Kevin Drum

Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

| Sun Jul. 13, 2014 11:16 AM EDT

Via James Hamilton, the Atlanta Fed is now making its GDP forecasts publicly available. As you can see, they've gotten steadily more pessimistic since April and are now predicting a growth rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter.

Now, there are two way to look at this. The glass-half-full view is: Whew! That huge GDP drop in Q1 really was a bit of a blip, not an omen of a coming recession. The economy isn't setting records or anything, but it's back on track.

The glass-half-empty view is: Yikes! If the dismal Q1 number had really been a blip, perhaps caused by bad weather, we'd expect to see makeup growth in Q2. But we're seeing nothing of the sort. We lost a huge chunk of productive capacity in Q1 and apparently we're not getting it back. From a lower starting level, we're just going to continue along the same old sluggish growth path that we've had for the past few years. All told, GDP in the entire first half of 2014 hasn't grown by a dime.

I am, by nature, a glass-half-empty kind of person, so feel free to write off my pessimism about this. Nonetheless, the GHE view sure seems like the right one to me. It's just horrible news if it turns out that during a "recovery" we can experience a massive drop in GDP and then do nothing to make up for it over the next quarter. It's even worse news that the unemployment rate is going down at the same time. I know that last month's jobs report was relatively positive, but in the longer view, how can unemployment decrease while GDP is flat or slightly down? Not by truly decreasing, I think. It happens only because there's a growing number of people who are permanently left behind by the economy and fall out of the official statistics.

But hey. This is just a forecast. Maybe the Atlanta Fed is wrong. We'll find out in a couple of weeks.

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Friday Cat Blogging - 11 July 2014

| Fri Jul. 11, 2014 2:53 PM EDT

For a variety of reasons, fresh catblogging just didn't happen this week. So I'm going to do what everyone else does when they fail to meet an editorial deadline: run some old stuff and pretend it's an extra-special feature. So here you are: rarely seen archival footage from January 14, 2007, Domino's first day at home after we picked her up from the shelter. As you can see, she immediately made her way to a book about a magical cat who refrains from eating its shipmate. This was a good influence, I think.

A Progress Report on "Reform Conservatism"

| Fri Jul. 11, 2014 12:40 PM EDT

Does the new generation of "reform conservatives" represent real change for the Republican Party? In policy terms, not really. They've offered up a few variations on popular conservative themes (reducing taxes via child tax credits instead of cuts in top marginal rates, for example), but for the most part they've just nibbled around the edges. David Frum, however, says this is still a good start:



Fair enough. At the same time, there have always been successful conservatives who were tonally distinct from the tea party. Paul Ryan is the best-known example. He's mild-mannered and speaks in the language of an accountant. He always seems reasonable and willing to engage. He doesn't participate in tea party histrionics. In short, he doesn't say any of the things Frum mentions above.

And yet, Ryan remains a tea party darling, and for good reason: his budget is a radically right-wing enterprise. Perhaps the most genuinely radical, genuinely right-wing enterprise in all of Washington.

So the question for the reform conservatives is: What's next? Are they trying to build credibility with conservatives so they can later nudge them in a new direction? Or are they mostly just trying to put a friendly veneer on an essentially tea partyish agenda? We don't know yet, because so far they haven't been willing to take many risks. And with good reason. As a friend emailed just a few minutes ago, "The reformers are one bad suggestion away from being fully Frumanized out of the party."

I wish the reformers luck. And I don't really blame them for their timidity so far. Still, it's far too early to tell how serious they are. We'll just have to wait and see.

Does Financial Literacy Matter?

| Fri Jul. 11, 2014 11:56 AM EDT

We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it's a good horror story, and one we can't seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they're in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I've long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That's not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn't matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can't say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

Prior Experience Doesn't Matter (Much)

| Fri Jul. 11, 2014 10:53 AM EDT

Tyler Cowen points to yet another story today about how HR departments are using big data to hire and manage employees, and it's fairly interesting throughout. However, my appreciation for the power of this approach was certainly enhanced when I read the following:


This was something I always scratched my head about back when I was a hiring manager. Obviously you want someone with work experience that's related to the job you're trying to fill, but an awful lot of my fellow managers seemed pretty obsessed with finding candidates with almost identical experience. I understood the attraction of hiring someone who seemed like they could be slotted in immediately and hit the ground running, but it still seemed misplaced. Which would you rather hire? Someone fairly good with exactly the right experience, or someone really good who might take a month or two to learn some new things? I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, I suppose valuing experience highly might be a good idea if you really had no faith in your ability to distinguish good from really good. And the truth is that most of us probably don't. So maybe finding perfect fits makes more sense than I gave it credit for. After all, back in the Middle Ages we didn't have access to Xerox's whiz-bang big data.

Boehner's First Lawsuit: Obamacare is the Lucky Winner

| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 8:25 PM EDT



Blah blah blah.







And that might be just what Boehner wants.


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Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.

| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 5:21 PM EDT









Americans Are Surprisingly Stressed Out About News and Politics

| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 2:26 PM EDT




Republicans Love Obamacare!

| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 12:59 PM EDT



Who's Afraid of an Itsy Bitsy Bit of Inflation, Anyway?

| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 12:19 PM EDT





Brad DeLong isn't buying it:









