votes in support of the wage hike … Some centrist members of the Democratic caucus are exploring a possible compromise with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to raise the minimum wage to something below the $10.10 endorsed by Obama and most Senate Democrats." Alexander Bolton at the Hill.
House to not pass the unemployment benefit extension. Shocker, right? "The Senate’s vote ... to pass an unemployment extension doesn’t mean the more than 2 million people who have lost their benefits can rest easy — the House isn’t likely to touch the issue until the end of the month, if at all ... Speaker John A. Boehner has been clear that the Senate measure fails to meet his tests of creating jobs and being fiscally responsible … The real question for House Republicans seems to be this — is there something they can get out of the White House and congressional Democrats in return for releasing benefits to the unemployed?" Steven Dennis and Daniel Newhauser at Roll Call.
Patents
Everything you need to know about patents. Timothy B. Lee at Vox.
Politics
Campaign Finance
How the Firefox resignation will make the case for more undisclosed donations. "Along comes the forced resignation of Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who had given $1,000 to the campaign for anti-same-sex marriage Proposition 8 ... to give new cover to the anti-disclosure forces. Opponents ... have ... been arguing that secrecy is needed to spare big spenders from persecution. They’ve invoked the precedent of the NAACP … It’s a stretch, to say the least, for zillionaire donors ... to put themselves in the same company as the NAACP ... But the activists who hounded Brendan Eich ... just made it a bit easier for opponents of transparency to pull off that brazen gambit." Alec Macgillis at the New Republic.
Civil Rights
50 years after the Civil Rights Act, the fight continues. "The divide is both ideological and the result of the vastly different perspectives of each party’s core constituencies. The majority of whites vote Republican and see racial discrimination against blacks as mostly a thing of the past, blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic and see racism as an ongoing problem. Even when it comes to gay and lesbian rights, the divide remains largely partisan … There’s a tendency to talk about civil rights in past tense ... On the contrary … the conflict rages on, with Johnson’s proudest legacy, the fight to end discrimination, very much in doubt." Adam Serwer at MSNBC.
Congress
There's no House ethics rule that prohibits making out with your staffers. "Republican Rep. Vance McAllister, R-La., apologized Monday after a video surfaced ... that reportedly showed him 'passionately kissing and embracing a member of his congressional staff.' … McAllister could face an ethics investigation. Though House Ethics rules do not specifically prohibit romantic involvement between a member of Congress and his or her staff, the rules do require members to 'conduct themselves at all times in a manner that reflects creditably on the House.' That broad regulation could provide support for an investigation against McAllister." Sarah Mimms at the National Journal.
Democrats
#CancelColbert and the anti-liberal left. "We are entering a new era of political correctness … Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea … that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression … Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible ... when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge … There’s a cure for this sort of thing, though it’s worse than the disease. When the right takes power, the left usually discovers the importance of unfettered speech." Michelle Goldberg at the Nation.
DOD
DOD begins to wind down drone purchases. "The Pentagon’s robot budget is currently shrinking. In its 2014 budget request unmanned systems’ funding was down by a third on the previous year ... Some, especially in the air force, never much cared for them anyway and are happy to make them a lower priority. And other programmes—most notably the extraordinarily expensive F-35 fighter plane—have far more effective champions in the military-industrial-congressional complex than drones do." The Economist.
Education
Everything you need to know about college costs. Dylan Matthews at Vox.
Most of what you know about college students is wrong. Libby Nelson at Vox.
Elections
Stop trying to figure out if candidates are running in 2016. "The media needs to understand the difference between running for 2016 and running in 2016 … 'Will she or won’t she?' garbles all of these considerations. It gets the tense wrong; the nomination campaign is now, not in the future. It implies a decision, rather than a risk calculation. It treats the decision to run as static, a one-time choice, when it’s dynamic. Most of all, it inverts the entire process, which involves the party winnowing out candidates, rather than waiting around for them to begin running." Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg.
No, Rand Paul is not and will not be a GOP frontrunner. "Paul isn't the GOP frontrunner. He's not even close … Party leaders care about two main things — whether a candidate is electable, and whether the candidate's positions and profiles are appropriate for the party … Paul has problems on both electability and on fitting with the GOP's platform." Andrew Prokop at Vox.
Obama forced to weigh policy goals against midterm races. "In the post-earmark era, using the party’s control of the federal bureaucracy to deliver local projects or delay new regulations that might stifle jobs has become a critical part of Democratic efforts to maintain control of the Senate. In close races, particularly in less populated states such as Alaska and Montana, incumbents are hoping that a few favorable agency decisions might secure the backing of key constituencies. Sometimes, though, the requests set up a difficult dynamic for the administration, which must decide between helping vulnerable Democrats and going against broader goals." Paul Kane at the Washington Post.
