Interesting blog bits

1. John Taylor gives us More on the Unusually Weak Recovery

   The weak recovery continues to be a major topic.

2. John Taylor on Weak Recovery Denial

   Paul Krugman disagrees with my recent post that the recovery is weak compared to recoveries from past serious U.S. recessions including those associated with financial crises. I’ve been writing about the reasons for weak recovery for two years, but the issue has heated up because of its relevance to the elections this fall.

3. John Cochrane on Are recoveries always slow after financial crises and why

   Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have an interesting new Bloomberg column, "Sorry, U.S. recoveries really aren't different." They point to the great Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke "Tale of two depressions: what do the new data tell us" columns. (Hat tip, commenter Tim to "slow recoveries after financial crises" who asked what I think. Here's the answer)

4. Lynne Kiesling on Lifecycle analysis: environmental impact of electric vehicles ambiguous

   A forthcoming article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology reports on a lifecycle analysis comparing electric vehicles with internal combustion vehicles (at the moment the full article is available for our edification!). This thorough analysis looks at the resource use and environmental impact of the production, use, and disposal of the vehicle.

5. Joshua Gans on Media disruption: it is not journalism, it is advertising
   

   This morning, I had a “someone is wrong on the Internet” moment. The someone was Clay Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth who wrote a long piece for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard entitled “Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism.” The report is about the woes facing the newspaper industry and what they have to do to get back in the game. But the narrative makes the classic mistake of searching for keys under a lamppost because that is where the light is. That is, it fails to start with the causes of disruption and so, I think, makes an error in focussing on second order issues. Put simply, I contend, as I have done many times before, that what was disrupted for the newspapers was not journalism but advertising.

6. Tom Papworth on Land underlies everything

   The use and ownership of land has been perhaps the most important question facing societies going right back into antiquity. Arguably the biggest story in human history is the settlement of particularly fertile regions by previously nomadic people, and their attempt to protect the land they cultivate from still-itinerant tribes and those who want to settle the same patch. It lies at the heart of many armed conflicts: even today, conflicts such as Dafur are, at heart, battles between the pastoral and agricultural peoples of that region.

7. Seamus Hogan has More on exchange rates

   Eric posted on Monday about the Stuff.co.nz article in which he was extensively quoted. I am mostly in agreement, with the article and Eric’s quoted comments, but there are a couple of places where I take issue.

8. Matt Ridley on The benefits of GM crops

   Generally, technologies are judged on their net benefits, not on the claim that they are harmless: The good effects of, say, the automobile and aspirin outweigh their dangers. Today, arguably, adopting certain new technologies is harder not just because of a policy of precaution but because of a bias in much of the media against reporting the benefits.