Ezra Klein

Recap: What Ben Bernanke needs to tell Congress; some thoughts on Juan Williams; and a new idea on medical-malpractice reform.

Elsewhere:

1) A good Brookings panel on accelerating health innovation.

2) This is where inventions come from.

3) Mad Men hates domestic life.

4) Environmentalists argue over the path forward on climate change.

Recipe of the day: Roasted chickpeas.

I think Ross Douthat gets me slightly wrong here: The point of focusing on growth -- both growth of the economy and growth of the debt -- is that it gets you focusing on the right solutions. We don't have any policies that could move GDP growth from 2.5 to 4 percent over the next 10 years. But the second option I offered -- slowing the growth rate of health-care costs, which are primarily responsible for our rising deficits -- really can be done, if not easily.

One way to think about this is to consider the GOP's current position on reducing the deficit. On the one hand, they want to repeal not just the health-care reform bill in its totality, but its cost controls and Medicare reforms in particular. At the same time, they're offering vague promises of spending cuts at some point in the future.

Even if there were reason to think those spending cuts would materialize, this would still be an awful trade. Something like the Independent Payment Advisory Board really might slow the growth in Medicare's spending. A spending cut, by contrast, will just be wiped out by the growth rate of Medicare's spending. But since people don't think of this stuff in terms of growth, the relative value of different types of reforms aren't well understood.

I meant to write about this the other day, but Peter Orszag's proposal for medical-malpractice reform is pretty clever. As I read it, in fact, it's not primarily a malpractice-reform proposal at all. It's a proposal for spreading evidence-based medicine through a vehicle that conservatives and doctors find congenial.

Quick background here: "Right now, health care is more evidence-free than you might think," Orszag writes. "And even where evidence-based clinical guidelines exist, research suggests that doctors follow them only about half of the time. One estimate suggests that it takes 17 years on average to incorporate new research findings into widespread practice." And that gets to Orszag's broader take on controlling costs in health care: If we can get doctors to stop doing the stuff we don't need, we can control costs without rationing in a way that harms anybody's care.

Of course, defining the stuff we don't need is more difficult than it sounds. And when evidence-based medicine became something Democrats wanted to do, Republicans decided it was something they opposed. Using research to decide what works and what doesn't is rationing, you know.

Orszag sees medical-malpractice reform as a way to get around this debate. Instead of protecting doctors from lawsuits by capping damages or limiting the ability of plaintiffs to sue, you could protect them by charging the American Medical Association or the Institute of Medicine with creating standard lists of best practices and then providing immunity to doctors who can show they followed them. That's easier said than done, but if you could manage it, it would give doctors a reason to follow the best practices and, in theory, drive down overall health-care costs. That would be much more effective than just attacking malpractice suits, which aren't a large contributor to spending and are often quite warranted.

All this, incidentally, costs two cents per penny.

(Picture from Encyclopedia Britannica, and via Austin Frakt.)

Despite 10 percent unemployment, continued job losses and a sharp rise on long-term joblessness, Republicans have, in recent months, begun opposing the periodic extensions in unemployment benefits that Congress needs to pass to keep the program running. The most recent extension took months to make its way through Congress, causing a two-month interruption in benefits. And that was when Republicans were in the minority. Now the benefits are threatening to expire again, and extending them may well become the next Congress's problem:

More than 1.2 million people would have their federal unemployment payments curtailed next month if Congress fails to renew jobless benefits when it returns to work following the midterm elections, according to a report (pdf) released Friday. ...

Congress has only a tight window to enact an extension, or risk having people thrown of the benefit program. After the upcoming midterm elections, lawmakers are slated to reconvene on Nov. 15. But they are scheduled to be in town for only a handful of voting days before leaving for the Thanksgiving recess.

