The Weekly Sift

It’s been one of those weeks: At last count, 14 people were dead and dozens still missing in the Texas fertilizer explosion, and that event could barely stay on the front page with all the Boston coverage.

The Sift isn’t a breaking-news kind of blog, so my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing is to take a step back and wonder what it might mean to the country long-term. The thing that stands out to me is how the narrative hooks of 9-11 got reversed: In 9-11, heroism set the stage for greater tragedy, symbolized by the first responders who charged up the burning tower and died when it collapsed. In Boston, the initial tragedy set the stage for greater heroism.

So I wonder if Boston can be the first step in undoing some of the mistakes we justified by pointing to 9-11. And so the first featured article this week is: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now”.

The second featured article is longer, because the topic is more complicated. In “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters” I try to explain why you should care about an academic dispute between economists: The case for focusing on the national debt rather than unemployment is based on a highly influential paper that is simply a fraud.

That doesn’t leave much space for a weekly summary, but there’s still that Texas thing to deal with. And the Senate siding with the NRA over the American people.

After two weeks off, the Weekly Sift is back. This week’s featured article will focus on the conservative pundits who framed the firing of player-abusing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice as a defeat for “old-fashioned discipline” at the hands of the “liberal media” and “political correctness”.

I too see this as a story about the decline of discipline in America, but I think Sean Hannity is looking at it upside-down: America’s real discipline problem is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. Like Mike Rice, our bankers, billionaires, and CEOs are running wild, and their misbehavior mostly goes unpunished, even when it’s criminal. Rice has become one of the rare examples of the success of discipline in America — a person in authority made to face the consequences of his actions.

We’d fix a lot of what’s wrong in America if we could get back to the “old-fashioned discipline” Stan Lee put in the mouth of Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben in 1962: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And accountability. And a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.

In the weekly summary I’ll review what people have been talking about these last few weeks: what the Supreme Court will do with same-sex marriage, whether this wave of outrage at gun violence will result in any changes, and how seriously we should take the threats coming out of North Korea. Plus, short notes that include what an honest cable company would tell the public.

This week has two featured articles, and they’re both more-or-less done, so they should come out fairly soon. The first, “Who Do Representatives Represent?” looks at a fascinating discovery by political scientists: liberal and conservative politicians alike think their districts are more conservative than they really are. Following David Sirota’s lead and bringing in an important research result from 2005, I raise this possibility: Maybe those politicians are accurately estimating the views of the constituents they actually represent — the rich.

The second featured article “What Bubbles Look Like From the Inside” asks how you could tell if you were living in a propaganda bubble. Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has the right test: Are the people you listen to preparing you for what really happens? Or are you constantly adjusting to big surprises — like Obama’s re-election? Now that ten years have passed, let’s take a look back at the Iraq invasion.

None the supposedly “big” stories this week caught my imagination, probably because I never really cared one way or the other about Hugo Chavez. But the week produced its fair share of shorter notes and interesting human-interest stories.

This week’s featured article will be a look at William Baumol’s recent book The Cost Disease, which presents a unique point of view on the country’s long-term fiscal problem: It may not be a problem.

In other words, what if the exponential growth in medical expenses that drives the long-term exponential growth in government spending is just the ordinary course of affairs in an economy with growing productivity? What if medical spending isn’t squeezing out other consumption, but instead our ability to make everything else with less labor is leaving more space in our economy for health care?

Also worth attention this week: The resemblance between Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy might be more than just a trick of the camera angle. Why there’s no White History Month. Fascinating new stuff about dolphin communication. The NRA thinks it has found a wedge issue. And you have no idea just how far out there the discussions on right-wing talk radio are getting.

The John Brennan confirmation hearings have shamed me into recognizing that a lot of the stuff I hated in the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Not that I didn’t know that, and I even wrote about it from time to time, but I had lost my sense of urgency about it.

It’s the same problem Republicans had during the Bush years: Yes, these powers invite abuse, but I trust Obama not to do the worst possible things with them. So I’m against the powers, but I’ve had a hard time maintaining my outrage. During the campaign, no Democrat challenged Obama, and no Republican  — other than Ron Paul, who I don’t trust and can’t accept for a lot of other reasons — recognized these issues at all. So what was the point of bringing it all up?

That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is supposed a government of laws, not of men. Whatever powers we allow Obama to wield will still be there for the next president, and the one after that. Eventually something really bad is going to happen. So the featured article this week will be “Secret Law II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it”. It still needs work, so it may not appear until almost noon.

The weekly summary will be worth looking at just for the opening quotes. There’s also a great snow photo from Nemo, a few more links on guns, an infectious British bar song that both Occupiers and Tea Partiers should be able to dance to, one more reason not to trust Ron Paul, Bill Maher’s hilarious reprisal in an argument Donald Trump really should have left alone, great responses to that Super Bowl ad about farmers, and more.