We’re not living in America:

— How the Dutch manage without a public option and why the Senate Finance Committee is unlikely to deliver that either.

— It’s striking how much untranslated English is in the ads on Swedish television.

— Maybe the NAIRU is going up but pre-crisis we never actually discovered how low NAIRU was.

— US Chamber of Commerce goes from questioning climate change science to lying about its record of questioning climate change science.

— Don’t donate to Harvard.

Sweden is the world’s number three music exporter, after the much larger USA and UK. This is The Sounds, “Living in America”.

Something that kind of bugs me in the policy analysis game is the way that very small terminological choices can do a lot to spin some research. For example, should denser building be part of our strategy for combating climate change? I say yes. Then I see Reihan Salam quote this:

Even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050.

Obviously I can’t evaluate the underlying research, but why is that “only” 8 to 11 percent. Obviously, changing the nature of new construction is going to be somewhat limited in its impact since it won’t have any impact at all on existing structures which will be the large majority of structures for most of the 2009-2050 period. The big appeal of denser building as an emissions-reducer, to me, is that there’s good reason to think that this would be a good idea even absent the climate change issue. Dealing with climate change will require us to do a bunch of stuff that wouldn’t be smart policy if it weren’t the case that CO2 emissions are harmful. But it makes a lot of sense to make sure we do the “dual use” stuff that can improve the quality of our lives in other ways.

At any rate, Reihan comments:

Increasing density is a cause embraced by many environmentalist, including more than a few conservative environmentalists. Yet reducing the weight of personal automobiles might be a more effective strategy.

He follows up with some persuasive evidence that lighter vehicles could do a lot of good. But this obviously isn’t an either/or choice. Indeed, the two policy options have nothing much to do with each other. It seems to me that reducing emissions to an acceptable level is going to require something like a thousand cuts. There’s no sense dismissing particular strategies as “only” cutting a 10 percent chunk out of a given sector. A comprehensive strategy is built out of chunks.

It seemed to me that part of the subtext of Germany’s election was a population that was underestimating the extent of the economic problems it’s facing. I think these new numbers showing consumer confidence rising underscore that point.

The thing about Germany is that even though the country experienced growth last quarter, it’s growth from a terrible base—the collapse in output was one of the largest in the world. The central bank thinks it’ll take five years for per capita GDP to retake its pre-crisis highs. There’s no real reason for consumers to feel confident. But unemployment hasn’t spiked, and people see the crisis as something that happened “in America” and is sparing Germany. Nevertheless, the only reason unemployment hasn’t spiked is because of the government-sponsored kurtzarbeit scheme in which the government basically gives firms a large enough subsidy to make it worth their while to hoard labor during the downturn. Thus instead of laying off half your workforce, everyone just works part time on nearly full salary with the government paying some of the tab.

That, however, isn’t something the German government can afford to keep doing. It was a useful tool to get Angela Merkel through the election, but it’ll have to stop soon and unemployment will probably skyrocket. What’s more, the longer it lasts the more Germany is delaying any real restructuring in its economy. Pre-crisis Germany was very oriented toward exports to the United States and Eastern Europe, but neither of those places can afford to import as much as we used to. If Germany stays export-oriented it will need to export to someplace else and that probably means exporting somewhat different stuff.