Unemployment is at a decade’s-long high, and despite the supposed economic recovery, job growth has been anemic at best.
The Fed’s core mission with respect to monetary policy is to “influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”
Is the Fed achieving this goal? We remain at risk for a double-dip recession. Is the Fed fully utilizing all its tools to stimulate economic growth?
Tim Duy has been reading the tea leaves and concludes that, for the time being, the Fed is content to do nothing, letting the economy glide on its own power:

Bottom Line: The Fed shows no sense of urgency with respect to the current economic situation, and appears prepared to endure a weaker second half with no policy shift. Moreover, even if the economy does worsen more than they expect, the likely candidates for policy action are more smoke than fire. The Fed knows this, and doesn’t want to lose credibility on actions with little likelihood of success. A more aggressive policy stance Gagnon-style appears off the table as long as the Fed fears the possibility that such policy might actually work and push up long term rates. That means more significant action only after outright deflation expectations are evident. Appears extreme, but central bankers tend to be a conservative lot. Lacking a financial crisis, the need for more action is not apparent to them. They fundamentally believe they have done pretty much all that can be reasonably expected. Moreover, we need to reassess the Fed’s inflation comfort level; they may think they are hitting one mandate just fine.

The economy is sputtering and policymakers seemingly have no sense of urgency to do anything more about it. Evidently the Fed will not be changing monetary policy anytime soon. Congress apparently won’t be adopting any stimulative fiscal policy beyond extending unemployment benefits. The resulting outlook is for continued high unemployment for many more months, if not years.
It’s depressing.

LifeHacker alerts us of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Matt Haughey describes Shirky’s thesis thusly:

The gist of the story Clay weaves is how we’ve spent the previous 50 years staring at televisions but the internet enables us to finally talk back, and even tiny slices of the time wasted watching TV when applied towards some collective output can result in massive repositories of information like Wikipedia. He shows many contemporary examples of online collaboration beyond Wikipedia.org and breaks down the motivations for contributors that cites plenty of sociology, psychology, and economics research to back his points up.

It’s now easier than ever to share your knowledge or ideas with others:

Back in the early days of the web and even blogging, you had to be a programmer, developer, or at least technically minded enough to write your own software, publish your own HTML, and manage your sites using many disparate tools. It was very much like the days of very early television where the guys that could control the cameras wrote all the shows because there wasn’t any other way. In 2010, we thankfully have a ton of simple to use tools like Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous that take the need to be a programmer or developer out of the equation and simply let anyone say what they want with minimal knowledge and minimal friction.

If we can capture just a fraction of our extra cognitive capacity, we can accomplish a lot. Information is Beautiful visualizes the potential with this graph:



Here’s a talk Shirky gave a couple years ago on this concept (with part II). It’s something interesting to chew on. Thanks to our chronic unemployment problem, we’ve now got more cognitive surplus to tap into than ever before.

The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local budget woes are leading to rougher road surfaces:

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

It sounds like a temporary solution to recession-induced budget woes–cutting back on road maintenance costs while tax receipts are down. Thing is, changing a road surface isn’t all that temporary,. like furloughing a worker. If you’re grinding up the asphalt, you’re likely doing away with the pavement for years to come.
There’s another factor suggesting this may be a long-term trend rather than a quick budget fix: higher energy prices have made petroleum-based asphalt more expensive. Asphalt is made from bitumen, a by-product of oil distillation. Although bitumen is still quite readily-available, the recent surge in oil prices has made it more expensive to obtain and process the raw ingredients needed to pave roads. When the 2008 oil bubble hit, many counties and municipalities started cutting back on or deferring road projects before they saw a cataclysmic drop in tax revenues. I suspect that even if/when local governments are able to right their balance sheets, $80+ oil means we’re not going to see repaving on the scale we once did.
The WSJ piece credits the automobile for the creation of our paved road system:

Paving grew in popularity in the early 20th century as more cars hit streets and spread when the federal government built the Interstate Highway System.

That’s not entirely correct. Bicyclists actually who started the movement to pave America’s roads:

The bicycle, quite literally, paved the road for automobiles. The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world’s cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million people) at its peak. Sure they engaged in silliness like racing and bicycle polo (!) but at heart, the group was a potent, progressive social force that inadvertently helped bring about its own end by getting roads paved, thus making long distance “touring” possible in automobiles.

This is where the rubber meets the road for me. I don’t often drive on remote, rural roads that are at risk for going gravel. But I occasionally bicycle them. And bicycles don’t mix well with gravel, or chip-and-seal, or even potholes. So I hope graveling doesn’t rear its ugly head in East Tennessee . . . at least not on any roads that matter.

