Daily Reading: June 12, 2012

If you read anything today, read this: 


A new issue of the always-great Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is out today. The whole thing is worth reading, but I'll go with E.J. Dionne's sweeping case for reasserting a progressive vision of American history: 

The Founders of our nation were daring, but they were also balanced, moderate, and temperate. They had confidence that government could be made to work and that it could accomplish great things, but they were always wary of deifying the state and those who ran it. They hugely valued individual freedom but were steeped in principles that saw the preservation of freedom as a common enterprise. They were influenced by the Bible and the Enlightenment, by liberalism and republicanism.

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


(1.) Weissmann runs through a worst case scenario for a Euro-zone meltdown. Bad, very bad. Really bad.


(2.) More Eurozone pessimism from Andrew Ross Sorkin.


(3.) I'll keep beating the irrationality drum. Great little piece on intelligence and cognitive bias: 

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes.

(4.) Ezra reacts to Lizza (linked in yesterday's "Daily Reading") and reminds us that Congress, you know, matters: 

Lizza, by the way, gets at much of this in his piece, so the post shouldn’t be taken as a critique of him. And don’t get me wrong: The president is powerful, and Congress is frequently reactive to the agenda he sets, so articles about what he wants to do are definitely worth reading. But there’s a huge imbalance in how much time the media — myself included — spend reporting on the executive branch vs. the legislative branch, and while that imbalance exists for perfectly understandable reasons, it leads readers to overestimate the importance of the president’s personal preferences and underestimate the importance of Congress.

(5.)  David Brooks examines contemporary American political monuments and determines that we've forgotten how to think about just authority: 

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.

(6.) Chait argues that Obama's "doing fine" gaffe may help him by re-focusing the debate on the realities of public sector employment:

But there are also ways in which the debate harms Romney. Seizing on Obama’s gaffe, Romney committed a counter-gaffe, in which he declared of Obama, “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.” The flub here is one of excessive honesty. Americans may hate the idea of government in the abstract, but they like it in the specific. The Republican strategy is always to keep its discussion of government programs general — with a handful of exceptions, like foreign aid and programs that help the poor — while Democrats try to make it as specific as possible. Firing police officers, firefighters, and teachers is way less popular than firing government bureaucrats. Obama has taken great care to turn the question into one of those specific job categories, and Romney has inadvertently helped him. 

 Chait follows up here. 


(7.) Via Matt Yglesias, nice bit from Seth Stevenson on how Southwest has managed to say profitable in an unprofitable industry. 


Read these if you have the time (a little longer, but good): 


(1.) Walt: what makes a good ally? A realist's answer. 


(2.) I'll double dip on Lehrer today. Why we don't trust science.