Most important reads of 2013

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In the spirit of the Must Read section of my Weekly Digests, I looked through my posts and reading list from 2013 and found what I thought were the most important reads.  My main selection criterion was that the piece motivated thinking about bigger issues.   With that in mind, there was one important subject where I didn’t note an exemplar article:  domestic surveillance by the NSA.  Recently there’s been a fair amount of reporting on the NSA being slapped down in the courts – see, e.g., this – but nothing I’ve read has struck me as a “must read” piece which captures the significance of the whole.   That noted, here’s my list of most important reads and listens from 2013 (in no particular order):

  • Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogo ff”.  Why is it significant?  Because it demonstrates that the “We have to balance the federal budget or future generations are doomed!” argument is a load of crap.  Summary of the piece:  A UMass grad student and two profs investigate the data underlying a widely-circulated claim that high national debt undermines economic growth.  Herndon and co discovered that R&R analyzed the data incorrectly and that the “Debt-to-GDP >0.9 dramatically slows growth” claim is incorrect.  For those not inclined to read Herndon and cos article, here’s Jared Bernstein‘s chart summarizing the effect of Reinhart and Rogoff’s error on the calculated correlation between debt-to-GDP and GDP growth levels.  Notice that things look far less grim at the debt >90% GDP level when the error is corrected.

R_Rcorrect

We have to get back into the habit of thinking that the future is not something that only happens to us. It is not a place where fate just happens to land on us with a heavy, unsummoned weight. It is a place we are entitled to deliberate about, argue about and then democratically choose. And once we have made an informed and thoroughly debated choice about what kind of future we want as a people, we then formulate a strategy for getting to the place we have chosen, and execute that strategy.

    • In Vaclav Havel’s Fairy Tale, Slawomir Sierakowski writes about Havel’s liberalism and worldview.  I think Havel’s view stands in strong contrast to contemporary American liberalism.  From what I understand of his view, it is well-aligned with my own. An excerpt from Sierakowski’s piece:

The biographies of dissidents offer invaluable solace to current and future nonconformists, who, without much hope of success, follow the path outlined by their convictions. It is different with dissidents’ manifestoes, which, once the fight is over, quickly reach their expiration date and are buried in the historical archive. Havel remains one of the very few exceptions.

As Adam Michnik, the Polish anti-Communist activist, recently admitted, “I think that for my dissident friends — and for me, too — the dissident philosophy of life was enough. It was not enough for Havel.”

Former dissidents entered the new era [of post-Communist rule] with the naïveté of children on their first trip to the toy store; out of everything that was Western, the invisible hand of the market proved most alluring. But Havel was different, because he did not simply look at Communism or capitalism from the perspective of the other. He considered both systems to be two versions of the same crisis of civilization…

Havel noted the world’s addiction to the drug of short-term profit, which gives pleasure in the moment, but in the long run becomes a threat to development. He noted the simulated pluralism of both opinions and goods. “The pressure toward soulless uniformity that is perceptible everywhere today — despite the seemingly endless array of choices among a seemingly infinite array of products pretending to be different from one another — poses a great threat to all forms of uniqueness.”

The same can be found in politics, so he postulated seeking an alternative to the shopworn and very technocratic political parties through “an effort to rid them of their hidden, subtle, and omnipresent power, which itself is a denial of the principles of representative democracy.”…

Every system is based on universal conformism, meaning we are all both victims and agents. We can either remain solitary and accept the imperfect reality that confronts us, or challenge it together. Havel longed for an “existential revolution,” just as Tomas Masaryk before him longed for a “revolution of hearts and minds.” Both were similarly distrustful of institutions and trusting in the power of the powerless. Havel demonstrated that this power no longer exists in fairy tales alone.

    • And, finally, a music video:

Pretty amazing to me that a pop song can both speak to class issues and get heavy radio airplay.  Visually it’s also as good a representation of alienation as anything in recent memory.  I can relate to the kids boxing too.  I grew up in a rural area.  Not a lot going on unless you made it happen.  My peers and I used to box – used my father’s ’50s era gloves.   As recreational activities go, nothing like punching someone in the face to alleviate boredom and, conversely, nothing like possibility of getting punched in the face to sharpen your awareness of what’s going on around you.  By and large, we moved on to more constructive things by the time we turned 16 but I can imagine there are plenty who don’t.