One has passed, three remains.

By; Henrik Nystrom

Having been around a while, I have some memory of the Years One of four previous Democratic Presidents. Turbulence during takeoff has been the rule. It is wise to keep one’s seat belt loosely fastened.

J.F.K. had the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating Vienna summit with Khrushchev, unforced errors both. He dazzled with imaginative, low-cost initiatives like the Peace Corps, but the really ambitious items on his agenda (health care!) stalled in Congress. Carter mismanaged relations with Congress and “gave away” the Panama Canal, a necessary move that had the side effect of turbocharging Ronald Reagan’s political rise. Clinton stumbled over gays in the military on the way to his own health-care debacle. Only Johnson had a stellar first year, and that was largely due to the tragically galvanizing circumstances of his taking office.

That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.

Whether yesterday’s upset in Massachusetts turns out to be a catastrophe or merely a setback now depends largely on the grown-upness, or lack of it, of liberals in the House of Representatives. I don’t see any way out of the darkness right now other than for the House to tighten its stomach muscles, pass the Senate version of the health-care bill A.S.A.P., and move on to jobs and the economy. The Senate health-care bill, however inferior to the House version, is vastly superior to the status quo. The only alternative I can discern is no bill at all—a political, substantive, and humanitarian failure that would reverberate for a generation.

Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.

Meanwhile, President Obama forestalled a second Great Depression, turned the attention of the executive branch toward real problems, restored lawfulness and decency to foreign and domestic policy, damped down the flames of global anti-Americanism, and staffed the agencies and departments with competent, public-spirited officials who believe in the duty of government to advance the general welfare. In this generation, Obama is as good as it is likely to get. I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad, and I’m not saying that liberals shouldn’t keep the pressure on him to do better. I am saying that their—our—anger and exasperation should be directed elsewhere, at systemic grotesqueries like the filibuster and at the nihilists those grotesqueries enable.

Framtida projekt och godnattsagor

Har nu lagt upp två utav mina "Stories" på min relativt nyskapade blogg, kommentera gärna och ge idér på vad NI skulle vilja se att jag skriver om i framtiden.

Jag skriver ENDAST på engelska, men låt inte det hindra er.

Tack för mig.

Our limping economy, Inflation...what's next?

By; Henrik Nystrom

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The economy is still limping, job losses are still rising, and consumers are still reluctant to open their wallets. So it’s the perfect time to worry about . . . inflation? Apparently so, because, of late, the cries of inflation hawks have grown increasingly loud. Pointing to huge deficit spending, and to the flood of money that the Federal Reserve has sluiced into the economy, they argue that we’re at serious risk of “igniting out-of-control inflation” and bringing about the collapse of the dollar. Unless the Fed starts slowing things down, they say, we’ll face price jumps that qualify as “hyperinflationary” (a word that Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, actually used the other week). Most Americans are worrying about keeping their jobs. Now we have to worry about becoming Zimbabwe, too.

Of course, you can’t see any of this inflation in the numbers. The Consumer Price Index fell in July, and, over the past year, prices have actually dropped two per cent. And there’s not much sign that inflation is coming down the pike; the price of U.S. inflation-indexed bonds suggests that investors think future inflation will stay low, perhaps around two per cent. So do the remarkably low interest rates on government debt; the U.S. wouldn’t be able to borrow money for ten years at less than four per cent if people thought that double-digit inflation was in the offing.

To be sure, both deficit spending and the Fed’s recent measures could, in theory, create inflationary pressure. But they haven’t, because they’ve just gone to counteract the sharp decline in consumer and business activity. The government is borrowing more, but consumers and businesses are borrowing less. As for the money the Fed has been pumping through the banks, much of it hasn’t actually made it into the economy; banks are keeping hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves on hand. If the definition of inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, the too many dollars aren’t out there. In the real economy, meanwhile, worker productivity is tremendously high; wage growth is stagnant; and there’s still an enormous amount of slack—capacity that’s not being used and people who don’t have jobs. All of these things will put a lid on price pressures for some time to come.

Then why are people afraid that inflation is about to get out of control? Because they’re always afraid that inflation is about to get out of control. Indeed, many of those arguing today that the Fed should place the threat of inflation front and center were saying the exact same thing last year—in the middle of a recession. To be fair, last year there actually was inflation, thanks mainly to skyrocketing commodity prices (notably, oil and food). But the core inflation rate remained relatively low, and throughout the spring and summer of 2008 the U.S. economy was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, while consumers were cutting back on spending and banks on lending. Yet inflation hawks inside and outside the Fed insisted that inflation was as much a danger as recession, and called on the Fed to raise interest rates—generally not what you want to do when the economy is tanking. All this clamor had an effect: between April and October of 2008, while the recession deepened, the Fed failed to cut interest rates, and rumors about the possibility of interest-rate hikes made businesses more cautious and encouraged consumers to hunker down and hold on to their cash. And the Fed wasn’t even the worst offender in this regard—the European Central Bank raised interest rates in July, 2008, just as the world economic meltdown was beginning.

