Lobbyist Central Station

Julian Sanchez writes:

Notes from the Lounge: Et tu, TCS?: Y'know, I frequently disagree with pieces TechCentralStation runs--I expect to--but I don't usually expect to feel embarassed for them. On Monday they ran this ridiculous defense of Intelligent Design, and I'm embarassed for them.... I say this not by way of rebuttal--that would treat the article with a seriousness it scarcely merits--but just to express a modicum of dismay that a site that runs a fair amount of science reporting that, whether or not it happens to be correct on other points, is at any rate serious and interesting, would commit this kind of credibility seppuku...

Isn't that a little naive, Julian? Look at what's on the front page of TCS right now. Including the Spencer article http://techcentralstation.com/080805I.html that (rightly) makes you blush, I count six things that make me embarrassed:

I am embarrassed for them by James Glassman's mendacious defense of his Dow 36000 book: TCS: Tech Central Station - My Stalker: "By the way, none of the tumultuous events of the past six years has changed our minds about our thesis. In fact, despite terrorist attacks and a recession, price-to-earnings ratios have remained high, in historic terms, just as we predicted..." We all know that Dow 36000 predicted not that price-earnings ratios would remain at their ca. 1999 levels, but would triple over the next three to five years--i.e., by 2002-2004.

I am embarrassed for them by John Tabin's inability to grasp the point that there is good reason to fear that the private sector won't do enough basic R&D because that kind of intellectual property is hard to appropriate: TCS: Tech Central Station - Big Government Libertarianism: "It's true enough that NIH has long loomed large in funding this sort of research. But must it be so? Consider the larger research and development picture. About two-thirds of American R&D is now funded by the private sector, with taxpayers picking up the tab on the remaining third. As recently as 1970, the figures were reversed: Two-thirds of R&D funding came from Washington. Meanwhile, total R&D funding has in recent decades grown sharply. It should be no surprise that when government support stays relatively flat, the private sector more than picks up the slack. Is there any reason to think that research on embryos should be different?..."

I am embarrassed for them by Douglas Kern's strange take of U.S. history coupled with denunciations of the "apathy and indolence" of the Basrans: TCS: Tech Central Station - Hope Springs Infernal: "Consider the civil rights movement in the United States. The hagiographers of the baby boomer generation would have you believe that the enlightened preciousness of students and liberals made the civil rights revolution possible. But the true spark that lighted the fire of justice was the huge economic improvement that blacks enjoyed after World War II.... This taste of comfort provided an irresistible impetus for a growing, motivated black middle class to stand up against injustices that stood between them and the lives they had almost achieved.... [T]he average Iraqi now enjoys prospects and possibilities that were unimaginable three years ago.... The freedom to succeed and prosper is also the freedom to fall... in an underdeveloped country, failure means disease and empty bellies.... [A] thimbleful of prosperity creates a hunger for an affluence that may exceed the abilities of the current generation. Through television, through the internet cafés, and through conversation with Americans, the average Iraqi is aware of a world of colossal wealth, spectacular science, and undreamt-of desires, all seemingly within reach.... [Y]et his ability to thrive in a democratic, capitalist country grows slowly and unevenly. The ensuing envy, shame, and frustration are ripe for revolutionaries and utopians to exploit. So behold Basra: a city whose thriving middle-class citizens demand a first-world infrastructure even as they maintain third-world habits of apathy and indolence."

I am embarrassed for them by Ryan Sager's belief that we shouldn't try to set up better governmental institutions because "politicians are politicians," coupled with the declaration that Senator McCain and his Republican followers are a "front group funded by eight liberal foundations": TCS: Tech Central Station - Where Angels Fear to Tread: The FEC: "What this means, however, is that what's often called the "reform community" -- actually, it's a collection of front groups funded by eight liberal foundations -- is constantly left clucking its tongue at the "corrupt" FEC.... [T]he speech police have absolutely no standing to whine and moan when their proposed picks -- a list of uber-reformers being floated by Sen. McCain's office -- are dismissed out of hand. Politicians are politicians all of the time.... There aren't any in Congress or at the White House. And the sooner arrogant reformers like Sen. McCain and Fred Wertheimer realize that they're no angels either, the better for all of us -- and for the Constitution."

