Nice auto industry ya got there...

I follow a number of Econ blogs with some dedication, among them Robert Reich's. He recently did a three part series on the future of Manufacturing, GM, and the American Industrial Worker. Many of the reader comments are... less than fully grounded in anything resembling sense, but his core articles are excellent. In very short, the government-backed restructuring of GM is intended to slow the process of GM's failure enough that not all of the industrial economy of the upper Midwest crashes at the same time. Also, trade is still better than protectionism, even if you're an American industrial worker in an industry that is finally paying the price of spending decades paying increasingly higher effective wages while building products that are further and further divorced from you customer's needs.

Without further ado,

• The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part I)
  
• The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part II)
  
• The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part II)
  

Also, while we're discussing the automotive industry, Nate Silver over at Five Thirty Eight recently wrote two pieces on Cap & Trade and on getting people to use market pricing strategies to address tragedies of the commons and the like. They are excellent.

• Carbon Taxes vs Cap and Trade - Side Note: I have a slight preference for Cap & Trade over Carbon Taxes as such, because I expect that Cap & Trade will create more of a profit opportunity for people to create carbon control strategies (not only will the gov't stop fining polluters, but now people become abole to affirmatively make money by reducing corporate and industrial emissions. That should lead to a lot of reduction of waste carbon emissions over the couse of the next while. Also, a Carbon Tax would unite all of the opponents to a Tax regime on the same side (against the levyers of the Tax) as each other, whereas a Cap & Trade system should put the different players in opposition to each other, which should keep everyone a bit more honest, and reduces the (inevitable) risk of regulatory capture. So while Carbon Tax and Cap & Trade may be economically effectively interchangeable, I expect them not to be politically interchangeable, because Cap & Trade is more politically palatable over the longer haul.
  
• Overcoming distributional objections to greater reliance on market pricing - Or, how to solve the political problem that there are many things in the world which we would like to reduce, raising their prices is an efficient way to reduce things in many cases, but raising the price of basic ommodities makes a lot of poor peoples' lives suck. We would like to use market pricing strategies to more efficiently solve problems that are otherwise difficult to tackle (see the Cap & Trade article above), particularly if we can do it without actively screwing everyone at the bottom of the food chain.