AZspot

You might think this sounds crazy — a bunch of unelected bankers get to decide how many people have jobs? — and, in fact, it is crazy. But I’m not making it up. Ask a macroeconomist, like Paul Krugman, and this is exactly what he’ll tell you. And if you look in the Federal Reserve Act or on the Fed’s website, you’ll find their mission is to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” These multiple goals are relatively recent; before 1978, the goal was simply “maximum employment, production, and purchasing power. Aaron Swartz ☀

Today’s iPad introduction has to be about the most depressing Apple product launch I’ve ever watched. As has been noted, Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field only works when he believes in what he’s selling and he didn’t seem to really believe in this. The audience must have further added to the disappointment, expecting a revolutionary product and only getting an oversized iPhone (iPod touch, actually). That’s not to say the iPad won’t sell, or that I don’t want one. The scariest thing is that I think it probably will. It’s clear that Apple plans for the iPhone OS to be the future of its product line. And that’s scary because the iPhone OS is designed for Apple’s total control. Aaron Swartz (via dshusta) ☀

Google gets a lot of criticism (often deserved), but it’s worth taking a moment to think of all the things they haven’t done. If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable. Hearing things from the sociopaths’ perspective, it’s easy to get fooled. “Yeah!” you think. “Why should these Google guys get to control everything?” But for average people, this shift has been great: much more stuff is available, faster and freer than ever before, and the people making all the money off of it are actually decent human beings who feel some responsibility for the planet they inhabit. Sure, I don’t agree with them on everything and there’s a lot more they can do, but let’s not lose sight of the basic point: at least they’re not sociopaths. Aaron Swartz ☀

So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs. But in the 1980s, the rich staged a counterattack. They didn’t like watching inequality — and their wealth — melt away. There was a resurgence in classical economics, Keynes was declared to have been debunked, and interest rates were raised drastically, throwing millions out of work. The economy tanked, inequality soared, and things have never been the same since. For a while people talked about levels of inequality that hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. Then they talked about a recession the size of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s. Once again, Keynes provides us with the instructions on how to get out of this mess. The question is whether we’ll follow them. Aaron Swartz ☀

Twitter probably isn’t going to make THE_REAL_SHAQ governor, but I don’t think it’s crazy to worry about it having similar effects. Luckily, it also provides the tools for undoing these relationships. For the housewives stuck at home with the TV, Oprah is the only option. But on Twitter, at the same time you sign up to hear from Oprah, you can also follow — and cement your relationship with — more real friends. And it’s a good thing too, because with all these fake friends running around, we’re going to need all the real ones we can get. Aaron Swartz ☀

It’s often said that visiting a developing country is like traveling back in time — the conditions seem little changed from those of medieval Europe. But how did medieval Europe stop being medieval Europe? The answer is through protectionism: Britain became the reigning world power by being one of the most protectionist countries on earth, expending enormous amounts of government money to promote local industries. Eventually these industries grew strong enough to compete on the world stage and it withdrew the barriers. The United States eventually surpassed it with more of the same — many long years of tariffs and industrial intervention (to this day the US government spends an enormous amount of money on R&D). Western Europe, the so-called “Asian tigers” — all the major developed countries of our era got there by following these principles. But they don’t want others to follow in their footsteps. Instead of letting developing countries grow and compete in their own right, they’d prefer to use them as a source of cheap labor and raw materials. So enormous effort has been expended on building international institutions to prevent their economic growth. The World Bank and the IMF issue loans to countries, but only on the condition they dismantle all forms of protectionism. The WTO requires countries to agree to principles of “free trade”. Academic “experts” come up with reasons why protectionism really hurts everyone and rewrite the history of economic growth. Aaron Swartz ☀

A ticker at the bottom of the TV news screen gives people up-to-the-minute information about how well the stock market is doing. Nobody tells us how many people are dying right now (107 people every minute, 5 of them in the US). When a major stock drops, we hear which and how much and why and how it fits into the bigger market picture. Nobody does the same for deaths, either individual or in outbreaks. Nobody’s provided an overall look at why people are dying and how all our attempts to make the world a better place — from economic growth to clean water — are helping. Somebody should start. Aaron Swartz ☀