I was listening to comedian Rush Limbaugh’s rant against preventive medicine (Obamacare includes it, therefore it must be evil!) when I heard this beauty. It exemplifies the type of logical fallacy his listeners are constantly bombarded with:

And about this behavioral business, “Oh, yeah, we’ve really had a lot of success there.” Remember when they told us, “You get people to quit smoking, and you get rid of secondhand smoke, and look at the health care cost savings that we’ll have.” Remember that? Oh, I do. I remember everything these little commie twits say.
I remember it, folks, because it’s all BS. It is. Everything that comes out of their controlling, little, small minds is BS. So, “We can’t have second-hand smoke, and if people will just quit smoking look at the cost savings in health care.” Well, we’ve had a whole bunch of people quit smoking. In fact, it’s very odd to see a smoker. The most commonplace to see a smoker is in a movie. On the screen not in the theater. Actors and actresses. That’s where most smoking takes place these days. Yet last I heard, health care costs were skyrocketing at such a rate that we needed Obamacare to reduce the deficit. We’ve been successful with behavioral control. We have succeeded in convincing a vast majority of former smokers to give it up. Our health care costs, fshew! skyrocketed, as they continue to skyrocket.

In short, anti-smoking health policy advocates are wrong because they talked about cost-savings and health care now costs more than ever.
What’s wrong with this analysis? For one thing it supposes that the only change accounting for a variation in health care costs between the 1960s and today is that now we have fewer smokers. In reality, there are plenty of non-smoking-related factors that have driven up the cost of care. Think of all the drugs, tests, therapies, machines, and specialists we use now that didn’t exist forty years ago All of that stuff costs money.
The other problem with this take–symptomatic to talk radio–is the information it omits. There actually is research showing that the total lifetime medical costs for smokers are not more than those for non-smokers. It seems counterintuitive–smokers have higher insurance rates, after all–but that’s what the studies say.
Here’s the catch: the reason smokers don’t cost more is because they tend to die ten years earlier than non-smokers. Presumably anti-smoking health care advocates view death as a bad thing. That’s one of the reasons they want people to stop.
Perhaps Rush (and his target audience) views premature death differently. Perhaps they welcome it. If I had to listen to that nonsense day after day, I might welcome it too.

Last Thursday’s USA Today had a cover story examining where genetic research stands a decade after the first draft of the human genome was mapped out. (See also N.Y. Times).
You might recall how at the time that milestone was heralded as an earthshaking biological advancement–how it was going to usher in the age of personalized medicine where doctors knew in advance what health problems patients are genetically predisposed to develop and could treat them accordingly.
Ten years later that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Researchers still cannot tell which genetic markers are linked to heart disease or cancer. By and large, a simple family history remains a better forecasting tool for some conditions than genetic code.
So has the Human Genome Project has been a bust? Was all the hype akin to the mid-twentieth-century predictions of flying cars?
Not exactly. Geneticists have made notable progress in their ability to plot the genome, they just haven’t been able to figure out exactly what the markers mean. They’re starting to find that some common genetic variations are statistically linked to certain diseases, but thus far those discoveries have only turned out to be one of a number of risk factors in predicting the disease.
What researchers need to do is map out many complete genomes to see if they can link rare genetic variations to diseases. Fortunately, this has now become technologically feasible:

Stunning advances in sequencing technology have cut the time it takes to decode a genome from a decade to a couple of weeks. The cost has dropped from $3 billion, about $1 for each of the genome’s 3 billion chemical components, to less than $10,000, with the $1,000 genome in sight.

Geneticists will soon have a lot more data to crunch–whether or not it leads to meaningful advances in therapeutic medicine in the next decade remains to be seen.
Whenever this topic is raised one question I ask myself is this: How much do I want to know about my DNA? Do I really want to know that I have a strong chance of getting cancer, for example, particularly if there’s little that can be done to prevent it?
A few years ago I would decisively said, “I want to know.” And still today, on balance, I probably want to know. But a recent incident gives me more pause.
A few months ago I was experiencing some physical discomfort, so I went through WebMD and a couple other medical sites and looked up nearly all the diseases and conditions that might account for my symptoms. In the course of my investigation, I diagnosed myself with a number of serious–some even fatal–afflictions.
Suffice it to say, I don’t have any of those diseases. But I got worried that I did. And, taken overboard, that reaction can be counterproductive.
If I’m getting worked up over the mere possibility of contracting a disease, even when I know the odds against it are high, imagine what kind of worrywart I might become if I’m armed with a little knowledge about my genetic predispositions? I can see myself going into red alert mode every time I experienced a fleeting symptom. It would be unhealthy for my emotional wellbeing.
For now it’s a moot concern, since I haven’t taken a DNA test. Perhaps by the time I do researchers will have found a cure for whatever disease that threatens me. Then I won’t have to worry about it.