This is well worth reading. I’ll quote the end:

And fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers, titillate the imagination and line the pockets of conservative organizations make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix. [...] If the same people who are working themselves into a panic over women’s sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that young women really need help with, we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we’re stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn’t a shame at all.

Read the whole thing.

There’s been some talk about a clutch of very conservative Republican governors from the South, led by Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, “turning down” federal stimulus money. This is mostly nonsense—they’re all actually taking the vast majority of the money and in most cases there’s no real option of declining. But Jindal seems to be genuinely putting the meat on the bones of one aspect of this refusenikery by declining to change Louisiana law in such a way as to make its citizens eligible for extended unemployment insurance benefits. The nominal reason for this is that Jindal is claiming that taking the money would lead to a tax increase on Louisiana businesses, but his reasoning is hard to follow. Ryan Powers observes:

But it is not clear why participating in the expanded unemployment insurance program would result in tax increases for business. By Jindal’s own estimate, the recovery package would have funded his state’s unemployment expansion for three years, at which point the state could — if it chose to do so — phase out the program.

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin suggested earlier today, perhaps Jindal’s presidential ambitions are “clouding” his judgement. “I think he’s been tapped as the up-and-coming Republican to petition a run for president the next time it goes around. So he has a certain vernacular, and a certain way he needs to talk right now,” Nagin said.

My other thought is that there may be a “beggar thy neighbor” strategy going on here. If Louisiana makes its unemployment benefits less generous than what’s available in other states, then maybe unemployed citizens will leave Louisiana for Texas and other neighboring states, thus creating an artificial appearance of an improved economic situation. It would be the equivalent of Mike Bloomberg fighting poverty by demolishing all the low-income housing in New York and hoping the poor people all move elsewhere.

In yesterday’s column, Paul Krugman wrote about how major recessions can come to a “natural” end if you wait long enough:

Consider housing starts, which have fallen to their lowest level in 50 years. That’s bad news for the near term. It means that spending on construction will fall even more. But it also means that the supply of houses is lagging behind population growth, which will eventually prompt a housing revival.

Or consider the plunge in auto sales. Again, that’s bad news for the near term. But at current sales rates, as the finance blog Calculated Risk points out, it would take about 27 years to replace the existing stock of vehicles. Most cars will be junked long before that, either because they’ve worn out or because they’ve become obsolete, so we’re building up a pent-up demand for cars.

The same story can be told for durable goods and assets throughout the economy: given time, the current slump will end itself, the way slumps did in the 19th century. As I said, this may be your great-great-grandfather’s recession. But recovery may be a long time coming.

The closest 19th-century parallel I can find to the current slump is the recession that followed the Panic of 1873. That recession did eventually end without any government intervention, but it lasted more than five years, and another prolonged recession followed just three years later.

The thing is, that this points the way toward one possible path toward recovery. Consider the European version of World War II ending the Depression. On that side of the Atlantic, it wasn’t so much that wartime spending drove fiscal expansion. Instead, what happened was that a gigantic war destroyed an enormous amount of useful stuff. The survivors were then, with some assists from the Marshall Plan and enlightened US trade and monetary policies, able to all get jobs rebuilding the continent. Given the right conditions, in other words, you can make the broken windows fallacy work—given enough idle resources, smashing windows will cause those resources to un-idle and possibly get you back on a growth track.

In theory, then, you could try to aim for recovery by breaking windows. And you could strategically target the window-breaking so as to not be so disastrous for anyone. Hire unemployed people to destroy every yacht in America. Go to rich neighborhoods and slash people’s tires and smash up their fine china. Burn down a few of the McMansions. Of course to really make this kind of stimulus of mass destruction work, you’d still need global coordination.

Less insanely, though, instead of hoping for recovery to be led by increased consumer spending we could invest more in public goods.

Harry Hopkins was born in Iowa. As a child, his family moved to Nebraska then to Chicago, then back to Iowa where Hopkins attended Grinnell College. After graduation in 1912 he took a job with Christodora House, a settlement house, in the pre-hipster Lower East Side of New York City. From there he shifted to a position at the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. In 1915, the mayor appointed him executive secretary of the Bureau of Child Welfare which administered what we would now call welfare payments to single mothers but at the time was understood as pensions for widows with dependent children. He then became the director of the Gulf Region of the American Red Cross, and then in 1921 the Gulf Region was merged with the Southeast Region and he ran the whole thing out of Atlanta. In 1922, he moved back to the city and took the helm at the New York Tuberculosis Association and helped expend the outfit and merge it with the New York Heart Association.

