The problems of HFT, Joe Stiglitz edition

April 15, 2014 @ 8:04 pm
By Felix Salmon

Never mind Michael Lewis. The most interesting and provocative thing to be written of late about
financial innovation in general, and high-frequency trading in particular, comes from Joe Stiglitz. The
Nobel prize-winning economist delivered a wonderful and fascinating speech [1] at the Atlanta Fed’s
2014 Financial Markets Conference today; here’s a shorter version of what Stiglitz is saying.

Oklahoma students know less about evolution after Biology I than they did before taking it

By Scott Kaufman
Friday, April 18, 2014 11:28 EDT

A study published in the latest edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach demonstrated “the average student…completed the Biology I course with increased confidence in their biological evolution knowledge yet with a greater number of biological evolution misconceptions and, therefore, less competency in the subject.”

The study, conducted by Tony Yates and Edmund Marek, tested biology teachers and students in 32 Oklahoma public high schools via a survey the pair called “the Biological Evolution Literacy Survey.” The survey was administered to the teachers first, to get a benchmark of their grasp of evolutionary theory. The survey was then administered twice to the students — once before they took the required Biology I course, and once after they had completed it.

Paul Krugman: Salvation Gets Cheap

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which pools the efforts of scientists around the globe, has begun releasing draft chapters from its latest assessment, and, for the most part, the reading is as grim as you might expect. We are still on the road to catastrophe without major policy changes.

But there is one piece of the assessment that is surprisingly, if conditionally, upbeat: Its take on the economics of mitigation. Even as the report calls for drastic action to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, it asserts that the economic impact of such drastic action would be surprisingly small. In fact, even under the most ambitious goals the assessment considers, the estimated reduction in economic growth would basically amount to a rounding error, around 0.06 percent per year.

Beware of backroom deals in the name of 'science'

The term 'sound science' has become Orwellian double-speak for various forms of pro-business spin, says Colin Macilwain.

16 April 2014

Scientific and environmental groups enjoyed a small victory in Washington DC earlier this year, when an insidious little item called the sound-science bill was removed from farm legislation signed into law by US President Barack Obama on 7 February.

The defeat of the bill was but a minor skirmish, however, in a broader, global war that rumbles on over how science should be used in regulating everything from smoking to pollution.

Tom Frank interviews Barbara Ehrenreich: “You’re the anti-Ayn Rand”

Belief, Richard Dawkins, Jesus and the minimum wage, "The Fountainhead" and more, in our exclusive conversation

Thomas Frank

I’ve been a devoted fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s writing ever since I discovered Fear of Falling, her book about middle-class dreams, during a summer vacation when I was in graduate school. Reading it on a beach somewhere, I felt a light went on in my head; she was describing the culture of our times in a way that was both persuasive and accessible, and yet that I had come across nowhere else, not even in academia. For her 2001 book, the massive best-seller Nickel and Dimed, she took a series of service jobs incognito and told the world what the experience was like. Bright-Sided, which she published in 2009, saw her turn her painstaking scrutiny on the quasi-religious industry of positive thinking.

Somewhere along the line, I became Barbara’s friend, and it occurred to me that the factor that makes each of her books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact.

Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner
April 15, 2014

Want to understand our market-crazed era? Rediscover the 20th century’s most prophetic critic of capitalism.

In November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff. It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine. Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Polanyi, with no academic base, was already a blend of journalist and public intellectual, a major critic of the Austrian School of free-market economics and its cultish leaders, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi and Hayek would cross swords for four decades—Hayek becoming more influential as an icon of the free-market right but history increasingly vindicating Polanyi.

Conventional farmers drop their plows in favor of conservation

By Nathanael Johnson

The Michael and Adam Crowell duo works this way: Michael handles the crops, and Adam handles the dairy cows; Michael is the colorful wisecracker, and Adam is the straight man; Michael casts about for a word when his tongue outpaces his memory, and Adam fills it in; Michael is the father, and Adam is the son.

I visited their dairy farm near Turlock, in California’s Central Valley, to get a look at the growing trend of conventional farmers adopting ecologically friendly techniques. In the Midwest, where farmers grow a small number of grain crops, this transformation has led to a new normal, with the majority of farmland under some form of conservation management.

Food shortages could be most critical world issue by mid-century

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The world is less than 40 years away from a food shortage that will have serious implications for people and governments, according to a top scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"For the first time in human history, food production will be limited on a global scale by the availability of land, water and energy," said Dr. Fred Davies, senior science advisor for the agency's bureau of food security. "Food issues could become as politically destabilizing by 2050 as energy issues are today."

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It's Not a Democracy

By Tom McKay April 16, 2014

The news: A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn't a democracy any more. And they've found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.

