There’s a very good parenthetical passage in a post at Andrew Sullivan’s site on the scandal du jour about Paul Ryan’s presumed racism which takes a side trip into Charles Murray’s scholarship. Here it is:

(It’s an old and great line that liberals believe nothing is genetic but homosexuality, while conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. For my part, it seems pretty damn obvious that almost all human behavior is a function of both – and the interaction between them.)

A great, succinct way of expressing something that I, too, believe.

There’s a good piece of advice in Edward Lazear’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on the most recent jobs report:

The labor market’s strength and economic activity are better measured by the number of total hours worked than by the number of people employed. An employer who replaces 100 40-hour-per-week workers with 120 20-hour-per-week workers is contracting, not expanding operations. The same is true at the national level.

Using that measure how does the jobs report fare?

The total hours worked per week is obtained by multiplying the reported average workweek hours by the number of workers employed. The decline in the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by 3/10ths of an hour—offset partially by the increase in the number of people working—means that real labor usage on net, taking into account hours worked, fell by the equivalent of 100,000 jobs since September.

To start adding jobs and putting the people who’ve been out of work for so long back to work we need to increase the hours worked rather than reducing them. I can’t help but wonder if the number of uncompensated hours is rising even as the number of compensated hours falls. Given the president’s recent proposal about over-time pay, I suspect that’s what he’s decided.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 also known as “the stimulus package” is five years old. Robert Samuelson celebrates with a fair explanation and evaluation of its performance. He concludes:

All this makes for a messy verdict. When proposed, President Obama’s stimulus was desirable. (Disclosure: Though disliking details, I favored it.) Regardless of multipliers, it supported the economy. It also sent a message along with the auto-industry bailout, the Federal Reserve’s easy money and the Troubled Asset Relief Program: The government won’t let the economy collapse. This was crucial to restoring confidence. The stimulus was a justifiable emergency measure.

That was my grudging opinion as well. I thought the stimulus was poorly timed and structured even worse. For maximum impact it should have been spent as quickly as possible rather than dribbled out over years. If the economy had come roaring back, it would have provided political fuel for additional stimulus. That didn’t happen.

I think there are additional questions Mr. Samuelson doesn’t raise in his column. Is it politically possible to fabricate a timely and effective stimulus? Have the last 80 years of Keynesian and pseudo-Keynesian policies inured the economy to fiscal stimulus?

Japan’s experience with fiscal stimulus including “Abenomics”, its most recent experiment, isn’t particularly cheering.

Effective or not it will be darned hard to stamp out fiscal stimulus as a strategy for dealing with economic downturns. There is an insatiable appetite for spending money that hasn’t been earned.

I’ve written about my Irish heritage before but it bears repeating. My maternal line is entirely Irish. My mother self-identified as Irish-American which means a lot of my identity is Irish, too. Her name was Colleen. Despite her conspicuously non-Irish birth name, my mom’s mother self-identified as Irish, too—she was billed as “the Irish Nightingale” in vaudeville. Her mother was Irish. Her maiden name was Flanagan. Her mother’s mother’s name was Dunn.

The Flanagans were cattle people from Westmeath in the center of Ireland. Born in Ireland, my great-great-grandfather Flanagan came over here as an infant. I have the story in his own words and I’ll publish it some day. He joined the Union Army during the Civil War at a very young age. Twice. And thereby hangs a tale. He worked as a express mail carrier, a cowboy, and, later, a cattle grader.

The Flanagans were tall, slender, good-looking, and had reddish-blond hair. I do not look like a Flanagan.

I know nothing about the Dunns. Perhaps I’ll learn more some day which would be interesting since I think I favor them.

My mother’s father self-identified as Irish, too. His mother’s maiden name was McCoy, she was born in this country, her family emigrated here around 1840, and I have reason to believe that they were from Armagh. I suspect they were in the horse trade. One of her brothers was a teamster when that meant you drove a team. Her mother’s name was Reilly.

My wife’s maternal line is Irish, too. That’s a story I may tell some day. Her great-niece is an Irish step-dancer who competed at the international level.

My best high school buddy was 100% Irish. All four of his grandparents were born in Ireland. He celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by wearing orange.

There’s one good sentence in Tom Friedman’s latest column:

It can’t be easy being Pollyanna, John Wayne and Henry Kissinger all at once.

Sadly, that mild wisecrack is expanded into a column that doesn’t offer much additional insight. I won’t bother fisking it.

The one thing about which I think we can be absolutely certain about in Barack Obama’s foreign policy is that he’s no Jimmy Carter. My criticism of Carter’s foreign policy at the time and which I believe has held up since is that he thought the U. S. could maintain its position in the world on the basis of moral suasion alone.

