Tag: Matt Yglesias

Why is the media—including the liberal media—supporting these teachers’ strikes?

I’ve been amazed—in a good way—at how positive is the media coverage of all these teacher wildcat strikes and actions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Particularly from liberal media outlets. I say this because it was just six years ago that the teachers in Chicago struck. Even though their cause was just as righteous as that of the teachers in these southern states, featuring many of the same grievances you see in the current moment—the Chicago teachers’ final contract included a guarantee of textbooks for all students on the first day of class; a doubling of funds for class supplies; $1.5 million for new special education teachers; and so on—the hostility from media outlets, including liberal media outlets, […]

Trump: 0. Democrats: 0. The People: 1.

1. Donald Trump was handed a major defeat tonight when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate his travel ban. The three-judge panel, which included a George W. Bush appointee, unanimously rejected one of Trump’s key arguments: that when it comes to immigration and national security, the actions of the executive branch are not subject to judicial review. Although our jurisprudence has long counseled deference to the political branches on matters of immigration and national security, neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ever held that courts lack the authority to review executive action in those arenas for compliance with the Constitution. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the notion that the political […]

David Brooks Says

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post on the most recent column of David Brooks. David Brooks says: We are in the middle of…a dangerous level of family breakdown. David Brooks says: It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites. The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members […]

Would It Not Be Easier for Matt Yglesias to Dissolve the Bangladeshi People and Elect Another?

Yesterday, after a building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing almost 200more than 250 workers nearly 350 workers at least 377 workers over 650 workers, Matt Yglesias wrote: Bangladesh may o r may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States. The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices […]

Getting on Board

Alex Gourevitch is no stranger to this blog. He was one of my co-authors, along with Chris Bertram, on the Crooked Timber post about workplace coercion. He also has a terrific blog of his own, The Current Moment, which I recommend you check out. Here, in this guest post, he does a double-take on Matt Yglesias’ double-take. • • • • • Prompted by Gary Shteyngart’s op-ed today chronicling a disastrous American Airlines flight, Matthew Yglesias produced a little nugget explaining that AA’s delays are the product of pilot slowdowns. American—well, its executives—are trying to save their hides by using bankruptcy courts to screw the unions. Pilots are fighting back by zealously following all kinds of obscure rules—what Yglesias dubs […]

Matt Yglesias’s China Syndrome

Commenting on the recent labor unrest in China, Matt Yglesias makes a comparison with the past and present of the United States. Conditions in contemporary China have much more in common, structurally speaking, with conditions during the heyday of western labor activism than does anything about the Chicago teachers strike or the apparent American Airlines sickout. The rapid pace of Chinese industrialization means the average wage in a Chinese factories has managed to lag behind the average productivity of a Chinese factory worker (roughly speaking because it’s dragged down by the absymal wages and productivity of Chinese agriculture) which creates a dynamic ripe for windfall profits but also for labor activism. The repressive nature of the Chinese state is an […]

If Only We Knew How to Decrease Unemployment…

Every month the jobs numbers come out, and every month we have the same conversation: Why is unemployment so high? How can we get it down? While the entire political establishment continues to suck its thumb, this post from the Atlantic (h/t Bryce Covert) tells you all you need to know. We have the lowest number of public-sector employees per population since 1968. If we merely restored government employment to its 2007 levels, there’d be 1.7 million more jobs. Remember last summer when the Atlantic asked a group of worthies, including Matt Yglesias, “What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?” I think we know the answer: First, stop firing people. Second, start hiring people.

