Reads for Oct 23

Jobs, Economy and Financial Markets

• Stratfor: Special Series (Part 1): Assessing the Damage of the European Banking Crisis
• Scott Sumner in National Affairs: Re-targeting the Fed
  • Also see this video, where he discusses the idea of Nominal GDP targeting, something that's getting a lot of attention
• Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider: Goldman Advises The Fed To Go Nuclear, And Set A Target For Nominal GDP
• Rob Parenteau at Credit Writedowns: Leaked Greek bailout document: Expansionary fiscal consolidation has failed
• Famous Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto in the Washington Post: The Cost of Financial Ignorance
• Simon Johnson at The Baseline Scenario: European Debt - The Big Picture
• Kash Mansori at The Street Light: Where Exactly Are Those Lazy Southern Europeans, Anyway?
• Simon Johnson at The Baseline Scenario: Jon Huntsman: Too Big To Fail Is Too Big
• Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior: Greg Mankiw on Fiscal Policy
• CBPP's Off The Charts Blog: Jared Bernstein and Chuck Marr Discuss a Tax Holiday for Overseas Corporate Profits
• CEPR's Mark Weisbrot et al: The Argentine Success Story and its Implications
• Kenneth Rapoza in Forbes: US Businesses Not Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says
  • World Bank report: Doing Business 2012
  • also see this earlier piece by Larry Mishel at EPI: Regulatory uncertainty - A phony explanation for our jobs problem]

Food

• Justin Gillis at the Green blog in the New York Times: Deep Thinking About the Future of Food
• Darcy Palmquist in the Christian Science Monitor: The world can feed itself without ruining the planet, study says
• Both of the above, refer to this paper...Foley et al. in Nature: Solutions for a Cultivated Planet
  • The gist of their paper: "To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially while, at the same time, agriculture’s environmental footprint must shrink dramatically. Here we analyse solutions to this dilemma, showing that tremendous progress could be made by halting agricultural expansion, closing ‘yield gaps’ on underperforming lands, increasing cropping efficiency, shifting diets and reducing waste. Together, these strategies could double food production while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture."

Climate Change

• Douglas Fisher at Think Progress: Evidence Builds That Scientists Underplay Climate Impacts
• NASA JPL features a stunning chart showing ocean levels and clues as to what's driving some of the record flooding this year
• Long-time global warming skeptic and Physics professor Richard Muller writes in the Wall Street Journal: The Case Against Global Warming Skepticism. Some excerpts:

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that's where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.

We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on "very rural" locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average.

What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes.

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

More on this from Joe Romm at Think Progress.

Business

• Daniel Goleman at Harvard Business Review (HBR) Blogs: The Must-Have Leadership Skill
• Heerad Sabeti at HBR Blogs: To Reform Capitalism, CEOs Should Champion Structural Reforms [also see this and this]
• Kenneth Freeman at BBR Blogs: To Create Long-term Shareholder Value, Start With Employees

Education

• Chris Kirkham at Huffington Post: With Goldman's Foray Into Higher Education, A Predatory Pursuit Of Students And Revenues

That's it for this weekend.