What to Read

The Washingon Post collects some book recommendations:

We asked a number of smart people -- inside and outside economics and finance -- to scan their bookshelves for answers. Though there is no single book that can sum up and explain the current conditions, we asked each of our contributors for one book they would recommend to their neighbor, their daughter, their aunt, their barber, priest, rabbi or best friend to help them gain some perspective on these volatile times.

Click through to the article to see the answers.

The Palins: Fans of retirement saving

A friend writes:

Thought this might interest you, since you once blogged about Obama's failure to take advantage of tax-advantaged savings. Here is Governor Palin's financial disclosure form. Turns out her husband is a rather astute saver -- taking advantage of both his company's (BP) 401(k) plan and setting up (pre-1996) a SAR-SEP IRA for his commercial fishing business. He's also nicely diversified in various funds, both domestic and international.

McCain veep pick is not a member...

...of the Pigou Club:

Palin just signed a bill to suspend Alaska’s gasoline tax until Aug. 31, 2009, actually implementing in her state what John McCain advocated this year on the national scene....The bill, signed Aug. 25, also suspends taxes on marine fuel and aviation fuel for a year.

Source.

Sachs on the Digital Divide

Jeff Sachs reports some good news:

The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces. Mobile phone technology is so powerful, and costs so little per unit of data transmission, that it has proved possible to sell mobile phone access to the poor. There are now more than 3.3 billion subscribers in the world, roughly one for every two people on the planet....

In Africa, which contains the world’s poorest countries, the market is soaring, with more than 280 million subscribers. Mobile phones are now ubiquitous in villages as well as cities. If an individual does not have a cell phone, they almost surely know someone who does. Probably a significant majority of Africans have at least emergency access to a cell phone, either their own, a neighbor’s, or one at a commercial kiosk.

The Political Divide

Peggy Noonan, one of my favorite political commentators, does a nice job of summarizing a key difference between the political parties:

Democrats in the end speak most of, and seem to hold the most sympathy for, the beset-upon single mother without medical coverage for her children, and the soldier back from the war who needs more help with post-traumatic stress disorder. They express the most sympathy for the needy, the yearning, the marginalized and unwell. For those, in short, who need more help from the government, meaning from the government's treasury, meaning the money got from taxpayers.

Who happen, also, to be a generally beset-upon group.

Democrats show little expressed sympathy for those who work to make the money the government taxes to help the beset-upon mother and the soldier and the kids. They express little sympathy for the middle-aged woman who owns a small dry cleaner and employs six people and is, actually, day to day, stressed and depressed from the burden of state, local and federal taxes, and regulations, and lawsuits, and meetings with the accountant, and complaints as to insufficient or incorrect efforts to meet guidelines regarding various employee/employer rules and regulations. At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don't dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.

Neither party ever gets it quite right, the balance between the taxed and the needy, the suffering of one sort and the suffering of another. You might say that in this both parties are equally cold and equally warm, only to two different classes of citizens.

Ec 10 is now in Gen Ed

For those few blog readers who have followed the saga of how economics fits within the new General Education requirements at Harvard, here is the latest news:

The Committee reached a decision on Social Analysis 10: Principles of Economics. When both semesters of this course are taken for a letter grade, it will meet the General Education requirement for Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning or United States in the World, but not both.

My opinion: This is a reasonable compromise among a variety of competing viewpoints.

Seeds of a Mess

A reader calls my attention to this article from 2003:

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac....

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''