Just received this statement from Rep. Darrell Issa's office:

With NPR benefitting from the generosity of people like MoveOn.org financier George Soros, it’s obvious that NPR is now a self-sustaining entity that no longer needs to rely on federal funds. As an independent entity, they will be free to serve Mr. Soros’ far left agenda. Once NPR is free from the umbrella of accepting, receiving and being eligible for taxpayer dollars, maybe Soros can fully finance NPR’s fall schedule with spin-offs of some of America’s favorite shows such as, "Dancing with the Czars" or "Socialist Survivor" and "Lost: The Obama Presidency."

If Republicans win the House next month, Issa will chair the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which means he'll be running investigations and have full subpoena power. Should be fun!

The worst word in Washington is "message." Whenever anything goes wrong, politicians begin blaming their messaging operations, as if a better-chosen sound bite by a more silver-tongued aide would have spared them the consequences of their actions. It's almost never true. Almost. But for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the economy -- not to mention the Fed's credibility -- might be riding on whether he's willing and able to talk to Congress.

In a recent speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Bernanke made perfectly clear that the central bank is tired of watching the economy stagnate. "With an actual unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent," he said, "unemployment is clearly too high" -- and, yes, the italics are in his prepared text. So the Federal Reserve is likely to begin purchasing Treasury bonds -- "quantitative easing," it's called -- in an effort to lower interest rates and spur the economy. They did this in 2009, and to great effect.

But the Federal Reserve can't go it alone. No one gets a job when the central bank buys a bond. It's only when the Fed's decision to buy a bond persuades some other economic actor to spend money that hiring ticks up. And thus far, that's not been happening. Banks and corporations have simply been stockpiling their cash, waiting for a recovery that, paradoxically, won't take hold until they start lending and spending again.

"I'm worried," says Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. "I'm quite convinced that it'll be a lot less effective than the first time we did this, and that makes me worried that it won't be very effective." That's because the last round of QE worked very differently: The Federal Reserve bought mortgage-backed securities at a time when the market for them was frozen. That created liquidity where there wasn't any. Now they're planning to buy long-term Treasury bonds that are already in high demand. They're creating liquidity, in other words, where it already exists.

But there's one player who could move that money into the economy: Congress. Lawmakers have taken themselves out of the game amid concerns that more deficit-financed stimulus will increase interest rates. The Federal Reserve's purchases will ensure that won't happen. Someone, however, has to convince Congress of that, particularly now that the very concept of stimulus has become polarizing. Someone like, say, Bernanke.

Bernanke knows this, or at least he once did. In 2003, he tried to advise Japan on how to escape its long stagnation. "One direct and practical approach is explicit (though temporary) cooperation between the monetary and the fiscal authorities," he said. "This direction is promising and may succeed where monetary and fiscal policies applied separately have not."

People remember that Bill Clinton, for all his political talent, lost 54 seats in his first midterm election, at a time when unemployment was three percentage points lower than it is right now, right? That isn't to dispute his popularity or persuasive abilities, but presidential speeches just don't save midterm elections.

Tim Carney responds to my critique of his guilt-by-corporate-association arguments. And it's a response worth reading. "I do this for a few reasons," he says. First, "combating false conventional wisdom and Democratic dishonesty," by which he means showing that corporations and Democrats are often on the same side of certain issues, and second, "sowing skepticism about government programs."

I think that means we agree. Democrats have discovered this somewhat-unfair but extremely effective political tactic, and Carney is trying to use it against them. My critique of that and Carney's defense of it are largely the same: It simplifies the world and misleads readers in order to present policy debates and political outcomes in a way that's more sympathetic to the speaker's political preferences. He just doesn't think it should be used by only one side.

But I don't think it should be used by either side. As I repeatedly argued -- and took a lot of heat for arguing -- our health-care reform effort really suffered from the fact that it was popular to attack insurers (or, in Carney's case, popular to attack reformers for partnering with insurers) and so we got both a discussion and a policy too focused on problems in the insurance market. The real cost problems, as readers of this blog got bored of me pointing out, are in the provider market, but since doctors aren't an unpopular corporate entity, neither Democrats nor Republicans were willing to suggest anything that would overly concern them.