Foreign Policy
NATO didn't provoke Russia. "Tempting as it may be to castigate NATO for the deterioration of relations with Russia, nothing could be further from the truth: It was, and remains, the Russian regime's ideology, rhetoric, and conduct that provided the impulse for NATO expansion ... The enlargement of NATO ... has been one of the few unmitigated success stories of American foreign policy, as it consolidated democracy and security on a continent once scarred by total war. Faulting NATO for Russia's bad behavior betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of post-Cold War European politics, misrepresents the organization's role as a defensive alliance, and confuses aggressor with victim." James Kirchick at Foreign Policy.
US sends warship to Black Sea. "The United States is sending a guided missile destroyer to the Black Sea in order to reassure European allies in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, sources confirmed on Monday … The warship being sent to the region was the USS Donald Cook, a guided missile destroyer. The boat was recently upgraded to make it capable of firing SM-3 missiles, allowing the ship to function as part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System." AFP.
Hagel goes to bat against China. "U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel warned China’s Minister of Defense Chang Wanquan against unilateral moves that could escalate tension in the Asia Pacific, amid an ongoing dispute between Beijing and Japan over a group of uninhibited islands that both countries claim … However, China’s defense chief stuck to the party line and refused to budge over issues of Chinese sovereignty." David Stout at Time.
GOP
GOP adviser blames Obama for problems that the GOP created. "Glenn Hubbard ... a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney, laid out an odd critique of ... the stimulus. Hubbard criticizes the Obama administration for focusing too much on 'shovel-ready' projects while not implementing a sustained infrastructure program ... the exact sort of thing that the administration has been pushing for, and Hubbard’s fellow Republicans have been blocking … The White House wanted a larger stimulus. Congressional Republicans ... blocked it. Obama has repeatedly called for more infrastructure spending … in the past few years. Republicans have blocked those proposals." Danny Vinik at the New Republic.
Health
The ACA is basically repeal-proof. "In American politics, there is strength in numbers. When enough people feel a vested interest in the survival of a program, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for opponents to dismantle it. Obamacare ... has just reached a critical tipping point ... 7 million people have enrolled through the health care exchanges … Medicaid enrollment rose by 3 million people, … Rather than Obamacare being an abstract promise ... the Affordable Care Act is a concrete program upon which millions of American voters will be depending. As that number increases, opponents of ACA will be going after the benefits of many millions of Americans -- not just the President." Julian Zelizer at CNN.
Why the Medicaid expansion is important. "The expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act ... has been uneven … with 25 states choosing to broaden coverage and 25 choosing not to. But many more uninsured, low-income Americans — the people most likely to benefit from expanded government health insurance — live in states that, so far, have opted out. Some 8.5 million uninsured adults would be newly eligible for Medicaid if the expansion were implemented in their states ... But the disparity doesn’t end there. A new study shows that low-income people in states with expanded Medicaid coverage are generally healthier than their counterparts in states with more limited coverage." Ritchie King at FiveThirtyEight.
ACA plan cancellations - not as bad as you've heard. "Republicans ... frequently say that 5 million people 'lost' health insurance, because the old policies didn’t comply with Obamacare’s standards and/or insurers cancelled them pre-emptively ... It would appear most people who lost their old plans were able to get new ones instead … Plenty of people who lost coverage were able to replace it with plans that were cheaper, more comprehensive, or both. In short, not all the 4.8 million people who lost their old coverage are worse off. It's not even clear that a majority of them are." Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic.
Repeal, meet repeal and replace. "For all the challenges still facing Obamacare and its supporters, conservative health wonks are increasingly cautioning Republicans that the politics of the issue have changed in the wake of the 7 million initial sign-ups. Simply repealing the law is no longer an option, they warn, even if Republicans gain the power to do so. If they want to unwind the law, the least they'll have to do is coalesce around health care solutions of their own, lest they strip away benefits for millions of Americans without a plan of their own. And the party is far from a consensus on how they'd replace the law." Sahil Kapur at Talking Points Memo.
Jails are a poor substitute for mental health care. "Jails and prisons now house 356,268 inmates with severe mental illness — more than 10 times the number in state hospitals, according to a report published Tuesday by the Treatment Advocacy Center. In 44 states, the largest prison or jail holds more individuals with serious mental illness than the largest psychiatric hospital … As the number of hospital beds at state psychiatric hospitals has shrunk, advocates have become worried about whether patients have access to adequate treatment — and whether the prison and jail system has become a stand-in for the psychiatric hospitals that are disappearing." Sarah Kliff at Vox.