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Of course, looking tough on inflation is part of any central banker’s job description: if investors believe that inflation is going to get out of control, you end up with higher interest rates and capital flight, and a vicious circle quickly ensues. Nonetheless, there’s something peculiar about how powerful fears of inflation are. In the past ninety years, the U.S. has had only one sustained bout with high inflation—in the seventies. That track record should engender some faith that central bankers are going to be responsible, and that a healthy industrial economy isn’t prone to regular inflationary spirals. It hasn’t. Instead, we’re always about to relive 1974 all over again, which is why last year, as oil prices rose, we were bombarded with references to “stagflation.” In a way, there’s something profoundly puritanical, in the original sense of that word, about the inflation hawks: we are always on the verge of sinning, always about to succumb to our worst impulses. Even the rhetoric of inflation—the “debasement” of the currency—carries a moralistic tinge.

This isn’t to say that cheap money is always good—it has a nasty habit, for one thing, of starting asset bubbles. So, as Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, told Congress in July, once the economy starts growing again the Fed will have to start pulling money back out. But, in any balancing of the current threats to the economy, the danger of stagnation trumps the danger of inflation. Even if we are on the brink of recovery, the last thing we need is for the Fed or the federal government to start embracing a tight-money policy. To do so would risk a reprise of 1937, when, with the economy bouncing back from the depths of the Great Depression, the Fed tightened monetary policy and the government raised taxes, provoking a disastrous downturn that lasted until the Second World War. The Fed does have to make sure that the economy doesn’t go careering off the road. But let’s wait until the car is actually moving forward before we worry about applying the brakes.

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Human appetite, still a mystery or is the food simply that 'friggin good?

By; Henrik Nystrom

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One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

In the early nineteen-nineties, a researcher at the C.D.C. named Katherine Flegal was reviewing the results of the survey then under way when she came across figures that seemed incredible. According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteen-sixties, 24.3 per cent of American adults were overweight—roughly defined as having a body-mass index greater than twenty-seven. (The metrics are slightly different for men and women; by the study’s definition, a woman who is five feet tall would count as overweight if she was more than a hundred and forty pounds, and a man who is six feet tall if he weighed more than two hundred and four pounds.) By the time of the second survey, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a per cent, to twenty-five per cent, and, by the third survey, in the late seventies, it had edged up to 25.4 per cent. The results that Flegal found so surprising came from the fourth survey. During the nineteen-eighties, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 per cent of adults now qualified as overweight. Flegal began asking around at professional meetings. Had other researchers noticed a change in Americans’ waistlines? They had not. This left her feeling even more perplexed. She knew that errors could have sneaked into the data in a variety of ways, so she and her colleagues checked and rechecked the figures. There was no problem that they could identify. Finally, in 1994, they published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In just ten years, they showed, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. “If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic,” another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

During the next decade, Americans kept right on gaining. Men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds. The proportion of overweight children, age six to eleven, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age twelve to nineteen, has more than tripled. (According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.) As the average person became heavier, the very heavy became heavier still; more than twelve million Americans now have a body-mass index greater than forty, which, for someone who is five feet nine, entails weighing more than two hundred and seventy pounds. Hospitals have had to buy special wheelchairs and operating tables to accommodate the obese, and revolving doors have had to be widened—the typical door went from about ten feet to about twelve feet across. An Indiana company called Goliath Casket has begun offering triple-wide coffins with reinforced hinges that can hold up to eleven hundred pounds. It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually.

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Such a broad social development seems to require an explanation on the same scale. Something big must have changed in America to cause so many people to gain so much weight so quickly. But what, exactly, is unclear—a mystery batter-dipped in an enigma.

Though weight-loss books will doubtless always be more popular, what might be called weight-gain books, which attempt to account for our corpulence, are an expanding genre. In “The Evolution of Obesity” (Johns Hopkins; $40), Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin take a frankly Darwinian approach. They argue that we are fat for the same reason that we are capable of studying our backsides in the mirror. “In many ways we can blame the obesity epidemic on our brains,” they write.

Brains are calorically demanding organs. Our distant ancestors had small ones. Australopithecus afarensis, for example, who lived some three million years ago, had a cranial capacity of about four hundred cubic centimetres, which is roughly the same as a chimpanzee’s. Modern humans have a cranial capacity of about thirteen hundred cubic centimetres. How, as their brains got bigger, did our forebears keep them running? According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.

Although no one really knows what life was like in the Pleistocene, it seems reasonable to assume that early humans lived, as it were, hand to mouth. In good times, they needed to stockpile food for use in hard times, but the only place they had to store it was on themselves. Body fat is energy-rich and at the same time lightweight: when the water is taken out, a gram of fat contains 9.4 kilocalories, compared with 4.3 kilocalories for a gram of protein, and when the water is left in, as it is on the human belly, a gram of fat still contains 9.1 kilocalories, while a gram of protein has just 1.2. As a consequence, a person with a genetic knack for storing fat would have had a competitive advantage. Power and Schulkin are both researchers at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and they argue that this advantage would have been especially strong for women. Human infants are unusually portly; among mammals, only hooded seals have a higher percentage of body fat at birth. (Presumably, babies need the extra reserves to fuel their oversized brains.) Tellingly, humans, unlike most other animals, have no set season of fertility. Instead, ovulation is tied to a woman’s fat stores: those who are very thin simply fail to menstruate.

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