A Wasted Financial Crisis???

Adam Davidson at the New York Times asks: Did we waste a financial crisis?  (see here).  Davidson says:

Remarkably, five years after the crisis, the health of the financial industry is just as hard to determine. A major bank or financial institution could meet every single regulatory requirement yet still be at risk of collapse, and few of us would even know it.

So, while Republicans block every attempt at financial reform and Democrats (those who aren't secretly glad the Republicans are blocking reform) go on the talk shows and decry how "hard" they are trying, the rest of us are stuck with a huge bill for stabilizing the financial sector with the added insult that it most certainly can happen again.

Once again: Why we call it "the Great Recession"

CalculatedRisk updates it's (very informative) graph (see here for more ):

Read Robert Putnam's essay in the New York Times

Robert Putnam's essay "Crumbling American Dreams" is surely worth a read (see here).  Below is a quote from the concluding paragraph:

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.”

Some salary data from The Chronicle of Higher Education

The data below is 2013 data from The Chronicle of Higher Education (see here).

The power of "tax expenditures"

Timothy Taylor over at the Conversable Economist (see here) has a very informative post on "tax expenditures" ("a provision of the tax code that looks like government spending: that is, it takes tax money that the government would otherwise have collected and directs it toward some social priority" as he describes it).  He shows the following table that makes for interesting reading.

Waiting for healthcare

One of the arguments often made against serious healthcare reform is something like "all those other countries offer more access to care and their costs are lower because they make everyone wait so long."  The graph below from Health Affairs, December 2010, might (??) get some folks to rethink that argument.

What is Sheryl Sandberg's point?

I have been watching with some curiosity the discussion surrounding Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In unfold in the media.  I watched her last night on 60 Minutes.  I wasn't much moved or particularly informed by her interview.  Here is a woman that has made it "to the top" through the not so surprising path of famous connections and Ivy League education (pretty much like lots of men).  So I can't understand how she can be positioned to speak to aspiring middle class women.  It would be high farce if she wasn't taken so seriously.  Here is Judith Shulevitz's take over at The New Republic (see here) regarding why Lean In is no blueprint for contemporary women:

The reason The Feminine Mystique caught on so fast and to such revolutionary effect was that the American housewife saw herself in it. Sandberg and most of the other women discussed in Lean In, on the other hand, are anything but average. They camp in the dormitories of Harvard, occupy offices at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, and wind up in Palo Alto and the Upper East Side. They inhabit a tiny transnational bubble floating out of reach of the middle class, which itself is slowly vanishing.

And the reach of the middle class is surely "slowly vanishing."  I don't see how Sheryl Sandberg's pontificating makes any difference on this issue.

In my college classes are married and single women who try (sometimes desperately) to fit a college education into their lives while struggling to find affordable daycare and to balance their commitments at home (and they don't have nannies, personal shoppers, etc.).  For the life of me, I can't understand how Sandberg speaks to them.