Immigration
Passing immigration is hard this year - it will be even harder next year. "The Jeb Bush episode is a reminder of how hard getting to legalization remains for Republicans this year. But it’s also a reminder of how hard getting there will be next year, too. And remember: It could be even more difficult next year, because the Senate bill will expire, and the Senate would have to pass another one, even as GOPers like Marco Rubio are also running for president. By the way: the idea that it will be easier for a GOP-controlled Senate and House to pass reform may sound pleasing to some, but nothing they can pass will do anything significant to repair relations with Latinos." Greg Sargent at the Plum Line.
Pathetic excuses are pathetic. "To say House Republicans won’t approve immigration reform because they don’t trust the White House to faithfully executive federal law is a tired canard that was discredited months ago. Indeed, Democrats offered to delay implementation of reform until 2017 – after Obama left office – and Republicans still refused. I can appreciate good spin as much as the next guy, but Boehner’s rhetoric is just sad." Steve Benen at Maddowblog.
NSA
Post Snowden, NSA receives a ton of FOIA requests. "The National Security Agency (NSA) has been flooded with thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from journalists, civil rights groups and private citizens who have asked the agency to turn over the top-secret records that former contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the media, Al Jazeera can reveal." Jason Leopold at Al Jazeera.
SCOTUSwatch
Hello plutocracy. "The rich, already powerful, punch way above their weight. In 2010 just 0.01% of Americans accounted for a quarter of all the money given to politicians, parties and political action committees ... In a system where money is considered speech, and corporations are people, this trend is inevitable. Elections become not a system of participatory engagement determining how the country is run, but the best democratic charade that money can buy. People get a vote; but only once money has decided whom they can vote for and what the agenda should be. The result is a plutocracy that operates according to the golden rule: that those who have the gold make the rules." Gary Younge at the Guardian.
NSA, still safe from SCOTUS. "The Supreme Court Monday turned down a request that the justices immediately dive into the issue of the legality of National Security Agency surveillance. Larry Klayman, the conservative activist and lawyer who won an attention-grabbing ruling in December holding that the NSA's domestic phone-call database was unconstitutional, had asked the high court to review that ruling now—before a federal appeals court considers the question. Such requests are almost never granted. The Supreme Court kept to that pattern Monday morning, noting without comment in a routine order list that the request for 'certiorari before judgment' was denied." Josh Gerstein at Politico.
Voting Rights
To protect voting rights, push Congress to protect voting rights. "Many Americans ... are up in arms about the US supreme court's decision last week in McCutcheon v FEC, which further deregulates campaign financing … There's not much you can do about it, other than fight to uphold what remains of the rules … A lot more can be done to roll back some of the Roberts court's other unfortunate decisions involving our electoral process … the Shelby case did leave open the possibility that Congress could adopt a new coverage formula … If the supreme court won't do its job and actually defend democracy, there should be agitation for Congress to do it." Richard L. Hasen at the Guardian.
International
Global
Explaining the Heartbleed bug. "There was big news in the computer security world yesterday when researchers announced a massive vulnerability in popular web encryption software called OpenSSL … Researchers announced a serious bug in this software that exposes users' communications to eavesdropping … The SSL standard includes a heartbeat option, which allows a computer at one end of an SSL connection to send a short message to verify that the other computer is still online and get a response back. Researchers found that it's possible to send a cleverly formed, malicious heartbeat message that tricks the computer at the other end into divulging secret information." Timothy B. Lee at Vox.
Everything you need to know about the Heartbleed bug. Timothy B. Lee at Vox.
Locating Malaysia 370. "The Australian navy picked up extended underwater signals in the search zone for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in what authorities said Monday was the best lead yet in the hunt for the jet's 'black box' flight recorders. The naval ship Ocean Shield—fitted with U.S. Navy black-box detector equipment able to pick up signals far beneath the ocean surface—has been searching an area of the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia ... Investigators believe the area is the most likely spot where the plane may have run out of fuel, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest airport, after disappearing from civilian radar on March 8." Robb M. Stewart and Rachel Pannett at the Wall Street Journal.
Africa
20 years later - what changed after the Rwandan genocide. Hayes Brown at Think Progress.
The Rwandan genocide is still having an impact - in Congo. "The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) sits at the heart of two decades of war and instability in Democratic Republic of Congo, in which millions of people have died ... Founded by members of the ... Hutu militia that organized the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, the FDLR's ranks have dwindled ... to less than 2,000 ... But its presence in eastern Congo ... has prompted years of meddling ... fuelling instability and bloodshed. Experts say removing the FDLR is essential for peace in the Great Lakes region." Peter Jones at Reuters.
