Daily Reading: June 11, 2012

If you read anything today, read this: 

Ryan Lizza's piece in The New Yorker on a second Obama term is the talk of the blogosphere today. Yes, it's long, but it's definitely worth your time. Some great historical commentary on second-term governance along with some great pontificating on the potential options for the Obama Administration.


This bit on Nixon's second term attempt to assert control over the federal bureaucracy is particularly haunting:

Nixon gave his aides detailed directions about how to flush unsympathetic bureaucrats from the government after he won reëlection. Early in the 1972 campaign, he wrote his aides with instructions for a “housecleaning” at the C.I.A.:

'I want a study made immediately as to how many people in CIA could be removed by presidential action. . . . Of course, the reduction in force should be accomplished solely on the ground of its being necessary for budget reasons, but you will both know the real reason. . . . I want you to quit recruiting from any of the Ivy League schools or any other universities where either the university president or the university faculties have taken action condemning our efforts to bring the war in Vietnam to an end.'

No excuse to not read these (short but good):


(1.) At the always great NYT blog Economix, Polak and Schott highlight America's own version of austerity, an austerity driven by cuts in spending by local governments. I think the mainstream US media deserves some serious wrist-slapping for their treatment of American government spending during the Great Recession. Too many journalists allow their economic coverage to be driven by major, high-profile events (like the stimulus or the debt ceiling debate). The problem is that economic performance is driven by trends, not, typically, by major events. I'm not asking journalists to employ sophisticated economic theory, just to achieve some passing familiarity with actual data. 


(2.) Over at Wonkblog, Brad Plumer provides a very readable breakdown of Euro-crisis response options. 


(3.) I'm double dipping (deservedly!) Wonkblog today. Ezra Klein goes after Bobby Jindal and defends the Obama Administration's stance toward "business": 

After taxes, corporate profits amounted to 6.9 percent of GDP in 2010 — their highest level since 1966. That’s not, by any means, the singular result of the Obama administration’s policies. But it’s happening amidst their policies. And it speaks to the underlying reality of this recovery: Corporate taxes are near all-time lows and corporate profits are near all-time highs. That’s a mighty odd outcome for an administration that supposedly sees the existence of private businesses as an unpleasant side effect of the government’s need for tax revenues, don’t you think?

(4.) Jonathan Chait destroys zombie arguments about gay marriage and parenting (shamey shamey Douhat).


(5.) Matt Yglesias talks Demorat tax cut strategy. It's a mystery to me why any Democratic strategists would believe they could successfully marshal public opinion against the GOP on anything, given the recent past and hazy connection between legislative reality and popular perception. 


(6.) This election will likely focus on the economy. But Andrew Sullivan reminds us that the neocons are still breathing. And they have Romney's ear. 


Read these if you have the time (long-ish but good):  


(1.) Via Arts and Letters Daily, a fascinating account of family structure and inequality: 

So the single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.

(2.) At The Atlantic Ferreiro reviews an evolutionary theory of political behavior. Fascinating stuff, in keeping with The Divine Perspective's recent (much clumsier) focus on political psychology:  

Greatly simplified, his argument is that two rival evolutionary forces drive human behavior: first, individual selection, which rewards the fittest individuals by passing along their genes; and second, group selection, in which the communities that work best together come to dominate the gene pool. Wilson argues that these two evolutionary forces are at work simultaneously, so that both self-serving and altruistic behaviors are constantly competing at the individual and at the group level. As he explains, "Members of the same group compete with one another in a manner that leads to self-serving behavior .... At the higher level, groups compete with groups, favoring cooperative social traits among members of the same group." In other words, individuals with self-serving behaviors beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of individuals with self-serving behaviors.