Mini-Wars

So many responses to our Crooked Timber piece I can barely keep up (see my last post for an initial round-up).  And now the responses are generating their only little mini-wars. These Bleeding Hearts Let’s start with the Bleeding Hearts themselves.  Kevin Vallier has a lengthy reply, in which he concludes that the Bleeding Hearts “can have it all.” (I initially wanted to title our post “The Bleeding Hearts Can’t Have It All.” So at least we’re all the same kitschy page.) Jason Brennan has some interesting statistics on Denmark and France that I know we’ll want to come back to. Proving once again that he’s the menschiest of the menschen, Matt Zwolinski wonders “why are employers so mean?” Though […]

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Endless Arguments about It on the Internet

The Crooked Timber post on libertarianism and freedom that Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch, and I wrote has been heating up the interwebs. So much so that the three of us have now been dubbed “BRG.”  We’ll be responding in due time, but for now here’s a roundup of all the links. Tyler Cowen: “I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece.  How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context of a boss wishing to search an employee?…If I ponder my workplace at GMU, I see many more employees who take advantage of the boss, perhaps by shirking, or by not teaching well, than I see […]

Another prize! And other news of the blog and the book

The blog has won another award!  Cliopatra, the history blog at the History News Network, has awarded me its “Best Writer” award.  Here’s what the judges said: Corey Robin’s new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin’s provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin’s words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is […]

If Everybody’s Working for the Weekend, How Come It Took This Country So Goddamn Long to Get One?

Ta-Nehisi Coates went after liberals the other day for being too whiny. Those who complain about the compromises and capitulations of Obama—”Team Commie,” as he calls them—have only themselves to blame. They haven’t done the hard work of organizing citizens to put pressure on the pols in Washington, particularly conservative Democrats resisting Obama’s jobs program. I was a little puzzled by this post. Its hectoring tone (“being taken seriously involves actual work”) sounds a lot like the one Obama uses when he attacks “griping and groaning” liberals—a tone ably skewered by none other than Ta-Nehisi Coates in a New York Times op-ed, which I wrote about in an earlier post. It’s also not clear who exactly Coates is talking about […]

Doug Henwood: His Taste in Music is a Little Doctrinaire, but His Economics is Outta Sight

Those of you following this discussion between me, Matt Yglesias, and Mike Konczal, need to check out this post from Doug Henwood. It not only cuts through a lot of the fat, but it also takes us in a completely different, unexpected, and difficult direction, raising fascinating questions about the petit bourgeois origins and dimensions of the politics of inflation.  Doug is my rabbi in all things economic (though, sadly, we part ways on matters musical).  Check it out, comment there, here, everywhere. To my astonishment, this debate, or a spin-off of this debate, seems to have been kicked upstairs.  Way upstairs.  As in Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong upstairs. Update (July 18, 12:30 pm) And now the boys—and, seriously, […]

The Way We Weren’t: My Response to Yglesias’ Response to My Response to His Response to My Response

Prompted by this post from Mike Konczal, Matt Yglesias has weighed in again on our debate about what the government should do to create jobs. But it turns out that’s not what we’re debating.  What we’re really debating, says Yglesias, is monetary policy: specifically, whether the left should care about it. Yglesias thinks we should, and I gather I’m supposed to think we shouldn’t. Instead of confronting the real impact monetary policy has on jobs, inequality, and so on, I, like my brothers and sisters on the left, have allowed my “romance with the idea of the Works Progress Administration,” the misty water-colored memory of New Deal “social solidarity” and “public investment,” to blur my thinking about what would actually […]

Matt Yglesias Responds to My Post

Matt Yglesias sent me two emails last night in response to my critique of his proposal that the government should decrease unemployment by increasing inflation targets. In the first email, he writes: You’re attributing views to me I don’t hold. I was asked by the Atlantic for one idea, and I didn’t want an idea that would need to go through congress. So I said the Fed should set a higher inflation target (as FDR did: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/president-sets-a-price-level-target-in-a-depression-fdr-1932-edition/) which I think it should. But this is hardly the only thing we can or should be doing. The government should be borrowing money and spending it on public works (http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/11/265850/real-interest-on-government-debt-is-negative/) and the federal government should be giving fiscal support to state and local […]

Other People’s Money

In response to the question “What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?” Matt Yglesias writes, “The best step to create jobs and boost the economy would be for the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee to announce a plan to target inflation at 3 or 4 percent.” In a follow-up post, he’s even more emphatic: “The actual single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation” is “adopt a higher inflation target.” I’m no economist—the worst grade I got in college was in Econ 101; the professor was a newly hired economist by the name of Ben Bernanke—but I would have thought the single best thing the government could do to create jobs (and […]