A new ebola outbreak looks to be rushing across Africa. "Ebola could continue to spread in West Africa for months in one of the most challenging outbreaks of the disease the international community has ever faced, health experts said Tuesday. Dr. Keiji Fukuda of the World Health Organization said that while other outbreaks have seen more cases, the current one is remarkable for the wide area over which it has spread - from Guinea's remote tropical forests to the country's capital and over the border to Liberia ... More than 100 deaths in Guinea and Liberia have been linked to the current outbreak." Boubacar Diallo and Sarah DiLorenzo at the Associated Press.
Asia
I don't even… "In 2004 ... Indonesia began requiring all political parties to field 30 percent women candidates … In Wednesday's parliamentary election, candidates include a former Miss Indonesia, five former models, at least eight actresses, and nine singers. Googling their names may bring up 'leaked' nude photos, swimsuit or lingerie ads, and softcore sex scenes … Marketing women's sexuality isn't new in Indonesian politics ... But the recruitment of sexy celebrities to stand for political office takes the sexist logic of Indonesian politics one step further." Catherine A. Traywick at Foreign Policy.
Taiwanese youth go to the Yuan. "Prior to the dramatic occupation of Taiwan's legislature ... young Taiwanese in their 20s had ... been dubbed the 'strawberry generation' -- supposedly fragile and squishy … Few could have predicted that these lowly paid softies harbored so much energy. Hundreds of them rushed into the Legislative Yuan, the island's legislature … and paralyzed it for almost three weeks … all in protest of a trade deal with mainland China ... Following a compromise by the legislature's speaker ... students announced … that they would leave ... But ... the intergenerational conversation about Taiwan's uncertain political and economic future is only beginning." Rachel Lu at Foreign Policy.
Europe
Top EU court overturns a controversial data collection policy. "The European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Tuesday overturned a controversial EU directive that allowed telephone and email providers to store private citizens' data en masse for scrutiny by investigators in later cases of serious crime. The Luxembourg-based court ruled that the directive - passed by bloc's Council of Ministers in 2006, after terrorist attacks in London and Madrid - amounted to a grave intrusion into the private lives of citizens in the 28-nation bloc." Deutsche Welle.
How Putin won the fight for Crimea, but lost the war for Ukraine. "At the same time … Putin was signing a treaty finalizing the annexation of Crimea, Ukrainian Prime Minister ... Yatsenyuk was putting his own signature down: on a partnership pact between Ukraine and the ... (EU) ... Russia’s political influence in Ukraine and its dreams of creating an economic union to compete with the EU lies in tatters ... Putin’s decision to seize Crimea ... is far more likely to end up a disaster … The problem of course is that Russian pride, while politically useful, won’t attract foreign investment, won’t convince Europe to continue its reliance on Russian oil and gas and won’t pay the bills in Crimea." Michael Cohen at Yahoo News.
Russia's economy is getting worse; Ukraine's is terrible. "The International Monetary Fund (IMF) ... features some bad news for Vladimir Putin. Their forecast growth for Russia in 2014 has been revised way downward ... to a downright bad 1.3 percent … The IMF attributes this pretty directly to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine … Basically the IMF thinks investment capital for Russian businesses may dry up … The IMF didn't even try to forecast the likely course of Ukraine's economy, deeming the situation simply too unstable to be worth taking a pass at." Matthew Yglesias at Vox.
Six signs are pointing to a potential Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine. Max Fisher at Vox.
What if Russia invades? Gaming out the possibilities. Zach Beauchamp at Vox.
Middle East
No, Syrian protestors didn't use sarin on themselves - and just about every piece of relevant evidence disproves the theory. "Seymour Hersh just published a potentially dynamite claim ... It wasn't the Syrian government that bombarded a rebel-held district ... with chemical weapons last year, but the rebels themselves, supplied with sarin gas by ... Turkey … Hersh's story ... should have set off alarm bells … It is a big leap to show that Turkey got hold of large quantities of sarin gas and provided it to the rebels, who then got rockets and launchers from the Syrian military, successfully built and installed the warheads, and secretly fired them from near Syrian positions." Marc Champion at Bloomberg.
Pressure's on to finish the Iran deal before the Iranian public moves on. "More than four months into the deal, many Iranians think the interim accord has done little to help them … Dwindling popular support in Iran for the preliminary accord, coupled with perennial resistance to any nuclear compromise from hard-liners, raises doubt about how long Iranian President Hassan Rouhani can push ahead with his effort to reach a final deal. It also builds pressure on negotiators for Iran and six world powers to complete the complex diplomacy before the July 20 deadline." Ramin Mostaghim and Paul Richter at the LA Times.