Here's why your student loans are about to get more expensive

Updated by Libby Nelson on April 15, 2014, 8:30 a.m. ET

Bad news for college students: new federal student loans are getting more expensive.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday that undergraduate student loans issued this fall will have an interest rate of 5.04 percent, up from 3.86 percent for 2013-14.

The Middle Class Is Not ''Normal''

Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:57
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

In Denial

Conservatives Line Up To Oppose Minimum Wage Increase

Yesterday, during a public forum hosted by Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL), a fast food worker named Shaneeka Rainer stood up to ask the Congressman to support increasing the minimum wage. Rainer has worked an entire decade receiving only one raise: when Congress increased the minimum wage in 2007.

How LBJ Saved the Civil Rights Act

Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.

Michael O'Donnell, Mar 19 2014, 9:06 PM ET

In the winter of 1963, as the Civil Rights Act worked its way through Congress, Justice William Brennan decided to play for time. The Supreme Court had recently heard arguments in the appeal of 12 African American protesters arrested at a segregated Baltimore restaurant. The justices had caucused, and a conservative majority had voted to decide Bell v. Maryland by reiterating that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not apply to private businesses like restaurants and lunch counters—only to “state actors.” The Court had used this doctrine to limit the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment since 1883. Brennan—the Warren Court’s liberal deal maker and master strategist—knew that such a decision could destroy the civil-rights bill’s chances in Congress. After all, the bill’s key provision outlawed segregation in public accommodations. Taxing his opponents’ patience, he sought a delay in order to request the government’s views on the case. He all but winked and told the solicitor general not to hurry.

And then the conservatives on the Court lost their fifth vote. Justice Tom Clark changed his mind and circulated a draft opinion granting the appeal. In a revolutionary constitutional change, lunch counters and restaurants would suddenly be liable if they violated the equal-protection clause. But Brennan foresaw a new difficulty. By now it was June 1964, and a coalition of northern Democratic and Republican senators looked set to break a southern filibuster and pass a strong civil-rights bill. Would a favorable Supreme Court ruling actually give wavering senators an excuse to vote no? They might say there was no need for legislation because the Court had already solved the problem. So Brennan, ever nimble, engineered a tactical retreat by assembling a majority that avoided the merits of the case altogether. It was an alley-oop to the political branches. They grabbed the ball and dunked it. Ten days after the Court’s decision, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the president signed it into law.

In the popular imagination, the Supreme Court is the governmental hero of the civil-rights era. The period conjures images of strong white pillars, Earl Warren’s horn-rims, and the almost holy words Brown v. Board of Education. But in Bell, the Court vindicated civil rights by stepping aside. As Bruce Ackerman observes in The Civil Rights Revolution, Brennan realized that a law passed by democratically elected officials would bear greater legitimacy in the South than a Supreme Court decision. He also doubtless anticipated that the act would be challenged in court, and that he would eventually have his say. The moment demonstrated not merely cooperation among the three branches of government, but a confluence of personalities: Brennan slowing down the Court, President Johnson leaning on Congress to hurry up, and the grandstanders and speechmakers of the Senate making their deals, Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey foremost among them. In this age of obstruction and delay, it is heartening to recall that when the government decides to act, it can be a mighty force.

Dean Baker: The Hedge Fund Managers Tax Break: Because Wall Streeters Want Your Money

The coming of tax day provides a great opportunity for everyone to focus on their favorite tax break, and there are many from which to choose. However for all the sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability, none can beat the hedge fund managers' tax break. This is the way the rich tell the rest of us, because they are rich and powerful, the law doesn't apply to them.

The hedge fund managers' tax break, which is also known as the carried interest tax deduction, is different from other tax breaks in that it has no economic rationale. With most other tax breaks there is at least an argument as to how it serves some socially useful purpose. That is not the case with the hedge fund managers' tax break. This is simply a case where the rich don't feel like paying taxes and are saying to the rest of us, "what are you going to do about it?"

Planned Obsolescence Disguised as Innovation, Oligopoly Disguised as a Free Market, and the Enrichment of Oligarchs

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We are delighted to feature this post from Roy Poses, who with his colleagues at Health Care Renewal, have been providing consistently high quality analysis of the often dubious practices and economics of the health care system.

By Roy Poses, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University, and the President of FIRM – the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine. Cross posted from the Health Care Renewal website

The New York Times published another article in its series on the high cost of US health care. This one, focused on the care of type 1 diabetes mellitus and other chronic diseases, shines some light on the business management practices that now determine how our health care system functions, or not, and implies who benefits the most from them.

Paul Krugman: The Lack of Courage Among Policymakers 

The Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis recently asked on his blog: "Why does the economic policy pursued or proposed by the left in Europe often seem so pathetic?"

He was citing the government of François Hollande in France as the prime example, but also the limpness of the Labour Party in Britain. And he suggested that the answer is a matter of resources and organization: "Seeking out good advice (and distinguishing it from bad advice) takes either money or time," Mr. Wren-Lewis wrote. "An established government finds this much easier than an opposition or a new government."