Poor people die because they can’t get food, because they can’t get shelter, because they can’t get health care, because they can’t get homes in places that aren’t polluted, because they can’t get food without toxins, because they can’t get time off to supervise their kids, because they can’t spend money on safety, because they can’t spend money on education, because they can’t get a vacation from the stress that’s literally eating away at their brain. We don’t even know all the reasons poor people die. But we do know that they do. It’s not polite to talk about that. We talk about the poverty rate or the poverty level or the poverty gap, not kids catching on fire and adults wasting away. We talk about economic development and markets and education, not the millions who die each year coughing blood as tuberculosis takes over their body. (They don’t die from tuberculosis. They die because they can’t afford the vaccine.) Aaron Swartz ☀

The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government. If you visit a site like GovTrack, which publishes information on what Congresspeople are up to, you find that all of Congress’s votes are on inane items like declaring holidays and naming post offices. The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure. So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what’s really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a “success”: an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before. Aaron Swartz ☀

Keynes’ genius came in seeing that the Depression wasn’t a moral problem. We’re not being punished for our exuberance or our stinginess, just as the folks on Capitol Hill weren’t at fault for not wanting to go out. In both cases, the problem wasn’t legislative, but merely technical: there just wasn’t enough money to go around. And the technical problem has a technical solution: print more money. The moralists insist it’s irresponsible for us to just print more money. After all, they say, debt got us into this mess; is more debt really going to get us out? This is what they told FDR, causing him to hit the break on a recovery that was pulling us out of the Great Depression. This is what they told Japan, ending their recovery and plunging the country into a “lost decade” of unemployment. It’s not irresponsible to spend money; it’s irresponsible not to. Factories are lying idle, people are sitting at home unemployed, and our economy is slowing. We can spend money to make use of it all, or we can just continue downward spiral. The choice is ours. Aaron Swartz ☀

If you’re serious about lasting change, hiring moderates is the wrong way to go. It doesn’t attract Republicans; it just sends the message Democrats aren’t serious. The electorate likes success; if success comes from Democrats, then they’ll like Democrats. A progressive cabinet can move the ball forward by having their agencies implement countless small reforms while using their status as public figures to build support for bigger ones. All of which will further cement the Democrats’ reputation as the party of progress. The country isn’t left-wing because it likes people with blue logos and D’s next to their names; it’s left-wing because it wants shared prosperity and security. If Democrats don’t deliver, they’ll turn to someone else. Aaron Swartz ☀

In 1787, when America’s framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right. And yet, on the supposedly Wild West frontier of the Internet, publishing anonymously is not so easy. Hosting providers require a name and credit card, which they have to hand over to the FBi at the drop of a National Security Letter. Free hosting sites zealously obey takedown requests and require publishers to reveal their identity if they want their stuff put back up (a tactic Scientologists have used). Aaron Swartz ☀

McCain’s plans have been the most nutzoid right-wing proposals: end employer-paid health care, permanent bases in Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, and head-in-the-sand about energy. They’re big juicy targets. But so far, Obama has been incompetent about going after them. Whenever his ads begin talking about issues, they suddenly switch into policy-wonk mode and begin using so many long words that even I don’t understand what he’s going on about. And when they criticize John McCain they just seem like they’re making stuff up. To win, Obama’s ads will have to make the issues sexy — he’ll have to find a way to make talking about policy entertaining. Crazy as that sounds, it isn’t impossible. There’s real substance to these policy disagreements — they’re genuinely interesting. John McCain, for example, thinks the big problem with health care in America is that people have too much of it. Employers buy health care in bulk for all their workers, whether they need it or not. Instead, he thinks each American should pay for health care on their own. That’s crazy, but it’s substantive crazy. Aaron Swartz ☀

The fact is, if governments really want to promote startups and the economic innovation they bring, they shouldn’t listen to the standard refrain of cut taxes and deregulate. They need to start rebuilding the social safety net, so that their citizens know that if they go out on a limb and try something risky, someone will be there to catch them if things don’t work out. Aaron Swartz ☀