Food for Thought: March 19 2013

Webster Tarpley: New Pope Francis I Supports the Wall Street Sales Tax, Opposes Austerity, Globalization, and the International Monetary Fund

I don't see this getting mentioned a lot. In light of how this man's election defied prior expectations it looks like his ascent carries a special political significance.

ps. I can't fully vouch for Tarpley's accuracy and reliability in these matters.

Why Social Mobility In The United States Is A Total Myth

Whenever any statement is made about economic mobility, the yardstick that is used is always the extent to which people are able to move between the quintiles within one society. I'd like to instead see a measure of absolute income mobility. It is conceivable that a society would lose relative income mobility in the conventional statistical sense BY having certain of its members get richer, something that in isolation should rarely be a reason for complaints by anyone. A measure of absolute income mobility would avoid such pitfalls and not implicitly praise policies that distribute misery evenly among a society's members.

I'm personally inclined to think that relative mobility is almost a complete red-herring. It's a psychological abstraction of which the relevance can only be justified by the legitimization of envy. Absolute mobility tells you what a person's real prospects for living standards improvement are.

Also, things like these make me think that for anyone who isn't afraid of a little technical work, the mobility prospects in the USA are quite enviable:
DevBootCamp
App Academy

Noah Smith: John Taylor's Austerity Model

A good comprehensive post detailing how Taylor's model is a work of obfuscationary political hackery. If you're in a hurry, skip the whole post, stick to this paragraph and laugh:

5. There is no Zero Lower Bound.Note that in the monetary policy rule written above, there is nothing that says that interest rates can't go negative. In other words, Taylor assumes what most New Keynesian models assume, which is that there is no Zero Lower Bound (or that we're always far from it). Any of you who are familiar with the New Keynesian DSGE literature will recognize that Taylor's result is a very common result in this literature: Away from the ZLB, fiscal policy is not very effective. The "New Old Keynesians" such as Paul Krugman and Gauti Eggertsson, who advocate fiscal stimulus, explicitly make reference to the ZLB as the reason stimulus works. Taylor just ignores that idea in this paper.

Top REPUBLICAN Leaders Say Iraq War Was Really about Oil

Wars are rarely fought for one reason only. If the war wasn't fought "for" oil it would sure still have been one hell of a nice convenience. Whether oil was a (or the) main reason or more of a side-concern is really a matter of cosmetics.