I want to be clear here: I am not arguing that the corporate dimension of American politics doesn't matter. It's enormously important. But that means it's worth treating as more than a form of opposition research. If Carney were tracking corporate preferences and corporate involvement across issues and trying to offer his readers a comprehensive portrait of business interests and motivations, I'd applaud his work. But explaining the corporate involvement that helps your side, and using it as a tool to discredit policies rather than to better explain their affects, misleads your readers, who may not know that they're only reading 20 percent of the story.

The president of the United States contributes to Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project:

Like Paul Krugman, I think Britain's decision to pair a sharp economic contraction that's outside its control with a sharp contraction in the part of the economy that's in its control (the public sector) will be a disaster. But it'll at least be an interesting experiment.

For one thing, it's a good test of whether austerity economics works amid a weak economy and low interest rates. Seems unlikely, and I think a lot of British people will suffer while the government tries to figure it out, but we'll know soon enough. But it'll also be interesting to see whether the fact that the government has a decisive plan creates some of the "confidence" that people are always saying we need.

If I were trying to make the argument for a plan like this, I'd say something like: "Business and consumers are wrong about the short-term danger posed by the deficit, but that concern, though mistaken, has consequences for their spending and investment decisions, and if they feel like it's being allayed, they'll begin spending and investing more. The fact that a market isn't rational doesn't mean you can ignore its demands." I'm skeptical that any confidence effect will last for very long, as hundreds of thousands of people will lose the jobs and benefits that let them participate in the economy, but I guess we'll see.

You occasionally hear people say that the average American's consumption has continued growing over this period (though a lot of that was due to an unsustainable, and ultimately catastrophic, credit bubble), or that the way we measure inflation understates the improvement in the average American's living standard. But none of that explains away this graph.

Source.

The next round of quantitative easing will probably see an arm of the American government purchasing Treasury bonds in order to lower interest rates. In recent years, the main mechanism China has used to hold its currency down has been ... purchasing Treasury bonds. Which has, as any economist will tell you, done a lot to lower our interest rates.

So in a simplified way, China's been practicing quantitative easing on the United States for some time now: By purchasing our bonds, they've kept interest rates artificially low, which is part of why it was so easy for us to have a credit bubble. And we hate them for it.

That's partially because it's not a perfect analogy. Remember that there are two sides to the Fed's quantitative easing: The creation of new dollars and then the purchase of bonds. China, by contrast, has been purchasing bonds with their money. That means China's purchases have kept the yuan weak and the dollar strong. It also hasn't had the inflationary effect that the Federal Reserve is hoping to have by creating hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air. And it was, from our perspective, poorly timed: They were doing it during an expansion, which helped fuel a bubble.

Nevertheless, it's part of the reason that quantitative easing on its own isn't likely to do much unless we're willing to get into huge numbers (Paul Krugman has mention $8 trillion to $10 trillion). There are already players -- and not just China -- buying our bonds to keep our interest rates from rising.

Photo credit: Sylvester Cann.

Whether NPR should or should not have fired Juan Williams, they shouldn't have done it so quickly. Media organizations -- in fact, all organizations -- need to wait out these firestorms before they make these decisions. This was true for the Department of Agriculture and Shirley Sherrod, of course, but it was also true for CNN and Rick Sanchez. Responding to Internet frenzies at Internet speed is just a disaster. Waiting for the story to die down and then making a decision when it's easier to think clearly and would be preferable, and will, I think, come to be seen as an important management skill in the Internet age.