Last, I am embarrassed for them by Frederick Turner's misrepresentation of the debate over whether "Intelligent Design" should be taught in science classes as one in which both those you say "yes" and those who say "no" are equally wrong: TCS: Tech Central Station - Divine Evolution: "Religious views -- whether theistic or atheistic -- are, alas, the same: for our view to be right, all the others must be wrong. But as the evolution/design debate develops, more serious and thoughtful voices have joined in -- people whose thinking does not seem to be limited by partisan or ideological preconceptions, and who are not making the issue, as others have, a proxy for a fight about theology or atheism. Such voices include TCS's Lee Harris, James Pinkerton, and Nick Schulz, and the participants in the interesting dialogue at Natural History magazine.... A common vocabulary is emerging. The ground may now be prepared for a transformation of the debate from a partisan wrangle into a true conversation, a fruitful inquiry that includes good biological science but does not exclude the insights of other disciplines..."

Given its place in the DCI Group (see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html), TCS must fail to have proper intellectual controls. It must, sooner or later, commit the "gross lapse[s] in editorial judgement... [that] leave the intellectually serious casual reader fully justified in dismissing anything that appears there in the future."

Comments

[marquer]

Julian may be naive, but he does have an ear for a phrase.

"Credibility seppuku". That's about as accurate a summation as anyone could hope for with regard to the work regularly put forth at FlackCentralStation.

[howard]

good grief, it's hard to pick out the most offensively stupid remark out of this collection, but i guess i lean to Douglas Kern's assertions that: a.) baby boom hagiographers claim that it was the "enlightened preciousness" of students and liberals that brought about the civil rights movement, an interpretation that i have never seen in print, and i've studied the period; and b.) that the massive black middle class that existed after world war ii is what actually brought about the civil rights movement, a remark so asininely stupid that i can barely stand to be in the same room in which it is in print.

[A. Zarkov]

Glassman seems to be unable to write six sentences without stepping in shit. Does he really think that bonds have same risk as stocks? Does he really think his predictions came true? He is truly the “Paul Ehrlich” of economics who said "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." After Ehrlich lost his famous bet with Simon, he said the outcome was “meaningless.”

[nate]

Excerpt from Glassman:

"this stalker follows Kevin and me around -- to pick a fight, to force a confrontation."

"...ignore him. I manage to do so much of the time -- though with a stalker, it's not easy

Commentary:

How much was spent marketing and promoting Glassman's book Dow 36,000? Who is stalking who? It was hard to miss Dow 36,000. I have not read it. I have the feeling it would not have been good for my asset allocation at the time.

I read some interesting books by Siegel from Wharton.

[Brad DeLong]

Jeremy Siegel's _Stocks for the Long Run_ is the book that Glassman should have written (and the book that he now pretends that he wrote).

[Charles]

Glassman exists as a kind of cilice on the thigh of economics.

(See www.rickross.com/reference/opus/opus52.html if the reference is unclear)

[nate]

I've seen this theme before. Someone makes a ton of money or publicity pushing his or her questionable idea on everyone. Then, when the idea coincidentally in retrospect is around undesirable outcomes, he or she gets criticized. He or she calls people pests or stalkers - when in reality someone made lots of money pushing questionable stuff on people and should be called on it.

[nate]

Another interesting book by Siegel:

The Future for Investors : Why the Tried and the True Triumph Over the Bold and the New (Hardcover)

[piotr]

About Douglas Kern: is he aware that under Saddam's rule private enterprise did exist? Under a rule of thugs "free enterprise" is not exactly free, but Basra remains to be ruled by thugs. An American journalist who criticised contemporary corruption in Basra was very recently assasinated by Basran policemen. I would guess that the biggest change is that Iraqis are not subject of embargo anymore.

However, I would guess that the level of corruption, extortion etc. is at least as high as under the dictatorship.

[Julian Elson]

I suspect that if I actually were a libertarian, I would be even more disgusted than I am now. After all, one of the big, wrong, myths of libertarianism is that it's basically a bunch of selfish rich people who want to have their way with everything. Libertarian me (or the Sanchez, rather than Elson edition of Julian) isn't greedy -- he just wants freedom and is scared of the institution of the nation-state that, throughout history, has given us the gulag archipelego, the Irish potato famine, etc. Yet here are a bunch of guys who are running what pretends to be a libertarian magazine, except they really ARE just advocates of wealth and power (for instance, they want a Federal ban on independent municipal wi-fi).

