Links for 2011-03-24 [del.icio.us]

• Technology and employment: Pity useless men | The Economist
  So perhaps the story here is not that we’ve reached some point where technological improvement condemns a growing rank of workers to uselessness. Perhaps the story is that firms use recessions to realise productivity gains and get rid of surplus workers. And in recent recoveries, central banks have allowed growth to recover to trend, but have not permitted a strong period of catch-up growth of the sort that would facilitate re-employment of cast-aside workers. Instead, those workers linger on the fringe of the workforce until they become essentially unemployable.
• Yglesias » Stagnation and Monetary Policy
  Similarly, until 1980 or so the economy sometimes had bouts of inflation that the Fed had to control by raising interest rates and throttling growth. Since 1980, that’s never really happened. Consequently, the boom/bust cycle now alternates much less frequently than it used to. But the Fed obviously hasn’t learned how to prevent recessions from happening. We had a severe one around 1990, a mild one around 2000, and a very severe one just recently. The problem here isn’t that eliminating the inflation problem is a bad thing, any more than eliminating period of dearth is a bad thing. But if people never go hungry and sometimes overeat, the result will be rising obesity. If the economy never overheats but sometimes underperforms then average unemployment rates will be higher (which, as you can see above, is the case) and workers who lack unique skills will suffer.
• RealClearMarkets – Who, or What, Killed Detroit? Union Greed
  Union greed killed detroit.
• winterspeak.com: The US cell phone market
  All of those are fair, but I think it’s also fair to look at the flip side — using a cell phone in the US is cheap. The only calls you pay for are those made, out of network, during business hours as most plans have free nights and weekends, and free in-network. The per-minute charges are also really low.

  Also, the avalanche of innovation Apple launched with the iPhone could only have come from a market where the handset and carrier was tightly integrated because of all the expensive co-investment that needed to be made at the infrastructure level. AT&T originally said “no” to Apple, btw. Cingular ended up saying “yes” because they were a more nimble, innovative company and they needed to differentiate themselves from the big boys. AT&T ended up with the iPhone by accident as a consequence of the Cingular acquisition.

• America’s Superiority Complex – NYTimes.com
  Passport ownership in the States.
• The Libyan Rabbit Hole – NYTimes.com
  … what happens if the French and British try but do not succeed in a reasonably expeditious way? What happens is about as obvious as it gets: not Suez happens. The Americans come and save the day, as they demurred from doing in October 1956. The French and British know in their heart of hearts that we cannot let them fail miserably at this, or that’s what they suppose. I suppose they’re right.
• ROI: How to Figure Out What You’ll Need to Retire – WSJ.com
  A step by step plan.
• 100,000 Libyan Casualties? – NYTimes.com
  By way of comparison, in the Kosovo conflict, so often cited as a precedent for our Libyan intervention, the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign may have claimed 10,000 lives, while the widely-respected Iraq Body Count projects suggests that between 100,000 and 110,000 civilians have been killed in the eight years since we invaded in Iraq. Ross is suggesting, in other words, that upon taking Benghazi, Qaddafi’s forces would slaughtered ten times as many people as Slobodan Milosevic’s thugs did in Kosovo, and that they would have killed as many people in the space of a single campaign as have died in Iraq across eight years of invasion, insurgency, and sectarian civil war.”

Read more at Hispanic Pundit