And speaking of management skills, the consensus seems to be that NPR wanted to fire Williams for some time, but hadn't been able to bring itself to do it. The crisis gave them the excuse they thought they needed. In reality, it did NPR much more damage than if they'd quietly declined to renew the guy's contract because they thought he wasn't adding enough to their airwaves any longer. You see this a lot, where institutions decline to make difficult management decisions when they're strong, and then have to make them when they're weak, like amid a PR problem or a recession. On a human level, it's understandable. No one likes firing employees. But it often does everyone more damage, as either it increases perceptions of the organization's weakness or releases employees at a moment when it's maximally difficult for them to find a new job.

But if NPR's decision was hasty and ill-timed, Fox's decision was, for a media company, basically inexplicable. Williams had just lost his bargaining power. He'd lost his second income. He'd become less employable. And so he got a ... giant raise? That's not how markets work. And it's not how the news business works.

It only makes sense if you don't look at Fox News as a news business, and you don't pretend they offered Williams $2 million for his irreplaceable political commentary. For a conservative lifestyle channel, this is good PR, and it lets you further the sense of persecution that keeps your audience coming back. For Roger Ailes, the chance to call Williams "an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis" must be worth at least $500,000. And grabbing Williams is also an important precedent to set for other commentators who want to swing further right than their employers will allow: Making yourself a martyr against the politically correct, mainstream media can actually be quite lucrative.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Juan Williams.

No one thought the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill would get a test run so quickly. But as the potential problems in the foreclosure market grow, they're intersecting with the few portions of the bill that are already up-and-running -- and making it clear where we wish we'd had the bill long ago.

The frontline protections weren't there in time. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has the mandate and the power to stop systemic problems with the handling of individual mortgage products, but they're only just setting up. As Neil Irwin reports, the real player now is the Financial Stability Oversight Council -- the multi-agency watchdog that's supposed to monitor systemic risks. But it's not clear how ready they are for the challenge: The Office of Financial Research, which is supposed to be obtaining, collating, and assessing the data necessary to make these judgment, doesn't really exist yet.

And even if they fail, there's still one part of the bill left: Resolution authority.

It's Friday. Welcome to Wonkbook.

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The foreclosure crisis is testing the new regulatory structure set up by FinReg, reports Neil Irwin: "The Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and other bank regulators have examiners on the ground inside major banks - and the power to force them to improve their procedures. Fed economists are constantly monitoring risks to the economy as a whole. The Federal Housing Finance Agency oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which in turn can lean on mortgage-servicing companies that may not be complying with their obligations in how they deal with borrowers. The Securities and Exchange Commission has responsibilities over disclosure matters in mortgage-backed securities."

Obama wants a currency accord, reports Howard Schneider: "On Wednesday, a senior U.S. official said the administration had set aggressive goals, including agreement on a new "framework" that would measure whether an individual country's trade flows or exchange rates were out of balance with underlying economic forces and would judge whether national policies were helping or hurting...The official said the United States wants the G-20 nations to commit to flexible exchange rates and agree on how to measure a country's progress on reducing oversized deficits or surpluses in its current account. The current account is a measure of a nation's trading relationships with the rest of the world; a persistent, high current account surplus is a sign of an undervalued currency."

Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.

Fannie and Freddie will likely receive billions more from the federal government, reports Zachary Goldfarb: "In the most likely, as defined by the agency, which regulates the two companies, housing prices would decline slightly amid a modest economic recovery, and then inch upward. In this scenario, the total bailout of Fannie and Freddie would cost $19 billion more, or $154 billion. A more optimistic projection has the housing market springing back to life sooner. In this case, the companies would need just $6 billion more, or $141 billion. Finally, in a darker scenario, in which housing goes into another tailspin amid a second recession, they would cost $124 billion more, or $259 billion."

Reunited OutKast interlude: Big Boi featuring Andre 3000's "Looking 4 Ya".

Still to come: The Obama administration is emphasizing economic improvement for women; business is split on climate change action in California; regulators have settled on a medical loss ratio requirement for health care reform; and a dog does parkour.

Recap: The tax cut that failed (and the White House's response); Joe Stiglitz doubts Fed action; and the problem with guilt by corporate association.

