I’m a longtime mandatory paid vacation skeptic for standard neoliberal sellout reasons but one area where I think direct labor market intervention would offer large gains is in terms of paid parental leave. As Lauren Damme writes (PDF) the US is a real outlier in terms of not offering it:

The U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world without a system of paid leave to support working families. The experiences of developed nations show that economic growth is not undermined by policies that allow parents to spend adequate time with their newborn children. Equally important, paid parental leave policies are associated with lower infant mortality rates, better cognitive test scores and fewer behavioral problems for children, as well as fewer negative labor market consequences for mothers.

The point here, to me, is that subsidizing child-rearing is an eminently reasonable policy goal. Since a kid born today won’t be in the workforce until 2030 or later it’s very possible that a measure to reduce present labor supply in favor of more child-rearing will entail some kind of small short-term hit to growth. But in the long run people matter most, and giving parents the ability to take the time needed to get infants off to a good start in life is something with very large payoff.

Keith Humphreys has an interesting post on British ill-will toward Margaret Thatcher:

Thatcher makes an intriguing foil to her contemporary conservative head of state, President Reagan. When the latter was revealed to have Alzheimer’s disease, many people who voted against him voiced sincere sympathy for what he and his family were going through. In contrast, I spend an awful lot of of time in the U.K. and am in touch with people there almost every day, and I have to say that if Ms. Thatcher’s own dementia is generating sympathy in Brits who hated her policies, they are doing a frightfully good job of hiding it. I don’t even hear much sympathy from people who did vote for her. Thatcher seems to be in that small group of politicians who have a strange political legacy: The number of people who today acknowledge voting for them is far fewer than could explain all the elections they won.

I think the real answer here is that not that many people voted for Margaret Thatcher. In 1980, about 51 percent of the public voted for Ronald Reagan in a three-way race against Jimmy Carter and John Anderson. He had a lot of controversial initiatives, and in 1984 he won a resounding re-election with 59 percent of the vote. Thatcher, by contrast, won a three way election in 1979 with 44 percent of the vote. In 1983 her support slipped slightly to more like 43 percent. In 1987 she won again, but her support further dropped to around 42 percent.

There was a similar run under Tony Blair, where he kept securing parliamentary majorities based on electoral minorities. I think there’s a lot to be said for the UK political system and obviously in retrospect the thing to say about the Thatcher years is that had Labour been willing to take the Blairite turn in 1983 they could have won the election in alliance with the Liberals instead of waiting 14 years to do it on their own. But the ability of a prime minister to wield extraordinary power based on a parliamentary majority obtained with an electoral minority seems likely to engender a lot of bitterness.

In the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas I have a piece about progressives, the Federal Reserve, and the need to confront the centrality of monetary policy to economic issues:

On the merits, these conservative complaints are absurd. After then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan beat inflation in the early 1980s, annual increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hovered around 4 percent per year for the rest of the decade. After the recession of the early 1990s, the Fed held inflation mostly below 3 percent for almost 20 years. Since the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007, the CPI’s rate of increase has been steadily lower than even that. At the same time, unemployment has been sky-high, real growth has been first negative and then disappointingly slow, and overall consumer demand has been well below the pre-crisis trend. The idea that a time of unusually high unemployment and unusually low inflation would be a good moment for monetary policy-makers to start caring less about growth and more about price stability, especially when we already have price stability, is bizarre.

In response, Paul Krugman has called on progressives to “denounce Republican attacks on the Federal Reserve and defend the Fed’s independence.” But we need something better than a simple circling of the wagons around the powers that be. After all, people are angry for the very good reason that economic performance is currently very bad. And unlike a lot of the targets of popular anger in the Obama era, from autoworkers to hedge fund managers, America’s central bankers are in fact the ones who are supposed to deliver decent macroeconomic outcomes.

Which is just to say that while there are a lot of greedy bastards in America, it’s generally their job to be greedy bastards. The members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks, by contrast, are specifically tasked with the job of preventing giant recessions. They’ve failed. Utterly. And it’s a big deal.