Please go read Joe Gagnon’s latest post on the case for more robust monetary stimulus. His specific proposal—massive bond purchases by the Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of Japan—are considered radical these days. But in more general terms his ideas should be considered the very reverse of radical. His idea is that central banks that are undershooting their inflation targets, as the Fed, the ECB, and the BOJ are, ought to take measures to come closer to target. But in the UK, where inflation is above target, policymakers ought to stand pat and be ready to tighten if necessary.

The conventional wisdom has somehow gotten to be that these inflation targets don’t really need to be taken seriously, even though undershooting them is contributing to mass unemployment and generally depressed living standards. But why?

I’ll admit that I don’t exactly hail from a robust fried chicken culture or family tradition, but like Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m a bit confused as to how this bit of home cooking has managed to get so complicated in current telling:

[W]hen I was kid and first learned my way around the kitchen, the sense was that part of the beauty of fried chicken was its simplicity–some flour, egg, salt, pepper, and maybe some kind of herbalism. If you were fancy you had thyme, but most negroes were fine with Season-All. Hook up some potato salad real quick, and you were on.

These days, when I look up a fried chicken recipe it tends to be a 48-hour affair including brining, buttermilk, bay-leaves, and double-binding. When did this happen?

I feel like as time-pressure leads people to cook less in practice, the culture has started putting more and more emphasis on maximally time-intensive ways of doing things. This from Paula Deen seems to me to do a good job of combining a desire for interesting seasoning with a desire for a feasible timeline. But what do I know?

The federal government has decided it wants to give up 62.5 acres worth of the former Walter Reed Medical Center site. You might think this means the land will be sold to whoever wants it badly enough to offer a lot of money, but as Eric Fidler explains that’s not how it works:

One would expect DC to auction the site to the highest private bidder, but the federal base closure process requires proposals from government agencies or non-profits. The “public benefit conveyance” (PBC) requires using the land for homeless assistance, parks, recreation, wildlife conservation, lighthouses, historic monuments, education, public health, jails, law enforcement facilities, HUD self-help programs, airports, seaports, veterans cemeteries, or emergency management facilities, among other uses.

This strikes me as a kind of misguided policy. Would the public really benefit from from a jail than from a bunch of stores? Non-profit organizations normally operate in the same marketplace as everyone else. CAP, for example, rents space in an office building that also rents space to fore-profit firms and so do all the other many, many, many non-profit advocacy groups in DC. Which isn’t to say the government doesn’t do anything for us—the American tax code implicitly subsidizes a wide array of non-profit activities in a way that’s important to the overall U.S. social model. But it’s not at all obvious to me that setting aside parcels of land for non-profit use is necessarily more socially beneficial than just letting it be used for whatever the market wants. Among other things, the city could use the revenue obtained by selling the land to finance its provision of social services. And the creation of market-rate housing and/or commercial enterprises would generate enduring tax revenue streams that likewise would fund public services.

I don’t really want to write about Al Gore’s marriage to Tipper, but this paragraph from Howard Fineman raises an issue that I think we don’t discuss enough:

They were an odd couple from the start, a teenage romance that tried—and, after 40 years, failed—to bridge the divides that were inherent in it from the start: political versus nonpolitical Washington; pure, driven ambition versus another day at the beach; a need to internalize and intellectualize versus the drummer in the band.

This kind of thing seems way too negative and judgmental to me. Life in a modern-day developed economy is quite long. If two people can be happy together for 38 years, during which time they raise a few kids, and then maybe be unhappy for two years and wind up realizing they want to get divorced is that really such a “failure”? It sounds okay to me. Kind of impressive, actually! As a society, I think we need to cut ourselves some more slack about this kind of thing. Failure is relative.

As I’ve noted before, in the eyes of its defenders the blockade of the Gaza Strip is a security measure aimed at denying rockets to Hamas, while in fact it’s a comprehensive effort to collectively punish Gaza residents—a majority of whom are children—in hopes that this will somehow lead to Hamas being replaced by a more moderate regime. Yousef Munayyer’s rundown of the consequences of the blockade makes the point clearly. For example, “In 2006, Israel carried out an attack on Gaza’s only power plant and never permitted the rebuilding to its pre-attack capacity (down to producing 80 megawatts maximum from 140 megawatts).”

I suppose one could try to construct a defense of what the policy actually is, but instead most people seem to prefer to defend something else. Of course Israelis don’t want to be hit by rockets, but why shouldn’t Gaza’s civilians have electricity?