Dave Dayen: Wall Street’s wily front group: Inside story of a rental scheme’s secret facelift

How profit-hungry Wall Street landlords are secretly trying to turn themselves into a modest, lovable trade group

The Wall Street rental scheme, the mass purchase of 200,000 single-family homes by hedge funds and private equity firms to convert to rental properties, has run into some trouble. Complaints from renters have proliferated, alleging that repairs go unaddressed, leases violate local tenant ordinances and unnecessary evictions often occur due to negligence. The plan to sell bonds backed by revenue from the rental properties has also stumbled. Collected rents on the initial rental-backed security from private equity giant Blackstone fell 7.6 percent from October 2013 to January 2014, suggesting that the homes aren’t being occupied at a level necessary to make the deal work. The Standard and Poor’s rating agency declined to offer a triple-A rating for the securities, and with fewer foreclosed properties to buy and higher home prices, many investors have cooled on the idea.

CBO Lowers Obamacare's Price Tag By $104 Billion Over 10 Years

Dylan Scott – April 14, 2014, 12:41 PM EDT

In its latest projections for Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office has lowered the law's costs over the next 10 years by more than $100 billion.

Most of the change can be linked to lower spending on tax subsidies for coverage purchased on HealthCare.gov and its state counterparts, which can in turn be linked to lower-than-expected premiums.

“We are in great danger”: Ex-banker details how mega-banks destroyed America 

"The power has only been more consolidated," warns Goldman Sachs veteran Nomi Prins in an interview with Salon

Josh Eidelson

“It no longer matters who sits in the White House,” former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins writes in her new book “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power.” “Presidents no longer even try to garner banker support for population-friendly policies, and bankers operate oblivious to the needs of national economies. There is no counterbalance to their power.”

Prins, who also worked for Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan Bank, is now a fellow at the think tank Demos and a member of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Federal Reserve Advisory Council. Salon spoke with Prins about a century of presidential coziness with bankers; Barney Frank’s defense of big banks’ power; and how to “break the alliances” before they “break us.” A condensed version of our conversation follows.

The American Dream Turns Into a Global Nightmare

Commentary: 3 delusions that will backfire on us, self-destruct civilization

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — The American Dream? Now a Global Nightmare? A ticking time bomb, a lethal virus spreading worldwide, could destroy the entire world, backfire, take down America and capitalism? Yes.

But, first, a little history: Five years ago Bill Gates and his Billionaires Club asked that question. But gave up. Here’s why.

Gates’ billionaires essentially asked: What do you think is the single, biggest ticking time bomb that will eventually take down global economies? The absolutely biggest one with a trigger mechanism that can ignite, set off a nuclear chain reaction that will throw a permanent wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, potentially destroying modern civilization as we know it. Yes, that one. The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all other problems in the world irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible ever to solve. Yes, that one. What is the “big one?”

Paul Krugman: Three Expensive Milliseconds

Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base.

Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.

IPCC climate change report: averting catastrophe is eminently affordable

Landmark UN analysis concludes global roll-out of clean energy would shave only a tiny fraction off economic growth

Damian Carrington, Berlin
The Guardian, Sunday 13 April 2014 06.19 EDT

Catastrophic climate change can be averted without sacrificing living standards according to a UN report, which concludes that the transformation required to a world of clean energy is eminently affordable.

“It doesn’t cost the world to save the planet,” said economist Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, who led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) team.

The cheapest and least risky route to dealing with global warming is to abandon all dirty fossil fuels in coming decades, the report found. Gas – including that from the global fracking boom – could be important during the transition, Edenhofer said, but only if it replaced coal burning.

GAO report again finds black lung proposal supported by science

By Chris Hamby | 12:00 pm, April 11, 2014 Updated: 12:05 pm, April 11, 2014

A longstanding federal proposal to lower coal miners’ exposure to the dust that can cause black lung disease is supported by substantial scientific evidence.

That’s the conclusion government auditors reached in 2012, answering demands for a study by members of Congress concerned about the rule. And it’s the conclusion the auditors reached again — after another congressional request for a study — in a report released this week.

The Perils of Private Welfare: Job-Based Benefits and American Inequality

By Colin Gordon - March 27, 2014

American inequality is driven not just by the uneven distribution of wages, but also by the uneven distribution of job-based benefits. More than any other country, the United States relies on private employment and private bargaining to deliver basic social benefits—including health coverage, retirement security, and paid leave. The results—on any basic measure of economic security—have been dismal.

