The New Republic

There are several spoilers in this review of The Hunger Games, and I’ll get them out of the way early. The film shows precious little hunger and no sense of game. It’s a terrible movie, but it grossed $68.25 million on its first Friday. So that’s where your teenage daughters were over the weekend—or what they told you. And that’s why film critics sometimes feel their own futility.  READ MORE >>

A long-awaited moment is finally here: Tuesday marks the formal repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Ultimately, strong public opposition (and an overwhelming practical—and moral—case) carried the day, though the policy lingered for 18 years and maintains a small but determined group of supporters. READ MORE >>

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As the U.S. economy fails to recover, there is a growing fear that the United States has entered a phase of long-term decline. Conservatives blame “big government” for throttling entrepreneurship; liberals tend to take aim at Wall Street. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Among less inventive critics, the term in vogue is “financialization.” According to author Kevin Phillips, who popularized this notion, financialization is “a process whereby financial services, broadly construed, take over the dominant economic, cultural and political role in a national economy.”Elements of this thesis can be found in scores of books, articles, and blog posts on the state of the U.S. economy. Phillips blames financialization not just for the “Great Recession,” but for “excessive debt, great disparity between rich and poor, and unfolding economic decline.” In their book, 13 Bankers, former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist Simon Johnson and James Kwak blame financial factors for the “anemic growth” in the overall economy prior to the crash. And, in an influential essay—titled “WHAT GOOD IS WALL STREET?”—The New Yorker economics writer John Cassidy pointedly contrasts the period when regulators restrained the growth of the finance sector (when wages, investment, and productivity grew, lifting “tens of millions of working Americans into the middle class”) with the period of growth experienced by the finance sector since the early ’80s (when “financial blowups have proliferated and living standards have stagnated”). One thing is clear: Financialization, in some form, has taken place. In 1947, manufacturing accounted for 25.6 percent of GDP, while finance (including insurance and real estate) made up only 10.4 percent. By 2009, manufacturing accounted for 11.2 percent and finance had risen to 21.5 percent—an almost exact reversal, which was reflected in a rise in financial-sector employment and a drop in manufacturing jobs. It is also clear that high-risk speculation and fraud in the financial sector contributed to the depth of the Great Recession. But Phillips, Johnson, and the others go one step further: They claim that financialization is the overriding cause of the recent slump and a deeper economic decline. This notion is as oversimplified, and almost as misleading, as the conservative attack on the evils of big government. READ MORE >>

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I understand the emotional reaction Mark Kleiman is trying to express here, but the conclusion makes no sense at all: READ MORE >>

In light of the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, today is Civil War Day at The Study. In this second entry, we consider the cost of the war. As most people learned (or heard but ignored) in history class, over 600,000 soldiers died during the war, a gruesome number unequaled in any other American war. But what about the some three million who survived? What were their postwar fortunes? READ MORE >>

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