One theme coming out of the latest jobs report was the idea that “at least we’re not heading for a double-dip recession.” But I think this simply raises the question of what a double-dip really means.

Think about this. If the economy grows consistently the unemployment rate will eventually fall back to a low level. But the economy never just “grows consistently.” Recessions happen. And one question is whether we’ll grow rapidly enough during the current expansion to re-obtain decent labor market conditions before a new recession starts. There are lots of ways you can look at this. But consider that following the NASDAQ crash in 2000 we never managed to re-obtain the pre-crash peak of the employment-population ratio or the pre-crash peak in household income. And that was a relatively modest recession. Given the way things are going, I think you’d have to judge that the odds of not re-obtaining 2007 levels of employment and income—to say nothing of 2000 levels—are extremely good. Whether that looks like a “double dip” or not will depend on how long it takes to start heading down again, but the ultimate impact will be about the same either way.

Here’s some welcome news from Jonathan Bernstein who observes that a historiographical crusade near and dear to this blog’s heart is paying dividends:

Grant was close to the bottom in the first three Siena polls (1982, 1990, 1994), beating out just three presidents each time. In the 2002 edition, he moved up the 35th (of 42). Now, he’s escaped the ranks of the failed presidents entirely, rising to a respectable 26th. This matches what other surveys have been showing. The very first such study, conducted in 1948 by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., had Grant second-to-last, and up until recently he was invariably a bottom-five choice. Now, with Siena joining the crowd, he’s a mid-pack president. Siena’s respondents docked him for his executive appointments and executive ability, and didn’t really give him strong marks anywhere, with it all averaging out to 26th place.

What you’re seeing here is a growing appreciation of the central role the quest for racial justice deserves in American history, and the backlash against the Southern-dominated storyline that somehow cast Grant as the bad guy of the reconstruction era.

I think the other president primed for a historiographical re-evaluation is the little remembered Warren Harding. Arthur Schlesinger and the project of post-WWII Cold War liberalism casts a long shadow over popular understanding of a lot of American history, and that project almost requires an underrating of Harding and an overrating of his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. But the Harding administration is an example of the historically rare phenomenon of the civil liberties ratchet shifting in the direction of more freedom. Harding also began the process of raising the status of African-Americans from the low point we reached under Wilson—promoting, for example, an anti-lynching bill that passed the House of Representatives only to be filibustered to death in the Senate.

When you look at an industry that involves massive negative environmental externalities, reasonable people can disagree about how much it ought to be taxed to mitigate those externalities. Instead, however, our tax code good piece on a closely related issue for CAP, and it’s good to see it getting a bit more attention.

F.A. Hayek had a lot of smart and interesting ideas, but I join Alan Beattie in finding it bizarre that the work of his that people have the most interest in promoting nowadays is The Road to Serfdom, which is based around a provocative but in retrospect clearly mistaken idea:

This would be an interesting thesis, had it not turned out to be manifestly wrong. Even Hayek himself, towering genius though he was, looks a bit silly in retrospect. Here he is in the foreword to a 1956 edition, warning about Britain after six years of Labour government: “[W]hat the British experience convinces me even more to be true is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.” Unless Hayek was foreseeing the rise of reality TV and Simon Cowell’s reign of terror over British national life, this was a bit of a duff prediction.

There’s a debate to be had on the boundaries between private and public. But it’s hard to have it with people who look at a state-run Swedish kindergarten and see a boot stamping on a human face forever. In truth, if Hayek’s new readers want the literary equivalent of Fox News, they are heading for the disappointment of a rather dry treatise short on contemporary talking points. The Road to Serfdom has nothing exposing the authoritarian iniquities of government healthcare; nothing savaging the dictatorship of Social Security; nothing railing against the totalitarianism of gun control. It’s enough to make you turn to Nietzsche.

As it happens, I don’t have a photo of a Swedish kindergarten but here’s one I took of a Finnish middle school, which is a better example anyway since Finnish schools are more state-run than Swedish ones and their kids perform better:

To be fair, I do recall from the years 2004-2005 that a segment of progressive thinking also took a somewhat apocalyptic turn. It seems all too easy for people to forget that the pendulum of party politics oscillates very rapidly and that US public policy is massively biased toward the status quo continuing.

Much of the suburban built environment is quite old at this point, and like anything else our older “innter” suburbs need to change and adapt in order to thrive. And of course you already see quite a bit of this, with many suburban areas becoming, for example, immigrant enclaves rather than refuges for white flight from central cities. Ellen Dunham-Jones did an excellent TED Talk on this subject recently:

One thing I wish she emphasized more, however, is the legal impediments to this kind of adaptation. I think a lot of people will look at her presentation and say “if transforming these uses is so great, why don’t developers/businessmen/’the market’ do it on their own.” And a big part of the answer is that the prevailing land use regulations don’t permit it.