Apparently in Austria it’s illegal for a member of the royal family to run for the largely ceremonial office of president.

That’s via Robert Farley who (rightly) thinks the rule should be repealed. Of course in the annals of bad rules about eligibility to run for president, this has nothing on our rule against letting an immigrant run.

Annie Lowrey and Even The Conservative Josh Barro argue in favor of reforming the Unemployment Insurance system so as to make extended benefits eligibility automatic in times of economic depression. Barro:

I haven’t seen any specific formulas proposed (if a reform is on the table, readers, please alert me) but in general UI should be extended when unemployment is high and/or rising, and contracted when it is low and/or falling. A formulaic adjustment program could mimic what Congress habitually does already, but without generating market uncertainty — or incurring risk that Congress will be too timid to pull the trigger on abbreviating UI benefits in recovery.

I agree with the spirit here. One of the big lessons of the Great Recession is that relying on discretionary congressional action in the middle of a downturn is not a great idea. We need to set up systems that have more automaticity. That said, I saw a mind-blowing chart on Mike Konczal’s blog a couple of weeks ago that suggested that everything I think I know about Unemployment Insurance is wrong.

Here, then is some hot, hot empirical research from Austria:

What happens at 36 months? Well, in Austria if you’ve worked a job for at least 36 months, then you get your UI in terms of a single lump-sum payment, rather than a sporadic paycheck. Conventional UI in effect pays people to not work, and thus creates a disincentive to find a job. The general view is that this disincentive effect needs to be balanced against humanitarian issues and aggregate demand considerations during a severe slump. But the Austrian evidence suggests that conventional wisdom is badly misconstruing the situation. Instead of the lump sum encouraging people to take new jobs more quickly by removing the disincentive, it encourages them to wait even longer before finding a new position. Konczal says this is a more efficient reallocation of resources: “This is people searching for a job they fit into better, this is people making their basic payments and obligations, hedging against future risks and future financial ruin, this is people being able to efficiently make the choices for how to fix back into the economy.”

Interestingly, whether you agree with Konczal’s interpretation or want to stick with the traditional disincentive view, either way the lesson seems to be that the main reform UI needs is not automatic extensions, but transformation into lump-sum payments. If you want to do something automatic, you could add some criteria that triggers a new round of payouts.

Berlin Wall, 1986 (Wikimedia)

My former boss Mike Tomasky will have written this article before the Iranian political crisis broke out, but that only makes the relevance all the more clear:

On June 27, 11 days after Nagy’s rehabilitation, Foreign Minister Gyula Horn met his Austrian counterpart, Alois Mock, at the border. Each official held large clipping shears and made ceremonial cuts in the barbed-wire border fence. Soon thereafter, an annual ritual, by which East and West German families divided by the Iron Curtain reunited for a short vacation in Hungary, started again. But this year, for some reason, Hungarian border guards began letting some East Germans slip through to the West. By summer’s end, there was a full-fledged refugee crisis at the border. It’s a shame that the date September 11 now carries the solemn historical weight attached to it, because it was on that date in 1989–after a brave decision by Horn to abrogate a treaty with East Germany forbidding Hungary from permitting East Germans to cross into the West–that East Germans started streaming by the thousands through Hungary into Austria.

The tumult spread quickly to Leipzig and eventually Berlin. George H.W. Bush and James Baker chose, correctly, to do and say little. Mikhail Gorbachev, more importantly and impressively, chose not to roll tanks into Budapest or Berlin. On November 9, with pressure mounting, East German official Gunter Schabowski announced–hastily and incorrectly, in fact, but, since the announcement was aired live across much of the world, irrevocably–that all rules for travel abroad would be lifted “immediately.” East Germans rushed to the Wall and overwhelmed the guards. They danced atop it and chipped away souvenirs.

In a way, these were important events in American history. Certainly, they proved to have important—and positive—consequences for American foreign policy. But ultimately the events were made by people in the Communist bloc. The heroes were a mix of brave dissidents who dared the powers that be to suppress them brutally, and holders of power who ultimately flinched away from doing so. Inserting the strategic priorities of the West directly into the situation in a heavy-handed way would not, ultimately, have helped improve the outcome in any clear way.

I know people on the right who are aware that climate change is real and problematic, but who somehow don’t really feel that engaging with the denialists on their side and trying to educate people is an important thing to do. It seems like an odd point of view to me. Meanwhile, in the alps:

Melting glaciers in the Alps may prompt Italy and Switzerland to redraw their borders near the Matterhorn, according to parliamentary draft legislation being readied in Rome [...] “This draft law is born out the necessity to revise and verify the frontiers given the changes in climate and atmosphere,” Narducci said. “The 1941 convention between Italy and Switzerland established as criteria [for border revisions] the ridge [crest] of the glaciers. Following the withdrawal of the glaciers in the Alps, a new criterion has been proposed so that the new border coincides with the rock.” [...] Narducci said the same negotiation will be proposed to France and Austria.

Fortunately, boundary adjustments between Western European countries are almost certain to be handled in an amicably bureaucratic manner rather than a violent one thanks to the success in turning international relations within Europe into a rule-governed enterprise. The rest of the world, however, doesn’t have these kind of luxuries and as de-glaciation unsettles established patterns of land- and water-use we’re going to see some very serious political problems.