Peace process breakdowns. "For those who suspect that the Middle East peace process has become a diplomatic drama, playing on an endless loop, Secretary of State John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday could serve as Exhibit A … While Mr. Kerry said both sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, the precipitating event, he said, was Israel’s announcement of 700 new housing units for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. That came three days after a deadline passed for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners, and it undercut an emerging deal to extend the negotiations." Mark Landler at the New York Times.
South America
Venezuelan goods quotas - and how to circumvent them. "The country is suffering from unprecedented and appalling shortages of basic goods (including rice, flour, sugar, toilet paper, cooking oil, milk, and chicken), stemming from the distortionary effects of an increasingly unmanageable currency control policy and heavy-handed government price controls. Yet while much ink has been spilled discussing the causes of the shortages in Venezuela, little attention has been paid to the desperate strategies ordinary Venezuelans rely on to get by." Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez at the Democracy Lab.
Economics
The new story of wealth. "The ratio of wealth to income is rising in all developed countries … We should expect that trend to continue. If it continues, the future will look like the 19th century, where economic elites have predominantly inherited their wealth ... The best solution would be a globally coordinated effort to tax wealth … Market capitalism … will eventually lead to an economy dominated by those lucky enough to be born into a position of inherited wealth … The tyranny of inherited wealth was destroyed only by the devastation of two world wars, and ... the United States ... will suffer from the same affliction." Matthew Yglesias at Vox.
Polisci
Persuasion matters. "It turns out that good old fashioned human-to-human conversation really can change people's minds. A new experiment from political scientists Michael LaCour and Donald Green finds that a well-designed house-to-house canvass can turn same-sex marriage opponents around … Households ... getting the same-sex marriage script very quickly grew considerably more sympathetic toward gay people and gay rights. Before, respondents felt the same about same-sex marriage as Nebraskans; after, they felt the same as folks from Massachusetts. When the canvasser was gay, the results were even bigger. While straight canvassers's effect wore off over time, gay canvassers's didn't." Dylan Matthews at Vox.
Wealthy US interests have much more political influence than you suspected. "'Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.' … The collective preferences of ordinary citizens had only a negligible estimated effect on policy outcomes, while the collective preferences of 'economic elites' ... were 15 times as important." Larry Bartels at the Monkey Cage.
Democratic districts tend to be more economically unequal. "Michael Zuckerman ran US Census data on inequality within congressional districts and found that the most unequal districts tend to be a deep blue. New York's Jerrold Nadler represents the country's most unequal district, followed by Pennsylvania's Chaka Fattah, and then New York's Carolyn Maloney … Part of this, Zuckerman writes, is driven by the simple fact of political geography: 'cities have become, in general, strongholds of the Democratic Party, and cities have become, in general, hives of the most dramatic income inequality in the country.'" Ezra Klein at Vox.
Latin American democracies are run by the rich - and why that matters. "Latin American democracies … are disproportionately run by the rich. Although working-class jobs ... make up the vast majority of the labor force in every Latin American country, only a tiny percentage of Latin American lawmakers come from those kinds of backgrounds … The shortage of politicians from the working class in Latin American democracies has serious consequences for the economic policies they produce … Lawmakers from various white-collar professions tend to have more conservative views, whereas lawmakers from the working class tend to hold more progressive attitudes." Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes at the Monkey Cage.
Science
There's no scientific evidence that wifi or cell phones can make you sick. "Scientists have tested it for decades, and have found no evidence that the radiation produced by cell phones, wifi, or smart meters actually makes people sick … The dozens of these studies that have been conducted have uncovered zero people who can report symptoms reliably over time … Hundreds of people have been tested with dozens of different frequencies of radiation, turning up no reliable evidence … The more likely explanation is that these symptoms are a result of the 'nocebo effect' — the strange phenomenon in which the mind's expectation of negative symptoms can cause them to actually occur." Joseph Stromberg at Vox.
Miscellaneous
Debunking the myth of the Stradivarius violins. "In the minds of many musicians, no instrument can compare to a Stradivarius ... But are these revered instruments truly superior to their contemporary counterparts? A newly published study, which describes a blind comparison test performed by 10 world-class violinists, strongly suggests the answer is no." Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard Magazine.
Europe hasn't changed much since WWI, with awesome photo overlays. Travis Daub at PBS.
A tour of British Isles accents, in one take. Video at 22 Words.
Why it's so difficult to locate an underwater black box, with charts. The Washington Post.
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