1) I like this Turbovote idea ("make voting as easy as Netflix!"), though I got a bounce-back when I tried to e-mail the guy who sent it to me.

2) The non-ideological case for filibuster reform.

3) There's no doubt that Barack Obama will be remembered as a guardian of the free market once he leaves office.

4) I would like to see Austan Goolsbee and Keith Hennessey actually debate.

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen has long been a controversial figure in health-policy circles, and today he took to the Wall Street Journal to argue that the new health-reform law will, contrary to the Congressional Budget Office's expectations, unravel the employer-based insurance market. Health economist Jonathan Gruber is skeptical, and with good reason: We've actually seen this movie before.

CBO projections aren’t perfect, of course. But this particular projection is consistent with the best evidence we have--evidence that, once again, Bredesen completely ignores. In 2006, the state of Massachusetts put in place a system much like the one the Affordable Care Act will create nationally--with subsidies for low income groups (subsidies that are even more generous than those in the Affordable Care Act) and an individual mandate, but without the small group tax credit or meaningful penalties on firms that don’t offer insurance. The result? Employer-sponsored insurance has risen in the state by more than 100,000 persons.

Gruber also runs some of Bredesen's calculations again and comes to some very different results. The whole thing is worth a read, as it also serves as a useful primer on the complexities and regrettable resilience of the employer-based health-care system.

"By every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail,” said Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. That's left the company with some new concerns. A DVD-by-mail business needs to worry about postage rates. An online-streaming business needs to worry about bandwidth. And so Netflix is now worried about bandwidth: As Cecilia Kang reports, it's entering the "net neutrality" fight, pitting itself against Internet service providers such as AT&T; and Comcast. It's corporation v. corporation, as so often happens.

This has bearing on a certain type of guilt by corporate association argument that has long had purchase in certain sectors of the left and is gaining adherents on the right. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney has been pushing this to conservatives, but since conservatives are often rich businessmen, it turns out he's also been pushing this to rich businessmen who gathered to figure out a strategy to help Republicans in the 2010 election. As Matt Yglesias suggested, those rich businessmen aren't helping Republicans because they think they'll be bad for profits.

Carney's response to this is unpersuasive: The first part is an irrelevant attack on the Center for American Progress, and then he says:

These businessmen, as far as I could tell, mostly owned their own businesses. Many of them had been shockingly successful. I’ve often said — and I said it at the dinner — that privately held businesses tend to favor free markets, even when they get big; while publicly held businesses (like those on the Fortune 500), tend to want bigger government as often or more often than they want free markets, depending on the industry and who’s in power.

It's hard to know what to make of this. There's exactly no evidence provided for the claim. It's not an accurate description of the event he attended, which included the VP of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), the vice chairman of Cintas (NASDAQ: CTAS), the former chief executive of Dreyer's (a subsidiary of Nestle), the chief operating officer of the Chamber of Commerce (which loves itself some corporate welfare), the head of the Heritage Foundation (which files as a 501(c)(3) for tax benefits), the CEO of TCF Financial (NYSE: TCB), and so on.

Carney says he gave his standard talk on "the evils of corporate welfare and bailouts, and the destructive influence of the Big Business lobby in Washington," and I believe him: He should've just said that instead of trying to distract his readers with an attack on a shared enemy and then assuring them that he only talked to the good corporate titans -- the ones who agree with them, and fund their chosen political party.

But more broadly, this is why the guilt-by-corporate-association agenda doesn't end up working for political parties. There are businesses that disagree with you and you're happy to condemn and then, as Carney shows, there are those who agree with you and thus you find yourself treating them as allies. Sometimes those are the same businesses. There are public and private companies on all sides of major issues (Netflix and AT&T; can both be found on the stock exchange), and companies with similar interests find themselves pulled in different directions by the ideologies of their founders and CEOs.

