Some of the day’s best reads:
- Stephen Rose argues that the economy is, in fact, getting better: “Each week over the last year, a number of positive and negative economic indicators were announced. From my vantage point, the positive signs (‘green shoots’) have been more numerous. Where others saw premonitions of a double-dip recession, I saw the slow revival of the economy.”
- Tim Kane of Growthology doesn’t share Rose’s optimism: “Though I’m not in the Krugman camp for policy reasons, I concur with his macro pessimism. I still haven’t gotten the memo that the recovery has arrived.”
- Robert Litan testifies before the U.S. Joint Economic Committee on the importance of federally funded research in spawning innovation: “If the economy is all about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ then we must rely on a new generation of entrepreneurs to commercialize the innovations of the future and in the process bring back the roughly 8 million jobs that have been lost in this recession.”
- Matt Miller wants reformers to take on banker compensation: “The way pay is rigged at publicly owned Wall Street firms creates incentives for casino-style gambling, because bankers reap all the upside and stick shareholders or taxpayers with the losses. When their big bets go bad, in other words, top bankers walk away rich anyway. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work.”
- Third Way released a new policy memo on confronting terrorism.