He stayed in this position for nine years until, in 1931, New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt but Jesse Straus in charge of an agency called the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Straus hired Hopkins as executive director, and about a year later Hopkins replaced Straus as President of TERA beginning his long association with FDR.

FDR, obviously, became president soon after this. Hopkins was a hugely important figure in the New Deal as the administrator relief and jobs programs such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He was also a hugely influential political adviser to Roosevelt to whom the apocryphal strategy “We will tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect” is typically attributed. In December of 1938, the post of Secretary of Commerce was added to Hopkins’ portfolio. In practice, however, his work in this job was largely overshadowed by his FERA/WPA gigs and his role as a political adviser. At this same period, Harold Ickes was dual-hatted as Secretary of Interior and head of the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Ickes/Hopkins clashes of the perogatives of Interior-PWA and Commerce-WPA were legendary.

Even before U.S. entry into World War II, FDR began to shift his attention from the New Deal to the fight against Nazism. As such, Hopkins was shifted out of the Commerce job and sent overseas as an unofficial emissary to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin as well as to a key role in the Lend-Lease program.

I learned in the course of my Commerce Cabinet Crisis blogging that in some ways, the original sin of traffic engineering turns out to have been committed at the Department of Commerce back in the 1920s. Before there were cars, obviously, there weren’t rules regulating where cars could and couldn’t go. But when cars were invented, a potential safety problem emerged. A car might strike and kill a pedestrian. Clearly, cities were going to need to cope with this. Cities could have responded primarily through measures designed to restrain the behavior of drivers, so as to render their vehicles less lethal to ordinary citizens living their lives. But instead, in part at the urging of the Commerce Department, they decided in the name of “safety” to start putting draconian restrictions on the pedestrians. Thus, even in a very walkable city like New York or Washington, any given street is separated into a “not allowed to walk here” portion (the road) and a “not allowed to drive here” portion (the sidewalk) with the no-walking portion much bigger than the no-driving portion.

You can see the sort of mentality that thinks we should avoid traffic “accidents” (typically caused by illegal, non-accidental behavior on the part of the driver) by restraining pedestrians still on display in the attitudes of MPDC Officer David Baker as described in the Examiner. He says the big problem is that pedestrians need to pay more attention and stop listening to iPods as they cross intersections. How about if I keep walking around the city listening to music and the cars stop speeding? Well, he says that’s not a big problem (via):

Some vehicles do speed through that busy crossing, Baker said, but most average 34 to 37 mph. The speed limit there is 30 mph. As he surveyed the site with his radar gun, Baker said he watched pedestrian after pedestrian stroll by listening to their iPods and talking on their cell phones, crossing against the walk signal and stepping into the crosswalk in anticipation of a walk signal.

If the speed limit is 30, then anyone driving 34-37 miles per hour—which is most drivers, according to Baker—is speeding. A cop sitting there with a radar gun should try to stop them.

Even better, we actually know a lot about the intersection between road design, human psychology, driver behavior, and vehicle speed. The road could be re-engineered so as to encourage drivers to actually obey the speed limit. Evidence suggests that this will be more effective than relying on direct enforcement that, by necessity, can’t always be in place.

If you have the chance, please do read Jeffrey Gettleman’s article on Somalia in Foreign Policy magazine. It’s not only a great piece in its own right, but it’s a useful corrective to some of the imperial hubris that’s often wafting around in Washington:

In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world.

The whole country has become a breeding ground for warlords, pirates, kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen, and idle, angry youth with no education and way too many bullets. There is no Green Zone here, by the way—no fortified place of last resort to run to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trouble. In Somalia, you’re on your own. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds. [...]

It’s crunch time for Somalia, but the world is like me, standing in the doorway, looking in at two decades of unbridled anarchy, unsure what to do. Past interventions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U.S. forces fought predacious warlords at the wrong time, backed some of the same predacious warlords at the wrong time, and consistently failed to appreciate the twin pulls of clan and religion. As a result, Somalia has become a graveyard of foreign-policy blunders that have radicalized the population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of starvation.

There’s an enormous tendency in this town, and in establishment circles more generally, to see American involvement in a situation as by definition offering a solution. And certainly the United States has involved itself constructively in many situations around the world over the decades. But it’s not some kind of law of nature that us poking around somewhere is a good idea. And in Somalia, at least, our involvement has been hugely destructive. Not, I think, because we meant badly. But because we’ve been unable to simply accept that the internal politics of Somalia and the regional politics of the Horn of Africa just aren’t something that the American people or the American government are knowledgeable about or competent to deal with. We’ve engaged fitfully, thoughtlessly, and in a manner that usually involves us getting manipulated by the much-better-informed and much-more-committed players on the ground.