What I’m Reading, Sunday, October 28, 2012

Politics

• The Secret of Our Non-Success – NYTimes.com
  

  The U.S. economy finally seems to be recovering in earnest, with housing on the rebound and job creation outpacing growth in the working-age population. But the news is good, not great — it will still take years to restore full employment — and it has been a very long time coming. Why has the slump been so protracted?

  The answer — backed by overwhelming evidence — is that this is what normally happens after a severe financial crisis. But Mitt Romney’s economic team rejects that evidence. And this denialism bodes ill for policy if Mr. Romney wins next month.

  About the evidence: The most famous study is by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who looked at past financial crises and found that such crises are typically followed by years of high unemployment and weak growth. Later work by economists at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere confirmed this analysis: crises that followed a sharp run-up in private-sector debt, from the U.S. Panic of 1893 to the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s, cast long shadows over the economy’s future. There was no reason to believe that this time would be different. (read the complete article…)

• Jane Mayer writes a definitve piece on the Fraud of Voter Fraud—Who Created the Voter-Fraud Myth? : The New Yorker and
  • The Fraud of Voter Fraud – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
  • The man behind the voter fraud myth – Salon.com 
  • and The Nation jumps the shark publishing The New Yorker’s Voting Myths – Hans A. von Spakovsky – National Review Online written by none other than Hans A. von Spakovsky
• Denial of Economics – NYTimes.com
• Romney Stung by Fox News Lie in Debate Win for Obama? – YouTube
• Via Little Kitten – Whedon On Romney (And New Token Skeptic Podcast Out!) | Token Skeptic

Economics and the Economy