Trying to discredit people and issues because some member of big business or another is on their side is very effective -- it's why Carney reacted so defensively when it was done to him, and why he instantly turned to the same tactic against the Center for American Progress -- but at the end of the day, that's usually as far as it goes. People suddenly find the situation more complicated and full of exceptions when the corporate money is flowing in their direction. And that's usually why this type of analysis doesn't hold up for very long: There are so many corporations arguing for so many different things that, sooner or later, you're pretty much bound to find yourself on the same side -- and even working with -- a couple of them, and then it gets very hard to explain why you're not just like all those folks you've been criticizing.

Jon Cohn doesn't understand why the individual mandate has become so controversial. After all, in June of 2008, Sen. Chuck Grassley said, "I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandate." And Grassley wasn't alone. Now it's an unconstitutional abomination? The greatest threat to liberty since Thanos captured the gems? Kevin Drum, however, isn't surprised:

This is what makes writing about policy so frustrating. The answer to Jon's question is pretty obvious. Conservatives have no problem in general with mandating behavior. Nor do they have any problem with mandating affirmative behavior. In the context of healthcare reform, many of them have supported the individual mandate in the past. And the smart ones, at least, understand perfectly well why a mandate is necessary in order to make the broader healthcare reform package work.

Their opposition isn't based on any special principle. It's based on the fact that (a) they don't like healthcare reform and (b) people don't really like being forced to do stuff. This makes the mandate a convenient point of attack. Most non-libertarians don't really care about the mandate, but once Glenn and Sean and Rush have them suitably foaming at the mouth about Barack Obama's relentless attack on all that we hold dear in this country, getting them upset about the mandate is a pretty easy upsell.

But you can't just say this, even though it's plainly true. You have to pretend to take conservative arguments about this seriously. You have to write detailed responses, complete with quotes from law professors and health experts. You have to pretend that this is an actual issue, not just a handy attack point. And so we all spend mountains of time in a sort of pundit fantasyland where we all agree to talk about stuff that we all know nobody truly cares about.

I'll have a column this weekend on what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke needs to do to make a second round of quantitative easing work. As part of my reporting for the column, I called Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who's been very skeptical of further action from the Fed. The column, in part for reasons relating to my assessment of the politics of the issue, ends up taking a different position than Stiglitz, but I thought it worth publishing his interview in full, and he graciously agreed. An edited transcript follows.

Ezra Klein: You’re skeptical of further action from the Federal Reserve. Why?

Joseph Stiglitz: The Fed, and the Fed’s advocates, are falling into the same trap that led us into the crisis in the first place. Their view is that the major lever for economic policy is the interest rate, and if we just get it right, we can steer this. That didn’t work. It forgot about financial fragility and how the banking system operates. They’re thinking the interest rate is a dial you can set, and by setting that dial, you can regulate the economy. In fact, it operates primarily through the banking system, and the banking system is not functioning well. All the literature about how monetary policy operates in normal times is pretty irrelevant to this situation.

EK: But didn’t quantitative easing work in 2009?

JS: But think of the various channels through which monetary policy will operate now. The one that traditionally is the focal point is investment. Remember that quantitative easing’s effect on interest rates, after all, is only .2 or .3 percent. So broadly, there are two categories of firms right now: the large enterprises flush with cash -- they’ve got about $2 trillion, and a slight change in the investment rate won’t change their investment policy. Then there are the small and medium-sized enterprises that are cash-starved, and here, the funds need to be channeled through the banking system, and that part of the banking system is still sick. So if normally it might have a small effect, now it’ll have a smaller effect. So that channel is blocked.

Then there’s a second channel, which is the mortgage market. Those interest rates will go a little lower. But again, it won’t directly affect very much. We have too much capacity already. Those lower interest rates will move some money around, taking it from the elderly who hold long-term government debt and put it into the hands of people with mortgages. That’s just redistribution.

