The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution
By Barry Friedman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 614 pp., $35)
The discussion around the oil industry’s proposal for a linked carbon fee has raised some interesting questions about altering consumer behavior. Will a rise in the retail price of gasoline lead Americans to drive less or consume less fuel overall?
Empirical evidence from 1980 to 1990 found that a 1 percent increase in the price of gas is estimated to reduce gas demand by 0.3 to 0.35 percent in the short run and 0.6 to 0.8 percent in the long run. More recent research estimates the short run effect of gas prices on the demand for gasoline is much smaller: about -0.06 percent at the end of the 1990s and between -0.03 and -0.08 during 2001 and 2006.
Several critical points should be made. In terms of behavioral change, gasoline price changes have a larger impact on aggregate fuel consumption than on traffic levels. For example, a study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a traffic volume elasticity of -0.035 with respect to the price of gasoline. This result may point towards higher fuel efficiency of cars on the road and not towards reduction in driving, measured by vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world's civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.
Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google.
Harvard economist David Cutler today goes through the ten possible ways to control medical costs, and grades President Obama's plan. Bottom line:
Republican Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley by five points in the senatorial contest to succeed Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. But, in William Delahunt’s congressional district, Brown beat the lady by 20 points. This was not good news for Delahunt, not good news at all.
Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.
Apple’s iPad is dominating the gadget buzz this winter, but a few years ago, we and others made a big deal about the “polyglot” iPod, turning it into a talisman of the globalized supply-chain. The point was to accent the global context in which U.S. prosperity must be maintained. Then we managed to find a mildly affirmative story of Apple’s superior ability to capture value by creatively managing seven suppliers located in four different nations with manufacturing dispersed across five different countries.
That was then, though. More salient today as an insight into America’s standing in a globalized production system may be the backstory of another consumer electronics sensation--Amazon’s Kindle e-reader--yet here the story has a darker hue.
It is so simple. And elegant. What’s more, it is also true.
"Verum Serum" has a post accusing yours truly of hypocrisy. I'm going to go through the argument because it reveals a common vein of misinformation that tends to circulate on among conservatives.
On Friday, I pointed out that the American public thinks upper-income earners pay too little in taxes. Why is this hypocritical? Verum Serum explains:
The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in The American University
By Louis Menand
(W.W. Norton, 174 pp., $24.95)
Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.
IN EARLY 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America's greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch).
Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among white working class voters. That’s not because they are white. He would have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different class, if you like. And that’s because he does.
“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine
In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock).
The victory of Scott Brown in the fight for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat shines a light on a trend in American politics that ought to deeply trouble progressives.
Well, Martha Coakley did do well in some places on the Massachusetts electoral map.
On July 2 of last year, Politico broke a startling story: The Washington Post was planning to host off-the-record salons at which sponsors would pay to mingle with D.C. eminences and Post writers. The dinners--the first of which had been advertised in Post fliers as an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done”--were to take place at the home of Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher.
It was snowing. I entered the Haggerty School on Cushing Street in Cambridge just before noon. There were no directional signs to the gym as there ordinarily are on an election day. And there was no one pushing his or her candidate’s wares.
I checked in by address, went to the curtained little polling booth, filled in the box next to my candidate’s name, checked out by address, and put my ballot in what seemed to me to be one of those organ grinder’s contraptions. It had a moving number count which told me that I was the 504th voter of the day.
Scott Brown is running on a promise to block the health care bill in Washington. But, as you may have heard, he is not running on a promise to roll back the reforms that Massachusetts implemented three years ago. In fact, he says he supports those reforms.
I had been planning to something about how this proves Brown is an empty suit, as far as substance goes. Remember, the basic architecture of the coverage scheme in Massachusetts is virtually identical to what we'd do nationally if the bills before Congress pass. The big difference--and, yes, it's a big difference--is that the Massachusetts plan didn't really try to control costs, as the national reforms would.
But if you're a conservative who cares more about cost anyway, as Brown claims to be, then you should prefer the national reforms. His position makes no sense, unless he hasn't thought it through.
