High five for Crooked Timber

 What we seeing now, is not a shift in the Overton window, but a challenge to this whole approach to determining what views should be taken seriously, a challenge that started with the appropriation by the left of the “reality-based” label pinned on us in Karl Rove’s famous interview with Ron Suskind, and has continued (though very imperfectly) with the rise of fact-checkers. The new approach is based on the shocking idea that objective truth, rather than political acceptability, should be the criterion against which factual claims are tested.

If this view is right, then the most important single development was probably Nate Silver’s successful prediction of the 2012 election. Silver was up against both the pseudo-science of the Republican “unskewers” and the faith of centrist pundits (historically exemplified by Broder) that their deep connection with the American psyche was worth more than any number of least-squares regressions. Given the centrality of horse-race journalism to the pundit class, their defeat by relatively straightforward statistical analysis of opinion polls was a huge blow.

Read more here.

Nice video explanation of Debt Ceiling

David Wessel over at the Wall Street Journal (see here) has a nice 3 minute video on the Debt Ceiling.

Nice graph from Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (see here) is experimenting with graphical ways to display information about the economy as it recovers from the Great Recession.  The following "spider graph" (in my opinion) does a nice job conveying the essential data.

They comment on the graph as follows:

The chart tells a familiar, but not too happy, story. Only one of the variables in the collection of employer behavior, employee and employer confidence, and labor resource utilization categories has recovered even half the gap from its prerecession benchmark. The labor resource utilization variables look particularly bad, with one variable—marginally attached workers—actually getting worse over the recovery as a whole. On the brighter side, our leading-indicator variables are looking relatively strong, perhaps portending improvement ahead.

James Fallows and the debt-ceiling fiasco

Regarding the debt-ceiling issue, James Fallows (see here) points to what should be obvious (and, the fact that it isn't says all we need to know about journalism and politics today):

1. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize one single penny in additional public spending.
2. For Congress to "decide whether" to raise the debt ceiling, for programs and tax rates it has already voted into law, makes exactly as much sense as it would for a family to "decide whether" to pay a credit-card bill for goods it has already bought.

Back to basics

The Economist (see here) reminds us that the "often recommended" approach to investing is so recommended for good reasons.

The Economist says:

The S&P 500 has now outperformed its hedge-fund rival for ten straight years, with the exception of 2008 when both fell sharply. A simple-minded investment portfolio—60% of it in shares and the rest in sovereign bonds—has delivered returns of more than 90% over the past decade, compared with a meagre 17% after fees for hedge funds (see chart).

Health care spending in 2010

From a Deloitte report (see here) we get some data on health care spending (by age) in 2010.  The report finds:

In 2010, total U.S. health-related expenditures were an estimated $3.2 trillion or 23.9 percent higher than reported in the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). This translates to $10,392 per person.

December jobs report is in

The December jobs report is in and, well, the economy is still rather weak.

Ben Casselman at the Wall Street Journal (see here) summarizes:

The monthly jobs figures, which have substantial margins of error and are often subject to big revisions, are famously volatile. But lately the numbers have shown remarkable consistency. December was the sixth consecutive month of payroll gains between 100,000 and 200,000. December’s one-month addition of 155,000 jobs was close to the three-month average (151,000 jobs), the six-month average (160,000 jobs) and the 12-month average (153,000 jobs). A pace of around 150,000 jobs a month hardly represents robust growth, but it’s been enough to drive a relatively steady decline in the unemployment rate.