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U.S.
With Vacancies High, G.O.P. Primaries in Texas Set Up a Scramble to the Right
With Gov. Rick Perry leaving office and Senator Ted Cruz ascendant, the races have taken on a no-rules tenor amid a barrage of fiery attack ads and accusations.
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Sports
The Week’s Men’s College Basketball Games to Watch
A pair of must-watch rivalry games are slated for Saturday as No. 17 Kentucky travels to top-ranked Florida and No. 19 North Carolina visits No. 6 Duke.| Women's College Basketball | ||
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| 56 | 7:33 2nd Half |
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| 42 | |
| Women's College Basketball | ||
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| 68 | Final |
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| 48 | |
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Health
The Perils of Toughing It Out
Untreated or inadequately treated pain is disabling and can hasten the death of an older adult by interfering with exercise, eating or socializing.
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U.S.
A Disaster Brought Awareness but Little Action on Infrastructure
After the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, many people thought, mistakenly, that the government would take action to repair and improve aging bridges.
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U.S.
Holder and Republicans Unite to Soften Sentencing Laws
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and libertarian-leaning Republicans have found common cause on eliminating mandatory-minimum prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
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Education
New All-Digital Curriculums Hope to Ride High-Tech Push in Schoolrooms
Amplify, part of News Corporation, is one of many companies releasing all-digital curriculums for sale to school districts.
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U.S.
Senator Expresses Concerns About Nuclear-Waste Tanks
Ron Wyden of Oregon contends that even the newest and sturdiest of tanks at a Washington State site show some of the same construction problems as one that began leaking in late 2012.
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Opinion
Swimming and Multitasking
A reader asks what happened to the joy of the sport for its own sake.
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Health
Mental Illness Risk Higher for Children of Older Fathers, Study Finds
Children born to middle-aged men are more likely to develop any of a range of mental difficulties, like attention deficits, bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia, according to a new study.
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Movies
The Damage That Good Can Inflict
“Fatal Assistance,” a documentary by Raoul Peck, chronicles the challenges and failures of rebuilding efforts in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
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T:Style
On View | The Fancy Flock of James Bond Films
The artist Taryn Simon obsessively photographed all 340 birds that appear in the 24 spy films — a nod to the ornithologist after whom the main character was named.
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Business Day
A Dire Economic Forecast Based on New Assumptions
This year’s economic forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office were worse than last year’s because the office stopped treating the recent slow years as outliers.CBO Mix-And-Match
Floyd Norris makes a really good point in criticizing the Congressional Budget Office;
he argues that the office’s latest budget projections aren’t
consistent. CBO has marked down its expectations for future growth, but
it hasn’t marked down its expectations for future interest rates. And
that leads to excessive fiscal pessimism.
Indeed. CBO seems to think, for some reason, that this represents the new normal:
but that this does not:
You can make the case that US long-term
growth prospects have worsened substantially. But it’s hard to make that
case without thinking that we will be at least flirting with secular stagnation, which will mean persistently very low interest rates.
One way to think about why this matters this
is in terms of the relationship between “r”, the real interest rate, and
“g”, the economy’s long-run growth rate. The extent to which public
debt is a problem depends a lot of this relationship. If r is close to
or even below g, debt is hardly a burden at all; if revenues pay for
non-interest outlays, debt as a share of GDP will steadily erode. Only
if r>>g should we worry about debt spirals and all that.
So what CBO has in effect done is mark down
its estimate of g but not of r. And that’s surely not right. As Floyd
says, we should expect lower g to lower r too. In fact, I think there’s
good reason to believe that a fall in g will reduce r more than one for
one, so that slow projected growth actually reduces the urgency of doing
anything about debt. More about that when I have time to get to it.
Important stuff."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/growth-and-interest-rates-i-appear-to-be-wrong/
"
Growth and Interest Rates: I Appear To Be Wrong
In my last post I followed Floyd Norris
in criticizing the CBO, which has marked down its estimates of future
economic growth without marking down its estimates of future interest
rates. I still think that’s a fair criticism. But I also offered a
hypothesis: that interest rates fall more than one-for-one with slower
growth, so that the crucial difference r-g — interest rate minus growth
rate — actually falls, making debt easier, not harder, to handle.
So I’ve taken a quick and dirty look at US
history, and it doesn’t seem to bear my hypothesis out. Here’s actual
r-g — strictly speaking, interest rates minus the rate of growth of GDP
over the previous year — since 1952:
Interest rate minus GDP growth
Postwar US history broadly breaks into two
eras: a fast-growth generation after World War II, and generally slower
growth thereafter. If my hypothesis had been right, r-g should have been
lower in the second era than the first. Well, it looks as if the
opposite was generally true, even if you ignore the spikes around big
recessions.
Now that I think about it, the case of Japan —
although complicated by the zero lower bound — also counts in this
direction: interest rates have been low, but GDP growth even lower.
I still think that a fall in g leads to a
fall in r (as it did in Japan), so that the budgetary implications are
weaker than CBO seems to think. But lower growth does appear to make
debt harder, not easier, to carry."
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World
Crackdown on Baby Trafficking Zeros In on Websites
The police have broken up four online businesses that matched prospective adoptive parents with children needing homes — in reality, baby traffickers, the police said. Some of the sites posed as public welfare interest groups, or disguised the babies as “gold jewelry.”
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U.S.
Chokwe Lumumba, 66, Dies; Activist Who Became Mayor in Mississippi
Mr. Lumumba, a civil rights lawyer who once called for an independent black-majority country in the American Southeast, handily won a race for mayor of Jackson, Miss., last year.
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World
Altered Letter Fools Afghans and 10 Flee From Prison
Calling the breakout “humiliating,” Afghan officials said someone had altered an official document that let at least 10 prisoners walk out the front gate of a prison in Kandahar in broad daylight.
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Fashion & Style
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