Daily Reading: July 3, 2012

Today's best from around the web. Fourth of July holiday lake trip hiatus impending. No more Daily Reads till Friday. 

Holiday lake trip recreational activities. 

Today's must read, courtesy NYT Economix (God, I hate that blog title). Kids are (really) expsensive and parenting is chronically undervalued by the market: 

Rather than trying to draw analogies with either livestock or pets, we should conceptualize children as key elements of an economic system that reaches beyond the boundaries of both the market and the state, part of anintergenerational private/public partnership vital to our society.

Read these too:

Kristine Eck ponders women in combat from the women-as-rebels angle:

Experience from rebel groups shows that none of these objections have proven terribly relevant. Take the Maoist rebels in Nepal, whose combat troops were composed of roughly 20-30% women. These women engaged in the same military operations as men, including carrying the injured off the battlefield. They trekked upwards of 300 miles across some of the roughest terrain in the world—the Himalayan foothills—which required them to live in harsh guerilla conditions for upwards of 6 months at a time. And group cohesion was largely unaffected, thanks to extensive training that emphasized discipline in respect to sexual activity (which was forbidden) and which insisted on norms of gender equality.

Why we should visualize data. I think "looking cool" is a good enough reason, but these are solid too. 

Quality business/finance writing can be a bit hard to find (anyone have recommendations in this regard?). This piece on Robert Diamond's resignation from Barclays, via NYT's Dealbook, is excellent: 

On the one hand, he has been famously described as the unacceptable face of banking, with his brash, can-do American attitude that has become emblematic of the culture of banking. As part of the $450 million settlement with Barclays, authorities said they found “pervasive” wrongdoing in which the bank tried to influence interest rates to benefit its own bottom line.Yet, Mr. Diamond is also the architect of one of Britain’s largest and most successful financial institutions. Unlike many of its peers, Barclays never had to take a bailout from the government during the financial crisis, emerging as one of the relative winners.

Nice FP piece on Argentina's new central bank reforms.


Kevin Drum on the paradox of red states' opposition to Obama's medicaid expansion. They have far more to gain.