More on this later, but my vote for the "One Post You Must Read On Our Current Financial Crisis, If You Only Have Time To Read One" award goes to this post from Brad DeLong. What I like is that it provides a good summary of "how we got here" while doing so in a way that generally avoids the perfect hindsight-driven tendency to pronounce Greenspan, et al nothing more than a bunch of fools and knaves. If your explanation is based on everyone having been fools, you are likely to miss something big.

Megan is offended that NY City and State is putting up $220 million towards the Yankees' new stadium. So much so that she declares:

I'm feeling more affection for the Nationals by the minute.

I understand Megan's aversion to spending public money on sports stadiums (especially as most studies find that municipalities don't get much economic bang for the public buck), but this is almost as short-sighted and impractical as....voting for Ron Paul or something. First, the Nationals are themselves one of the worst offenders in recent years when it comes to extorting public money for their stadium - a city council revolt led DC to cap their outlays at "only" $611 million for the Nationals' new stadium. And it's not as if DC is that much more flush, or has fewer social problems, than NYC.

For better or worse, most new stadiums built over the past 20 years or so have been built whollly or mostly with public money (though the trend has been decreasing in recent years). By (very, very low) relative standards, New York has gotten off relatively easily with the new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets - neither project would crack any top-10 list of municipal stadium boondoggles.

And while the Nationals are on the way up, I still expect that New York will earn a better return on its investment than DC - at least on the field.

Blogging to resume later today, after the completion of a major writing project (to be unpublished, alas).