Ryan Grim has a great story that makes the point that the inclusion of a “reconciliation” option for health care reform is having its desired effect. With moderate senators now aware that they can’t stand alone and block change, more and more centrists are saying they’re at least “open” to a public option in health reform, since they don’t want to be cut out of the process. But not Ben Nelson, he’s a real fanatic about defending the interests of for-profit health insurance companies:

A Nelson spokesman said that Nelson is still talking to like-minded colleagues in hopes of building a coalition opposed to the public plan.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of using health reform to control health care costs. Those possibilities are real. But they’ll only emerge if a good system is put into place with good incentives. And a public option is an important element in trying to create a dynamic where insurance companies are under competitive pressure to deliver the kind of efficiencies for which the free market is so highly touted. Without it, there’s a very strong risk that competition will just take the form of trying to skim the healthiest patients, with no real efficiencies wrung from the system.

I linked yesterday to a New York Times article about a car-free suburb in Germany because I thought it was an interesting illustration of how many different kinds of places can exist in the modern world. This Dana Goldstein post, however, reminded me that in some ways the whole concept of living car-free is a bit of a distraction:

Rybczynski claims that only six American cities have downtowns dense enough for a mass transit-dependent lifestyle: New York (midtown and downtown), Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. This will come as news to those of us who live in Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn without cars, just to name two communities in which I’ve spent a lot of time. But while the childless lifestyle without a car is rather easy in a number of mid-sized cities, things get substantially more complicated when you’re responsible for ferreting a small, fussy person around to all their activities, while still being on time yourself. Any parents out there have experience with the car-less lifestyle outside of Manhattan? Any childless people who are making car-lessness work in cities other than the ones I’ve discussed here?

This is a useful factual corrective. But one should be clear that nobody lives in Washington, or even Manhattan, without ever using a car. I don’t own a car. But Washington Post superstar blogger Ezra Klein does. And last weekend he and I drove in his car to Costco where we bought supplies for some mass weekend grilling. I take cabs sometimes. And I’ve been known to rock a Zipcar. There salient thing about my life, and about Washington DC, isn’t so much that I don’t own a car as it is that even if I did own a car I wouldn’t drive it very much. It doesn’t really make sense to drive from my house to my office, and even if it did make sense it would be an extremely short trip. The big difference between owning a car and not owning a car under these circumstances is really economic rather than environmental. By not buying a car, I save a lot of money. And people who live in a city where you don’t need a car can save up in advance to buy one, rather than relying on credit—going into debt to acquire a depreciating asset isn’t very financially sound, but it’s a practical necessity for many people.

In environmental terms, however, the crucial distinction is actually how much gas is burned rather than whether or not one reaches a pristine state of carlessness. If someone who’s currently driving 300 miles a week to drive back and forth from Dale City to downtown Washington starts driving to a nearby commuter rail station instead, that will be a substantial reduction in pollution, notwithstanding the fact that he’d still be suburban car owner. Indeed, the reduction involved would be much larger than the reduction involved in someone like Ezra—who owns a car, but doesn’t commute in his car regularly—went “car-free.”

A rare moment of convergence between Atrios and Megan McArdle, neither of whom see much in the way of “green shoots” right now:

I don’t want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what’s surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism. I don’t mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell. But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don’t. They’re expecting something more like the recession that followed World War I. People are cutting back, but they’re still spending, particularly because companies are slashing prices to move inventory. It was the long grind of the years that followed, and the catastrophe of the second banking crisis, that scarred them permanently. And this shows up in the economics stats and the stock market, which did not, as we like to imagine, simply decline in a straight line.

I think it’s futile to predict the future course of the economy, since it’s so dependent on the policy response and that, in turn, is unpredictable.

I will say that I think the greatest objective economic risk at this point is policymaker over-optimism. We need the European Central bank to continue loosening monetary policy, and it wouldn’t hurt if some of the world’s lesser central banks followed suit. We could use more stimulus in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. We need corporate executives to understand the main risk to their interests to be coming from a lack of adequate economic recovery efforts rather than from losing small-bore political arguments with congressional Democrats. We need smart growth policy in terms of tax reform and trade. We need, in short, policymakers to continue to be worried. If they’re worried, and if they act on those worries, then more likely than not things won’t stay too bad for too long. But if they feel confident, then we might really be in trouble.

Unfortunately, the policy world has a hard time steering a middle ground between an atmosphere of panic, which is counterproductive, and an atmosphere of overconfidence, which is also counterproductive.