In principle, the contracting-out of provision of government services can be a great idea. And certainly nobody thinks the public sector ought to produce everything in house. Government agencies by paper from paper companies, they don’t get it from the National Paper Manufacturing Agency. But all too often in practice it looks like this:

Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips — some have called them junkets — for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips — to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland — they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools. [...]

The foundation’s officials say the free trips are solely educational and have no business purpose. On the foundation’s tax forms for the last two years, the line for listing “payments of travel or entertainment expenses for any federal, state or local public officials” has been left blank.

Don’t buy the false dichotomy here. I’ve been on a number of junkets abroad, including to Helsinki to get ideas for improving American public schools, and the point is that unless the trip sucks you’re naturally grateful to whoever paid for it (in my case the Finnish foreign ministry) and at the margin inclined to help them out. I trust that readers don’t believe my blog is just a smokescreen for a Finland propaganda campaign, but the idea that accepting free trips from government contractors is going to have no impact on contracting decisions is naïve.

You should definitely read Ezra Klein’s long take on the Obama administration economic team’s retroactive assessment of their performance. But I think it’s helpful to skip to the end:

That isn’t to say that this time couldn’t have been different or that next time won’t be. But it is no accident that these crises so often turn out the same, in so many countries, with so many types of governments, who have tried so many kinds of responses.

In general, the policies that are vastly better than whatever you are doing are not politically achievable, and the policies that are politically achievable are not vastly better. There were many paths that could have been taken in January 2009, and any one would have made this time a bit different. But not different enough. Not as different as we wish.

I have some policy points to make about the whole thing, but something interested I’ve noted is a change in the story that the Obama administration economic team tells about itself. Back in 2009 what you would hear from key officials was much more like what Tim Geithner told John Cassidy when Cassidy was doing a version of this same piece written in a more optimistic time:

Still, it is worth remembering that he was hired not for his critique of contemporary capitalism or for his abilities as a communicator but for his experience as a financial firefighter. From his time as a mid-ranking Treasury Department official, during the nineties, to his presidency of the New York Fed, from 2003 to 2008, he worked on resolving a series of financial crises around the world. For all the wrath that has descended upon his slight frame, he appears to have succeeded in putting out another inferno. “Why do policymakers screw up financial crises?” he said before I left his office. “They screw up financial crises because the politics are horrible, and that deters action. They are slow and late and tentative and weak because they are scared to death of the politics. But sometimes a policymaker has to say, I’ll take pain now against pain later.”

The March 2010 Cassidy piece and the October 2011 Klein piece end with the exact same factual reflection, in both cases driven by Obama administration awareness of the exact same stylized fact about the likely prognosis of a country facing an economic crisis. Call it the Reinhardt/Rogoff Fact. But the affect has completely changed. In March 2010, the story from the administration was that they spent 2009 being completely aware of the Reinhardt/Rogoff Fact and thanks to their awareness, political guts, and policy knowledge they were going to overcome it. By October 2011, the affect is totally reversed. Having succumbed to the exact political dilemma that they once swore not to succumb to, they now cite the dilemma as nigh-unfixable.

Gregory Djerejian probably isn’t a name that rings out to modern-day blog readers, but back when he was updating more regularly he offered one of the most intelligent takes on international affairs and international economics around. So I’m thrilled to see he has a long assessment of the Occupy Wall Street group down in Zuccotti Park:

However, with Occupy Wall Street I believe some among the status quo oriented elites may be more rattled than with the Tea Party. For one, they may be smarter. Speaking to several of these protestors today, I met MBA students who cannot find jobs (one even told me his GPA at business school, a respectable 3.2), and law students in a similar predicament. As money gets wasted in epic fashion overseas for desperately flawed ‘provincial reconstruction teams’ in Iraq and risible ‘Government-in-a-Box’ initiatives in Afghanistan, these kids are staring at mountains of debt and an equally daunting lack of viable prospects (the MBA student was underemployed working as a barista at Starbucks). So there are intelligent faces and voices in these crowds—not just aimless rabble-rousers out for a rise—and I can sense this movement becoming more contagious (for instance, I saw in some of the more junior police officers today monitoring a march from Washington Square back down to Zuccotti a confused questioning in their faces, indicating perhaps some sympathy for the protestors). They are also smarter than the Tea Party in their choice of targets. Discounting some of the ‘professional’ agitators, or the anarchist fringes, and so on, I sense a reasonably cogent consciousness here, a well-spring reminiscent of Albert Camus’ quote: “(w)hat is a rebel? A man who says no”, here driven by a potent combination of disenchantment that no real change occurred with Obama (unless a poorly organized orgy of stimulus and highly dubious health care reform count) and fury at, not so much the Government writ large as we see with the Tea Party, but more the elites standing behind the Government.

Read the whole thing.