(Massive) Daily Reading: June 25, 2012

Today's best from around the web. The richest blogosphere day I've seen in quite some time.


Tomorrow: an essay on how to think about politics. 

The Spirit of the Law. 

Today's Must-Read:


I'm cheating, but these two are connected. 


James Fallows on the Roberts Court and democratic norms:

Normally I shy away from apocalyptic readings of the American predicament. We're a big, messy country; we've been through a lot -- perhaps even more than we thought, what with Abraham Lincoln and the vampires. We'll probably muddle through this and be very worried about something else ten years from now. But when you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, throughCitizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we'd identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.**  

Coates counters: 

I agree with a lot of this -- and yet I wonder how it squares with history. I feel like a broken record, but on the front of anti-black prejudice, for roughly 100 years these norms were effectively abandoned. More to the point, that 100 years begins with an apocalyptic war which began because as an outright rejection of those norms. The epoch following is basically instance after instance of the country violating its democratic norms. 

Read these too:


Killer piece from NYT Economix on gender pay discrepancy and labor market failures:

The debate over this proposed legislation reveals serious flaws in reasoning about the impact of public efforts to promote fair pay. Recent academic research suggests that many women are underpaid for the same reason that many chief executives may be overpaid — because the labor market doesn’t work according to the standard textbook model based on impersonal forces of supply and demand....Many jobs in today’s economy — particularly those at the higher occupational levels where gender differences in pay are most pronounced — are not standardized, and wage rates are not determined by a market based on open bidding.

Tech Crunch says entrepreneurs don't necessarily work for money:

Entrepreneurs have a peculiar habit of bucking the capitalistic expectation of easy money for long hours hunched over a laptop, leaving cushy jobs to start a risky new company, dedicating their time to charity, or simply working enough hours to make their equivalent hourly salary less-than-minimum-wage.A new longitudinal study of business students has an explanation: happiness isn’t about the money.

Derek Thompson looks at the United States as if it was a European style monetary union (awesome graphic alert):


The Atlantic also has my favorite break down of today's immigration ruling. My favorite Supreme Court breakdowns always focus on the Justices themselves, not technical legal points. Breaking: courts are just another flavor of political institution. 


Paul Krugman has a lucid, concise account of one of the fundamental problems behind recessions: 

You might think that the process would be symmetric: debtors pay down their debt, while creditors are correspondingly induced to spend more by low real interest rates. And it would be symmetric if the shock were small enough. In fact, however, the deleveraging shock has been so large that we’re hard up against the zero lower bound; interest rates can’t go low enough. And so we have a persistent excess of desired saving over desired investment, which is to say persistently inadequate demand, which is to say a depression.

By the way, this is in a fundamental sense a market failure: there is a price mechanism, the real interest rate, that because of the zero lower bound can’t do its job under certain circumstances, namely the circumstances we face now.

I feel compelled to offer two Ezra Klein rec's today. First, he discusses the future of healthcare reform if the Court overturns the mandate (it may not be what the right is hoping for). Second, he takes a look a the massive political effort required to make the mandate controversial in the first place. Breaking: courts are just another political institution (I said it twice, I'll keep saying it). 


Via Arts and Letters Daily, a forgotten World War Two era tragedy. 


Long, but worth it: "The False Allure of Group Selection."