Then it hit me: Actually, Scott is pretty smart. And he has a lesson to teach national Democrats, particularly those nervous that health care reform will ruin them politically.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the administration's new initiative to combat the flu on Whitehouse.gov this weekend. The administration hopes to encourage vaccination through an innovative viral Facebook application, I'm a Flu Fighter!, which lets people tell their friends they got the flu shot and challenges them to do the same.
Otherwise-obscure central bankers spent an unprecedented amount of time in the global limelight last year. As the crisis brought down not only banking behemoths, but also macroeconomic axioms, the expansionary measures enacted by the Fed’s Ben Bernanke, the European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet, and the Bank of England’s Mervyn King have been credited, at least for now, with preventing a second coming of the Great Depression. And for that they have been hailed: Bernanke is both Time’s Person of the Year and Foreign Policy’s top global thinker, while Trichet wields tangible power in an otherwise diffuse EU and King has expressed ideas that are likely to influence future financial architecture more than those emanating from 10 Downing Street. But an epic battle unleashed last week between the Argentine government and its central bank is an apt reminder that the most challenging times for central bankers may lay not in the recent past, but in a more problematic future.
The provost of University College, London, where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied for three years, said that he was "completely shocked" by the news of what the Christmas terrorist had tried to do. Really?
I've just received an e-mail from an old Harvard colleague, whose accomplishments include seeing social and intellectual trends in the world--the Muslim world, especially--that many of his fellow academics blithely deny.
Here is his New Year’s morning correspondence:
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
By Robert Darnton
(Public Affairs, 218 pp., $23.95)
On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Bookstores
By Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by David Wills
(Fordham University Press, 59 pp., $16)
I.
The airplane rises from the runway. Bent, folded, and spindled into the last seat in coach class--the one that doesn’t really recline--I pull my Kindle out of the seat pocket in front of me, slide the little switch, and lose myself in Matthew Crawford’s story of his passage from policy wonk to motorcycle mechanic. The gritty world of his workshop takes shape as I read. The airplane noise fades away, the pain in my cramped knees almost disappears, my eyes cease to blink. I am Kindled. It is by no means the first time. These days, in fact, I spend a lot of my time that way.
Several commenters have responded to my recent story (and blog posts) about the decline of U.S. manufacturing by insisting it's no big deal if the manufacturing sector shrinks. The United States will gradually replace current manufacturing-sector work with higher-value-added manufacturing and service-sector work, the argument goes, just as we replaced agriculture with manufacturing during the last century. (About 40 percent of the labor force toiled in agriculture in 1900; that was down to about 2 percent in 2000.) These critics are confident we either won't miss a beat or will get a lot richer in the process.
I think there are at least three big problems with this argument, which I may elaborate on later, but will just briefly lay out here:
1.) U.S manufacturing has major competitive problems; the agricultural sector doesn't--and, so far as I can tell, didn't develop them as it shrank. American farmers consistently produce more than we consume; American manufacturers do not. In 1980, we ran a surplus in agricultural food production of $20.4 billion; in 2008 that was $32.7 billion (though it was significantly smaller as a percentage of the total amount traded). By contrast, in 1980 we ran a trade surplus of $17.4 billion in manufacturing; last year we ran a deficit of $433.2 billion. So while both sectors have become more productive over time, food production stabilized relative to domestic demand even as the sector shrank, while manufacturing continues to decline relative to domestic demand. That means our foreign competitors our eating our lunch in manufacturing; not so in, well, lunch.
2.) The beauty of manufacturing is that wages and productivity aren't necessarily tied to education level. A person with a high school diploma (or less) can make a middle-class living in the manufacturing sector. (See the example of FormFactor in my piece about Ron Bloom.) By contrast, wages and productivity are much more closely tied to education level in the service sector. A person with a high school education or less will generally do very badly in a service-sector job--there are very few service jobs that can provide them with a middle-class living.
Now it would be great if everyone would go to college and be able to thrive in the post-industrial economy. But, in reality, there's always going to be a significant portion of the population that doesn't get beyond high school. Which means that an economy with almost no manufacturing is probably an economy with much greater income inequality. (This obviously wasn't a problem during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing, for the opposite reason.)
