Daily Reading: June 21, 2012

Today's best from around the web. 

Today's must-read:

Americans distrust, well, everything. Via NYT Economix. 


Read these too: 


Yesterday I linked to Casey Mulligan's piece arguing that anti-trust regulation of the computer industry is silly.  Today, Matt Yglesias pushes back: 

One strange tick I sometimes hear from conservatives is the habit of citing the results of successful government interventions in the economy as an argument against the need for public policy interventions.... At a time when Apple was teetering on the brink of liquidation, Bill Gates teamed up with Steve Jobs to announce both a strategic capital investment in Apple and Microsoft's commitment to releasing a new version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. The overwhelming conventional wisdom at the time was that Gates was acting in large part to try to assuage antitrust concerns that were very live at the time. 

Via Andrew Sullivan:

 63 percent of Republicans in a new poll believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs when we invaded in 2003, despite even George W. Bush's acknowledgment that he didn't. 64 percent also believe that Barack Obama was born in a foreign country, even though we have the long-form birth certificate from Hawaii. This alternate reality is sustained by a 24 hour propaganda network, and hermetically sealed off from any external intervention.

We are reaching a democratic crisis of some sorts. One major political party refuses to accept empirical truths. It has become a hall of ideological mirrors. 

Gail Collins is smart (and funny, as usual) on privatization: 

I have been thinking about this a lot, mainly because of a recent series of Times articles by Sam Dolnick, which examine the wondrous outcome of a pioneering effort by the State of New Jersey to privatize some of its prison functions, particularly a halfway house program for people on the way in or out of the criminal justice system. The program costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping. More than 5,000 have run, walked or wandered off since 2005. That placed a sometimes tragic burden on the victims of the crimes the escapees later committed, but it must have definitely reduced upkeep. Perhaps you could call it inmate self-privatization.

Krugman is lucid and devastating on bond vigilantes. 


Some nice (but crude) data on state spending and economic performance.


Nate Silver tells us how to intelligently treat an "outlier" poll. 


Chait asks the blogospheric abyss "How Badly Will SCOTUS Screw Up Obamacare?"


More Yglesias wins today's "Readable Economic Writing" award, setting the record straight on the inflation-unemployment relationship: 

The problem with the Fed's strict inflation targeting strategy isn't that inflation would create jobs. It's that employment would create inflation.

Think about North Dakota. Amidst the huge nationwide recession, North Dakota has had a localized boom due to the combination of an oil discovery and an extremely low baseline population. This has led to a soaring price level in North Dakota. Lots of people have flooded into the Bakken Shale area, using up all the housing stock and causing absurd appreciation in the quality-adjusted rent. Restaurants and stores are more crowded, which has led to higher prices (to ration access) and to increases in staffing levels (to accommodate more customers at what were previously off-peak times) and the increased demand for low-skilled labor has led to wage increases. This inflation has been the consequence, rather than the cause, of North Dakota's localized boom.

But suppose we had a nationwide employment boom, what would happen then?

In case anyone didn't catch Gail's Armstrong lyrics reference: