Hacker Update

I blogged yesterday on some new research purporting to show that the increase in earnings volatility Jacob Hacker documents in The Great Risk Shift didn't actually happen. I'm now told that Hacker will be coauthoring a followup study soon which is going to argue that while his earlier research may have overestimated the extent of the effect somewhat, but it's still real. All worth keeping one's eye on. Still, as I say, I think the main lesson of all this is that it's a mistake to ground arguments for big agenda items like health care reform in transient economic trends. At the end of the day, most of these things are either good ideas on their own terms, or else they aren't. Getting bogged down in these trend analyses isn't, I think, especially helpful or important in political terms.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/01/hacker-update/48005/