Daily Reading: July 12, 2012

Today's best from around the web. 

The American public seems to treat debt like medieval Europe treated usury.

Today's must read:


Ezra Klein highlights the simple fact that renders our current fiscal policy insane:

The market will literally pay us a small premium to take their money and keep it safe for them for five, seven or 10 years. We could use that money to rebuild our roads and water filtration systems. We could use that money to cut taxes for any business that adds to its payrolls. We could use that to hire back the 600,000 state and local workers we’ve laid off in the last few years. Or, as Larry Summers has written, we could simply accelerate payments we know we’ll need to make anyway. We could move up maintenance projects, replace our military equipment or buy space we’re currently leasing. All of that would leave the government in a better fiscal position going forward, not to mention help the economy. The fact that we’re not doing any of this isn’t just a lost opportunity. It’s financial mismanagement on an epic scale.

Imagine you could borrow money for negative interest. Would you respond by lightening your debt load? It's worth noting that neither Obama nor Romney endorses expanding the deficit at this point. The American public's vision of public finance is simply so misconceived that even the purportedly big-spending left doesn't dare make the (counter-intuitive if you don't remember Macroeconomics 1) case for counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Unlike Europe, the Untied States doesn't have an actual economic crisis. 


Just a governance crisis.  


Read these too:


The media is really bad at covering economic and financial news. I suspect because the economy has to be looked at as system and journalists prefer linear stories with clear causality and highly visible narrative hinges. This report, suggesting that "outsourcing" leads to no net employment effects, stands as a nice counter example (courtesy Suzy Khimm). 


Nate Silver ponders the predictive force of Obama's job approval (worse) and his personal favorability (better). 


Via Arts and Letters Daily, Jon Bardin has a fascinating piece on DARPA's new mind-machine image processing effort. Crazy:

He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain's performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man's brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

Derek Thompson thinks the the traditional TV bundle business model is about to die. And soon. 


T.N. Coates is on fire lately. Money quote from his reaction to the big Penn State/Sandusky report today:

It is indeed hard for us to reconcile the commission of evil with the commission of good. We like to think that evil is only perpetuated by those who are obvious, the better to relieve ourselves of the burdens of constant evaluation and reflection. It's similar to our conversation around race here. How does one accept that American democracy depended on American slavery? How do you accept that your brilliant spiritual father, Thomas Jefferson, committed the sin of slavery, knew it, and continued nonetheless?

Those who bear witness to that evil know well the price of waking us to the awful real, for forcing us to think.