Reliance on private benefits made some sense in a mid-century economy organized around lifetime “family wage” employment in large and stable firms. But even under these circumstances, benefits bypassed many workers. Their coverage was always uncertain (loss of a job meant loss of benefits) and often capricious (consider the health and pension plans that routinely evaporate in corporate restructuring). Good benefits followed good jobs, widening the gap between low-wage workers and everyone else. The expectation of private coverage undercut public programs—which were often structured as ways of supplementing job-based plans or mopping up around their edges. And, across the last generation, the logic of delivering social policy via private employment unraveled with the economy on which it was based.

Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why 

Economist Thomas Piketty's message is bleak: the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy us

Will Hutton
The Observer, Saturday 12 April 2014 15.30 EDT

Suddenly, there is a new economist making waves – and he is not on the right. At the conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact.

Like Friedman, Piketty is a man for the times. For 1970s anxieties about inflation substitute today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society. Piketty is in no doubt, as he indicates in an interview in today's Observer New Review, that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.

Global poverty could be up to a third higher than reported

With over one billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day, the World Bank aims to end 'extreme poverty' by 2030. But new research suggests that global poverty figures could be underestimated by up to a third, and calls for more robust measurement in the future.

The World Bank figures are widely used by the international community and play a significant role in international strategies to reduce poverty. Critics argue that its estimates are flawed because the 'dollar a day' poverty line is too arbitrary, and insufficiently anchored to any specification of basic human needs.

Charles M. Blow: We Should Be in a Rage 

Voter apathy is a civic abdication. There is no other way to describe it.

If more Americans — particularly young people and less-wealthy people — went to the polls, we would have a better functioning government that actually reflected the will of the citizenry.

But, that’s not the way it works. Voting in general skews older and wealthier, and in midterm elections that skew is even more severe.

Charles P. Pierce: George Will Gets Behind The Worst Idea In American Politics 

George Effing Will, conservative public intellectual and extremely bad baseball writer, has nurtured within himself a sweet tooth for a lot of the worst ideas in politics -- many of them so bad that even the Rehnquist court turned up its nose at them. He flirted for a while with the term-limits crack pipe. He tried his hand at climate change denial, until enough people wanted to feed him to a starving polar bear that he backed off. I liken these odd enthusiasms to a old sheepdog gone out to play in the yard with puppies, or to your Uncle Manny's trying to do the Electric Slide after a couple of Harvey Wallbangers at a big family wedding.

Spencer Ackerman: CIA and White House under pressure after Senate torture report leaks

Senate committee found CIA interrogations and detentions to be 'brutal' and urges administration to release report as quickly as possible

A leak of the major findings of a landmark Senate inquiry into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees led, on Friday, to intensified pressure on the White House and the CIA to release the inquiry speedily and with a minimum of redactions.

The classified study, prepared by the Senate select committee on intelligence, concluded that the CIA’s interrogations, secret detentions and outsourced torture sessions were “brutal, and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.”

Gutting of campaign finance laws enhances influence of corporations and wealthy Americans

RINCETON, N.J.—Affluent individuals and business corporations already have vastly more influence on federal government policy than average citizens, according to recently released research by Princeton University and Northwestern University. This research suggests that the Supreme Court's continuing attack on campaign finance laws is further increasing the political clout of business firms and the wealthy.

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse

By any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt. Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity. Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively market-based reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace.

Paul Krugman: Why We're in a New Gilded Age

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95

Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque—defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and wealth deep into the past—back to the early twentieth century for America and Britain, and all the way to the late eighteenth century for France.

The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. Before this revolution, most discussions of economic disparity more or less ignored the very rich. Some economists (not to mention politicians) tried to shout down any mention of inequality at all: “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution,” declared Robert Lucas Jr. of the University of Chicago, the most influential macroeconomist of his generation, in 2004. But even those willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich—on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the comparative good fortune of the top fifth of the population compared with the bottom four fifths, not on the rapidly rising incomes of executives and bankers.

Single mothers don't delay marriage just to boost tax credit, study says

MADISON, Wis. – When the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded in 1993, supporters hoped it would reward poor parents for working while critics feared that it might discourage single mothers from marrying or incentivize women to have more children to boost their tax refund.

A new collaborative study done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University reveals the EITC has helped the working poor but hasn't affected personal choices.

Proof of Wealth's Power Over Policy

Kathleen Geier April 10, 2014

Paul Krugman says we’re living in a “New Gilded Age,” an era of government of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich. Last week’s McCutcheon decision from the Supreme Court, which struck down the aggregate limit an individual can contribute in capped political donations, does not disabuse us of this notion. And now the world of social science brings forth even more proof that the wealthy overwhelmingly control our political institutions.

Writing for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels discusses a forthcoming study in Perspectives in Politics by fellow poli-sci acedemics Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page. Their research provides stunning new evidence of the hegemonic dominance of the rich in our democracy.

Paul Krugman: Health Care Nightmares

When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.

Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare. And the overall gain, including children and those who signed up during the late-March enrollment surge, must be considerably larger.