Third, it will have a very small effect on equity prices. But that won’t have much effect on either consumption or investment. People recognize that this is a temporary intervention and the government won’t maintain it for long, so they won’t run to spend that money. There might be some help on collateral prices, but that won’t be much.

Then there’s competitive devaluation, which is that lower interest rates could lead to a lower exchange rate. But for that to work, other countries need to allow it to work. And they’re saying that they won’t, that they’ll get into currency wars with us, and that may be worse.

EK: What about people who say that the right thing to do now is to put monetary and fiscal policy together, so the government spends and the Fed buys bonds to make sure the spending doesn’t raise interest rates?

Earlier today, I called the Making Work Pay tax cut "the tax cut that failed." The White House, you'll be surprised to learn, doesn't agree, and they make their case here. Economic adviser Jared Bernstein also points out that the research finding it less effective than a traditional tax cut uses polling data to ask people whether they spent the money from a tax cut that was designed to be invisible. If the tax cut worked as it was supposed to -- which is to say, people didn't notice it and thus they spent a greater proportion of it -- it wouldn't necessarily show up in that paper.

The power of cartoons:

Farhad Manjoo's piece on the collapsing distinction between blog posts and Web articles (or even normal articles) hasn't attracted as much bloggy navel-gazing as it deserves, so let me try to add some.

I write both blog posts and articles. More confusingly, I repost my articles on my blog, as blog posts, and I work out many of the ideas for my articles on the blog. So as far as technology and topic go, in other words, there's no difference. An article can be on a blog. Its subject matter can be on a blog. The reporting that goes into it will be blogged. You can blog anything these days.

The difference, for me, is in the writing. If there's explanation to be done, it's done in a link. (You'll notice, for instance, that I described Manjoo's argument in only the barest of terms. I'd have had to spend more time on it if I couldn't have sent you to the source). If there are multiple points to be made, they're usually (though not always) broken into different blog posts. If there are interviews associated with the post, I'm likelier to put them up as a full transcript rather than simply excerpt them in the text. The fact that my readers are mostly regulars, that I can use links and that I have no space limits drives both the writing and the organization of the content. A blog post is a part of a discussion, and that means you don't start from the beginning and you don't have to get everything out in your first comment.

An article is more like a lecture. You start from the beginning. You include links, if possible, but you don't really expect readers to use them. You try to say everything you need readers to hear, as they're not likely to be around for a follow-up. You condense interviews into quotations to save on space. The writing and organization, in other words, are driven by the knowledge that your readers aren't regulars, you may not be able to speak with them again and you're operating under tight space limits.

Of these two, blogging is the more derided medium, but it's unquestionably superior for conveying information. You can give a reader much more on a blog than in an article. But for all that, I'm fiercely committed to articles, because they make sure I'm writing in a way that's accessible to people who don't read the blog -- which is, let's face it, the vast, vast majority of the world. So though the technology underlying blogs and articles is beginning to converge, I don't think the forms are going to become one anytime soon. It will always be the case that your regular readers are a small fraction of your pool of potential readers, and the likely outcome here is that more and more organizations end up running two kinds of content: one aimed at regulars and the other written for drop-ins.

Barbara Kiviat notes that the minimum wage doesn't help that many workers or affect that many employers. So why is it so central to our economic thinking?

Talking about the minimum wage — whether you want to increase it or abolish it — is a proxy for saying "I care about struggling workers," or "I don't want government telling business what to do."

The problem with using the minimum wage to have this debate, though, is that no matter who wins, the victory will be hollow. If we want to help low-income families, we could do a lot more than change a wage many of them don't make anyway. And if we want to minimize government intervention in free enterprise, we might choose a battle that is meaningful to companies outside of such a narrow range — half of all minimum-wage workers have jobs in the leisure and hospitality industries.

Although maybe saying that just goes to show how naive I am about politics. Maybe in that realm the best battles to fight are the ones that are the least likely to change the status quo no matter what the outcome is.