My basic criticism of the president’s foreign policy is that I believe that domestic political considerations overwhelm our actual policy interests. That’s not unique to him but I do find a difference in degree so great that it becomes a difference in kind. I think it explains everything about his foreign policy from why he campaigned on an “Afghan surge”, why we haven’t withdrawn our forces from Afghanistan long after it was obvious that we had accomplished whatever could be accomplished there with the effort we were willing to expend, his reactions to Iran, the “Arab Spring”, you name it. It’s a Unified Field Theory of Obama foreign policy.

I think it explains why he reacted as he did to the situation in Syria. Surrounded as he was by R2P (“responsibility to protect”) advocates, he initially responded quite aggressively. However, when he realized that was a miscalculation and popular reaction wasn’t what he had supposed it was, he pulled back and Russian President V. Putin gave him the figleaf he needed for a hasty retrenchment. Haven’t heard much about Syria lately, have you? Civilians are still dying there in the thousands.

With respect to the situation in Ukraine I think the president has taken the temperature of the country (this country) pretty well. We’re not interested in intervention. We don’t like it that the Russians are intervening but, honestly, in the final analysis we don’t much care.

In an op-ed in the New York Times economist Victor R. Fuchs offers a suggestion for trimming U. S. healthcare spending which, despite the fact that I agree it, I think is impossible:

The excess in the United States is primarily attributable to a more expensive mix of procedures and services, higher prices paid to drug companies and physicians, and inefficiencies in the financing of health care. There are undoubtedly cultural differences between the United States and other countries, but it is also true that Swedes differ from Italians, Germans from French, and the English from all of the above.

What these countries have in common that distinguishes their health care systems from the American is universal insurance for basic care, a larger share of government in financing health care (typically about 75 percent of the total versus 50 percent in the United States), and more aggressive control of expenditures.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Yiddish wisecracks: if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.

Rather than return to something we’ve argued about around here, perhaps, fifty times over the last 10 years, I want to turn the question on its ear: would the British have created the British National Health system under the conditions that prevail in Britain and in healthcare today? I do not believe they would.

We have the additional problems that we have not historically been willing to limit government medical programs to “basic care” or control expenditures aggressively, viz. the annual postponing of cost control referred to as the “doc fix”.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

The Ukrainian Situation: I Yam What I Yam

This post originally was an evocation of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. Then I realized there was a much better hook. There are lots of different perspectives on the Ukrainian crisis around today. In this post I discuss Christopher Clark’s historical perspective, Tyler Cowen’s game theoretical analysis, and what we can learn about the situation from Popeye.

I find this obvious but interesting. Moods spread:

Over one billion status updates were made anonymous, then studied, covering Jan. 2009 through March 2012. The results, published in PLOS ONE, come from over 100 million different users across all major American cities. Exposure to positive posts results in more positive posts, and negative posts work the same way and spread more negative posts. However, positivity is a better contagion, and the more upbeat posts are more likely to spread.

“We wanted to see if emotional changes in one person caused emotional changes in another person and that’s exactly what we found,” said UC San Diego political scientist James Fowler, lead author of the study. He is also a professor of medical genetics and political sciences at UCSD.

They tracked rainfall and watched to see if cloudy days Chicago would affect how Sand Diego friends felt about their day. “When it rains on you, you write more negative posts,” Fowler said, “but it affects your friends too.” There will be a “transmission” or transfer, of those emotions through Facebook as one or two people reading will take on these contagions emotions expressed within the post they read.

The message here is something that is no surprise—moods spread. The Internet facilitates such spread. The Internet vector by which moods are expressed most frequently is Facebook. Consequently, moods expressed on Facebook are likely to be quite influential.

Interestingly, they found that positive moods spread more easily than negative ones so keep smiling!

It also suggests that there is a “spirit of the times” and it’s becoming progressively easier to influence it. Since I know people who, in essence, post on Facebook for a living, I’m sure that their jobs are secure will be a reassurance to them.

Well, I’m glad that’s settled:

Biology students at Aston University in the UK monitored how quickly E.coli and common bacteria spread from surfaces to food such as toast (butter side down, no doubt), pasta and sticky sweets — with time being a significant factor in the transfer of germs.

Food picked up just a few seconds after being dropped is less likely to contain bacteria than if it is left for longer periods of time according to the findings.

The type of flooring the food has been dropped on has an effect, with bacteria least likely to transfer from carpeted surfaces and most likely to transfer from laminate or tiled surfaces to moist foods making contact for more than five-seconds.

“We have found evidence that transfer from indoor flooring surfaces is incredibly poor with carpet actually posing the lowest risk of bacterial transfer onto dropped food,” said Professor Anthony Hilton who headed the study.

It’s better not to drop food at all but if you’re going to drop it the faster you pick it up the safer it is. I’m glad that’s settled. It will be very reassuring to my wife.

I now look forward to a definitive answer on whether the jelly side lands down a majority of the time.