On Other Blogs, Other Wonders

Links for Friday, September 11:

From my Roosevelt Institute colleagues Mike Konczal and Nell Abernathy, here’s a primer on “financialization“. This term is used widely but not always precisely; most definitions are some tautological variant of “more finance.” Mike and Nell wisely don’t try to provide a single analytical definition, but treat it as shorthand for a number of linked but distinct developments. Especially useful if, like me, you’re always looking for good material on finance and macroeconomics to use with undergraduates.

*

Also from Mike Konczal: NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs. There are two interesting points here, from my point of view. First, the fact that loans have a much stronger effect on college costs than Pell grants do, is yet another piece of evidence for the importance of liquidity; in a world without credit constraints, only the subsidy associated with federal student loan programs would affect anyone’s behavior. Second, it develops an argument I’ve been making for years — an important advantage of direct provision of public goods over vouchers and subsidies is that price movement will amplify effect of the former and reduce the effect of the latter.I should add that at CUNY, where I teach, the great majority of the  students take on no debt at all, since Pell grants and New York’s Tuition Assistance Program both cover the full cost of tuition and fees.

*

Over at Jacobin, my John Jay colleague Ian Seda-Irizarry has a useful overview of the Puerto Rican debt crisis.

*

Related to the disgorge the cash and capital-reallocation topics we’ve been discussing here, Evan Soltas has an interesting post on What Ails the American Startup? He looks at census data that includes  all firms, not just the publicly-traded corporations I’ve focused on, and finds the same long-term decline in the share of the economy accounted for by newer firms.

*

My friend Will Boisvert, whose two posts on nuclear power remain the most widely-read things to ever appear on this blog, is now writing for the Breakthrough Institute. I’m not entirely down with the “ecomodernism” project, but Will is a very smart and careful writer and his stuff there is very worth reading.

*

Here is my brother on CNBC, talking about the Kim Davis case.