Daily Reading: July 9, 2012

EDIT: Original Title Said July 7. Was supposed to be July 9.

Today's best from around the web.

Realism gone right.

Today's must read:


I'm not sure how I feel about hardcore realism (of the sort The National Interest espouses) as a foreign relations paradigm. But realists deserve major credit for being able to cut through ideological jargon and talk about fundamentals and global trends. This Paul Miller piece is no exception:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S pivot to East Asia is well-timed. The geostrategic importance of the Middle East is vastly overblown. The region matters to the United States chiefly because of its influence in the world oil market, but that influence has been in terminal decline for a generation, a fact almost wholly unnoticed by outside observers. A confluence of developments—including rising prices and production costs, declining reserves, and the availability of alternate fuels and unconventional sources of oil—will decisively undermine the defining role of the Middle East in the global energy market.

Read these too:


Coates on some pretty wild racial theories developed in the antebellum South. If it wasn't for their tendency to perpetrate mass violence, racists would be a pretty entertaining lot:

In the basic conception of the proto-Confederates, Southerners were descendants of the Norman "race," hot-blooded, passionate and noble Cavaliers, while Northerners were descended from the servile Saxons.

Nancy Folbre has been on fire at Economix lately. Her latest on the welfare state and parenting incentives is no exception.


Yglesias has a rare ability to clearly explain complex economic concepts in everyday language. We need more like him:

The issue here is that high unemployment is an exceptionally perverse consequence of financial crisis. If you find yourself suddenly more deeply indebted than you'd anticipated, what you need to do is work more. Try to freelance more or pick up more shifts or work a second job or hustle harder for commissions. Anything to increase your income. But at the same time, you're going to want to reduce your spending. And the problem is that if lots of people are trying to reduce their spending, there's the risk that people won't be able to work more even though they really need more income. Instead what happens is that Irish (and Spanish and so forth) people, in the aggregate, are doing less work than they were pre-crisis even though they need the income more. It's a mess. Currency depreciation by no means eliminates the pain of an economic crisis. On the contrary, it makes everyone poorer. But by spreading the shock across all citizens and assets, it does a much smoother job of mitigating the secondary trauma of idleness and unemployment. 

Apparently weather affects our consumer behavior. A lot:

People are far more likely to buy SUVs with four-wheel drive when it’s snowing, or overvalue homes with swimming pools when the sun is scorching — and often end up lamenting the purchases later. The economists, Meghan R. Busse, Devin G. Pope, Jaren C. Pope, and Jorge Silva-Risso, pored through data from 40 million vehicle sales and 4 million home sales. They found that  weather can have a sweeping effect. Take car sales: If the weather is 20 degrees warmer than the seasonal average, sales of convertibles shoot up 8.5 percent. (The authors control for climate and region.) A bright day with clear skies will reduce the number of black-colored vehicles sold. Conversely, when it’s snowing, sales of rugged SUVs with four-wheel drive shoot up.