* The Washington Post editorial page continues to exceed expectations by highlighting an excellent GSE reform proposal from Donald Marron and Phil Swagel, sponsored by my colleagues at Economics 21.

* Richard Florida makes the case against homeownership subsidies.

* Andrew Brown has written an excellent, insightful essay for Foreign Policy on how contemporary Sweden defies the expectations of its admirers and its critics.

* Seth Roberts on the coming end of gatekeeper thinking.

* Ian Bremmer is half-right and half-wrong. He is right to defend free market capitalism. He is wrong to believe that lemon socialism, as Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen describe it in their excellent book The End of Influence, does not entail a shift in the direction of state capitalism.

To observe that President Obama hasn’t established a Chinese- or Russian-like system of state capitalism in the U.S. over his brief tenure is pretty trivial: he couldn’t if he wanted to, and I’m confident that he has no intention of doing so. Rather, the question is whether his use of executive orders to privilege unionized firms in securing federal contracts, his efforts to expand the use of industrial policy and antitrust enforcement, etc., mark a significant, potentially self-reinforcing shift from a more market-oriented approach to a more state-directed approach, whether or not that is his explicit goal.

* Keith Richburg reports on rising labor unrest in China

* As India devises new anti-poverty programs, it should consider the lessons of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia system of income transfers. The program has helped reduce extreme poverty, yet it has also encouraged a shift from the formal to the informal sector.

* Clay Shirky on how the cognitive surplus will change the world.

* The Urban Institute’s Retirement Policy Program has issued a series of detailed simulations of how various Social Security reforms would impact the program’s bottom line.

* Alan Viard of AEI offers a primer on carried interest.