I have nothing I want to get into alone.
Bill Moyers did global warming / climate change. An effective presentation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyfford_Still
Show on WNET this evening. wow real power.
Watched a DVD of Winter's Bone.
Wandered the net. nothing of note.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/opinion/krugman-the-big-fail.html?hp
"It’s that time again: the annual meeting of the American Economic
Association and affiliates, a sort of medieval fair that serves as a
marketplace for bodies (newly minted Ph.D.’s in search of jobs), books
and ideas. And this year, as in past meetings, there is one theme
dominating discussion: the ongoing economic crisis.
This isn’t how things were supposed to be. If you had polled the
economists attending this meeting three years ago, most of them would
surely have predicted that by now we’d be talking about how the great
slump ended, not why it still continues.
So what went wrong? The answer, mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas.
It’s tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove
that economists don’t have the answers. But the truth is actually worse:
in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political
leaders — and all too many economists — chose to forget or ignore what
they should have known.
The story, at this point, is fairly straightforward. The financial
crisis led, through several channels, to a sharp fall in private
spending: residential investment plunged as the housing bubble burst;
consumers began saving more as the illusory wealth created by the bubble
vanished, while the mortgage debt remained. And this fall in private
spending led, inevitably, to a global recession.
For an economy is not like a household. A family can decide to spend
less and try to earn more. But in the economy as a whole, spending and
earning go together: my spending is your income; your spending is my
income. If everyone tries to slash spending at the same time, incomes
will fall — and unemployment will soar.
So what can be done? A smaller financial shock, like the dot-com bust at
the end of the 1990s, can be met by cutting interest rates. But the
crisis of 2008 was far bigger, and even cutting rates all the way to
zero wasn’t nearly enough.
At that point governments needed to step in, spending to support their
economies while the private sector regained its balance. And to some
extent that did happen: revenue dropped sharply in the slump, but
spending actually rose as programs like unemployment insurance expanded
and temporary economic stimulus went into effect. Budget deficits rose,
but this was actually a good thing, probably the most important reason
we didn’t have a full replay of the Great Depression.
But it all went wrong in 2010. The crisis in Greece was taken, wrongly,
as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits
right away. Austerity became the order of the day, and supposed experts
who should have known better cheered the process on, while the warnings
of some (but not enough) economists
that austerity would derail recovery were ignored. For example, the
president of the European Central Bank confidently asserted that “the
idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”
Well, someone was incorrect, all right.
Of the papers presented at this meeting, probably the biggest flash came
from one by Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh of the International
Monetary Fund. Formally, the paper represents the views only of the
authors; but Mr. Blanchard, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, isn’t an
ordinary researcher, and the paper has been widely taken as a sign that
the fund has had a major rethinking of economic policy.
For what the paper concludes is not just that austerity has a depressing
effect on weak economies, but that the adverse effect is much stronger
than previously believed. The premature turn to austerity, it turns out,
was a terrible mistake.
I’ve seen some reporting describing the paper as an admission from the
I.M.F. that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. That misses the point; the
fund was actually less enthusiastic about austerity than other major
players. To the extent that it says it was wrong, it’s also saying that
everyone else (except those skeptical economists) was even more wrong.
And it deserves credit for being willing to rethink its position in the
light of evidence.
The really bad news is how few other players are doing the same.
European leaders, having created Depression-level suffering in debtor
countries without restoring financial confidence, still insist that the
answer is even more pain. The current British government, which killed a
promising recovery by turning to austerity, completely refuses to
consider the possibility that it made a mistake.
And here in America, Republicans insist that they’ll use a confrontation
over the debt ceiling — a deeply illegitimate action in itself — to
demand spending cuts that would drive us back into recession.
The truth is that we’ve just experienced a colossal failure of economic
policy — and far too many of those responsible for that failure both
retain power and refuse to learn from experience."
.
