I don’t know anything about art, really, but I do enjoy Renée Magritte (memorably described to me by an art critic friend as a “painter for people who don’t like art”) and am always glad when I see his work on the wall of a museum. Meanwhile, it took a trip to Berlin for someone to mention to me that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has taken the excellent step of putting its complete collection, including works that aren’t on display, online in a searchable database. So I did a quick search for Magritte and—behold—several works I’ve never seen before even though I’ve been to MOMA three times since its renovation:

You can even go here and listen to a brief talk about the painting. Very cool.

My only critique is that given the relatively low resolution of these files it would be easy for the museum to release these images on a Creative Commons license without needing to worry about cannibalizing the market for prints. If you think about a future world in which all museums are putting their collections online, the best outcome would be for innovative people (perhaps affiliated with existing institutions or perhaps not) to be able to take these imagines and do things with them. Create “virtual exhibits” of different kinds mixing and matching works from different sources the way is currently done (with great care and at great expense) with traveling shows.

To make a policy point, all this is a great example of the consumer surplus issues at stake in getting the various aspects of this right. Creating a world in which a kid in Boise or Bangalore or Bangkok or Bethlehem and an interest in art has all the world’s most important paintings at his fingertips is going to have only a tiny impact on measured economic output. But the welfare gains of vastly expanding the horizons of culture available to people around the world are nonetheless substantial.

Timothy Naftali’s been doing the Lord’s work since he was sent by the National Archives to wrest control of the Nixon Library from the Nixonphiles, and while the anti-semitism revealed in the latest tapes won’t surprise anyone this seems like a very strange thing to say about Irish people:

In a conversation Feb. 13, 1973, with Charles W. Colson, a senior adviser who had just told Nixon that he had always had “a little prejudice,” Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Drunk Irish people are fun! Everyone knows that. Meanwhile note that Irish affection for booze is not just a lazy stereotype, the people of Ireland do in fact have the world’s second-highest per capital alcohol consumption after Luxembourg, a tiny oft-ignored outlier in many ranking lists.

From Nick Rowe: “Countries like the UK, US, Japan, have large debts and deficits. But they control their own monetary policy, and none of them have monetary policy anywhere near that tight. If they did set monetary policy that tight, they too would have a solvency crisis.”

How tight is “that tight”? Well, it’s Ireland tight. Coincidentally, Ireland doesn’t control Ireland’s monetary policy.

It seems like only yesterday that I was hearing from people that QE2 wouldn’t be very stimulative because what’s the point of lowering interest rates when rates are already low. Then last week I was hearing that the tax cut stimulus deal might be bad because it was pushing interest rates up a bit.

It seems to me that the right way to think about it is that these are two great tastes that taste great together. Fiscal stimulus helps the economy by boosting demand, but we need to worry that it will raise interest rates which puts a drag on the economy. But here comes Mr Bernanke who can buy bonds and keep interest rates low. Ta-da, economic boost! The combination of quantitative easing and payroll tax cuts is, in effect, a “helicopter drop” of money onto employed American. And the combination of quantitative easing and Unemployment Insurance extension is, in effect, a “helicopter drop” of money onto unemployed Americans.

The trick looking forward to the next recession would be to come up with some less agonizing, less ad hoc, more predictable monetary policy response to a situation in which the economy is depressed and nominal interest rates are near zero. You could give the Fed explicit legal authority to execute helicopter drops and establish some kind of “Taylor Rule” convention relating the scale of the drops to macroeconomic conditions. With that framework in place, the mere expectation that large drops will occur in depressed conditions should act as a stabilizing force and reduce the need to actually implement the recovery strategy. One of the challenges we faced as a country throughout 2008 is that nobody knew how the Fed would respond when rates approached the zero bound and everybody knew that nobody knew what would happen. This sort of thing tends to lead to panic and depression.

Peter Baker’s Week in Review piece trying to add some texture to the story of Bill Clinton’s post-1994 political moves is pretty good, but like most such narratives I think it slights the central role of macroeconomic performance:

Mr. Clinton’s lowest postelection moment arguably came less than 24 hours before he began his comeback. In April 1995, he was reduced to arguing at a news conference that “the president is relevant.” The next day, bombers blew up an Oklahoma City federal building, and Mr. Clinton’s steady, reassuring and empathetic response made him more of a national leader.

Mr. Sosnik identified two other phases that followed. Phase 2, he said, was spent “getting our theory of the case on how we were going to deal with this new reality,” and really started when Mr. Clinton proposed balancing the budget in hopes of outflanking the Republicans. Phase 3, he said, came in the fall of 1995, when Mr. Clinton engaged Republicans over the role of government, ultimately refusing to agree to deeper spending cuts and winning the spin battle over who was responsible for government shutdowns.

Underlying all of this is the fact that economic growth accelerated rapidly in the mid-1990s. For example, I think most of us would agree that were an allegation to emerge that Barack Obama had an affair with a White House intern, then Obama responded by denying the affair to his senior staff and the public, then it was proven that he’d been lying, and then it was also proven that he’d offered misleading sworn testimony about the matter that this would constitute a serious political misstep. And yet, all those things happened to Bill Clinton and he enjoyed high approval ratings and Democratic gains in the 1998 midterms.

That’s not to say that Obama’s tactical decisions don’t matter. They make a great deal of difference to the question of what laws get passed, which regulations are implemented, what judges obtain lifetime appointments, and to the conduct of US foreign policy. And these things, in turn, to some extent influence the performance of the American economy. But it’s the performance of the economy that will, above all else, determine Obama’s public fortunes just as it did for Clinton.