Abbreviated Friday Reading: July 13, 2012

Today's best from around the web.

Paul Samuelson

Today's must read:


Whenever I get fed up with David Brooks' platitudes he goes and writes a terrific column like this:

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.

Brooks most typical claim, that culture matters, stands as the most crucial line of social commentary in our overly-enlightened historical moment. 


Read these too:


Jonathan Bernstein puts a heavy lid on the Condi Rice for VP talk: 


Chait gives a great, even-handed breakdown of the Bain controversy: 

Romney’s political problem is that the changes to the business world he helped unleash are unpopular. Whether or not the old world of benevolent corporations of the sort his father ran are justifiable or can survive in a global economy, people liked them. The notion that businesses have no obligation save making money for their shareholders is a hard sell, both conceptually and in the practical outcomes it creates, like mass layoffs. Romney is attempting to portray his business experience as “creating jobs,” but he was actually in the business of creating wealth. Obama has every right to expose that contradiction. He doesn’t have a right to make things up in the process.

Dylan Matthews on how poorly designed eligibility cut offs hurt the poor and create a classic "welfare trap." 


Ezra Klein with 14 reasons why the current Congress is the worst...ever.


Krugman swipes supply-side myths.


More lucid economy writing from Matt Yglesias, building off the negative interest rates discussion:

Unfortunately, I think the facts say otherwise. There are three ways a government can finance current expenditures. One is to conscript resources from the public via taxation. The second is to borrow money on financial markets. The third is to print money. Regardless of one's views about what the appropriate level of expenditure is, it's desirable to finance that expenditure in the way that imposes the least cost on society. Under normal circumstances, taxation is a relatively low-cost means of financing expenditure. Printing money would generate inflation and possibly generate expectations of accelerating inflation wreaking havoc with citizens' plans, provoking capital flight from the country, and generally making everyone miserable. Borrowing money on a large scale, by contrast, tends to raise interest rates and "crowd out" private investment unless the central bank is willing to engage in inflationary low interest rate policies. But today the real yield on government debt is exceptionally low. As of yesterday, the government could borrow for free on a 20-year time horizon or borrow at a negative rate on a 10-year time horizon...Either way, the point is that to tax people when other people are willing to lend the government money for free is a very costly means of finance.