Economics & Finance
- Dean Baker at Beat The Press: How Is It Possible The Fed's Image Can Be Tarnished Further?; The Japan Story; More on the Celebration Over December's Job Report
- Gavyn Davies at FT: America’s incredible shrinking labour force (via)
- Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider: Something Has To Give Here; CHART OF THE DAY: The Final Word On ADP, The Most Controversial Economic Report There Is (also see this)
- Simon Johnson at Economix: Ron Paul and the Banks
- Kenneth Kutner: Low Interest Rates and Housing Bubbles: Still No Smoking Gun (via)
- Paul Krugman at NYT: Germans and Aliens; US Net Investment Income
- Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry in Foreign Policy: How Inequality Damages Economies (via)
- Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors of the US: The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States (see the accompanying slides here, via)
- An old post by Lane Kenworthy at Consider the Evidence has an interesting chart: Slow Income Growth for Middle America (via)
- Robert Greenstein at CBPP's Off The Charts Blog: Romney’s Wrong: Federal Low-Income Program Dollars Go Overwhelmingly to Beneficiaries
- Mike Konczal at Rortybomb: A Quick Note on the Distributional Consequences of a Lack of Refinancing Options
- William Black at Credit Writedowns: Real Financial Regulators Love Prosecutions of Fraudulent Bank CEOs
- Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism: Crowd-Sourcing the Revolving Door (also see here and here)
- Mark Whitehouse at Bloomberg's The Ticker: On the Capture of Economists (via)
- Simon Wren-Lewis at Mainly Macro: Mistakes and Ideology in Macroeconomics (via) - also see: Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling: Mechanisms and Models (via)
- Ejaz Ghani at Vox: Reshaping Tomorrow: What will India look like in 2025? (via)
Energy & Environment, Food Security, Climate Change
- Global Macro Monitor at Credit Writedowns: Chart of the Day: U.S. Gasoline Consumption Tanks in 2011
- James Hamilton at Econbrowser: Reducing Petroleum Consumption from Transportation - has a bunch of illuminating stats for the US v. other countries from this paper by Christopher Knittel
- Tom Smerling at Skeptical Science: U.S. 2011: The Wet Get Wetter, the Dry Get Drier [also, a useful 2005 report on Natural Disaster Hotspots is a good related reference]
- Tom Curtis at Skeptical Science: Global Warming: Trend and Variation
- Dana1981 at Skeptical Science: A Big Picture Look at Global Warming
- Stephen Lacey at Climate Progress: What Do Falling Natural Gas Prices Mean for Renewables?
- Peter Sinclair at Climate Denial Crock of the Week: Climate Change and Sea Level Rise: “An Emerging Hockey Stick”
Healthcare and Education
- Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist: Lots of people can’t fire their insurance companies (via)
- Kelly Kennedy at USA Today: 5% of patients account for half of health care spending [link to full study here]
- Ray Fisman at Slate: Thanks, Teach ("A new study suggests that a good grade school teacher can boost college attendance rates, reduce teenage pregnancy, and increase a student’s earning potential.")
- Catherine Rampell at Economix: Do College Grads Earn Less Now Than 40 Years Ago?; College-Educated Workers Gaining Jobs, High School Grads Losing Them
Miscellaneous
- Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture: Internet Censorship
- Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: Less Lead, Less Crime
That's it for today.