It reminds me of the description of the "American Apologists" on the New School's History of Economic Thought website:

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/apologist.htm

"It is important to note that most of the American apologists were were not Manchester School-type liberals... the apologists had to explain why an almost openly-corrupt government should be allowed to use its power to crush trade unions and farmer organizations, place strict controls on the money supply, use regulations to minimize competition among the corporations and throw up trade barriers to coddle them. These were positions that many a European liberal would have decried.

The American apologists had one peculiarly American feature: a penchant for making appeals to religious and moral arguments to defend the status quo. They often claimed that the "eternal laws of economics" were God-given and just, and that any attempt to meddle with them by, say, anti-trust legislation or legalizing unions, deserved heavy condemnation on moral grounds."

Of course, perhaps if I were a libertarian, other parts of me might be different enough that I might well not be as embarassed for TCS as I suspect I'd be, and just be surprised by the occassional ridiculously bad piece, like Julian Sanchez.

[MFB]

"The average Iraqi now enjoys prospects and possibilities that were unimaginable three years ago".

Well, no. Quite a lot of torturers and killers were quite capable of imagining Fallujah and Abu Graib. And anyone who had lived in an Iraqi city after Desert Storm was quite capable of imagining power cuts and sewage in your drinking water.

"Unexpected" covers it better. "Unwished-for", better yet. "Intolerably ghastly to contemplate", best of all.

[Charles]

I would like to sentence Douglas Kern to live in the "middle class" sharecropping life of Fannie Lou Hamer's in Sunflower County, Mississsippi. How, over the space of two generations, have we come to such willful, massive ignoraance as he displays?

Charles

[Ari]

Here is Basra -

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/opinion/31vincent.html?ex=1280462400&en=b1a69c64e764dcee&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Switched Off in Basra
By STEVEN VINCENT

Basra, Iraq

THE British call it being "switched on" - a state of high morale and readiness, similar to what Americans think of as "gung ho" attitude. During the 10 days I recently spent embedded with the British-led multinational force in this southern Iraqi city, I met many switched-on soldiers involved in what the British call "security sector reform." An effort to maintain peace while training Iraqis to handle their own policing and security, security sector reform is fundamental to the British-American exit strategy. As one British officer put it, "The sooner the locals assume their own security, the sooner we go home."

From this perspective, the strategy appears successful. Particularly in terms of the city police officers, who are proving adept at the close-order drills, marksmanship and proper arrest techniques being drilled into them by their foreign instructors. In addition, police salaries are up, the officers have shiny new patrol cars, and many sport snazzy new uniforms. Better yet, many of these new Iraqi officers seem switched-on themselves. "We want to serve our country" is a repeated refrain.

From another view, however, security sector reform is failing the very people it is intended to serve: average Iraqis who simply want to go about their lives. As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations' ranks, many of Basra's rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.

In May, the city's police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that "75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr - he is a great man." And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The fact that the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organizations is not lost on Basra's residents.

"No one trusts the police," one Iraqi journalist told me. "If our new ayatollahs snap their fingers, thousands of police will jump." Mufeed al-Mushashaee, the leader of a liberal political organization called the Shabanea Rebellion, told me that he felt that "the entire force should be dissolved and replaced with people educated in human rights and democracy."

Unfortunately, this is precisely what the British aren't doing....

[Ari]

Here is Baghdad -

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/international/middleeast/10restaurant.html?incamp=article_popular_5

Why Baghdad Must Make Do With Takeout
By CRAIG S. SMITH

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Things were looking up for Chen Xianzhong, proprietor of Baghdad's first authentic Chinese restaurant in the new Iraq, until a suicide car bomber blew up outside the place less than two weeks ago. The deafening blast shattered the windows and spewed body parts into the dining room. A foot landed on the pavement outside and a tire landed in the restaurant's second floor.

"There were small pieces of flesh all over, even on the roof," Mr. Chen said. Now, he does takeout only for the few loyal customers that continue to call.

Chinese restaurateurs turn up in the unlikeliest places, but Mr. Chen, 53, is a remarkable study in the tenacity that plants Golden Palaces and Hunan Gardens in cities and towns around the globe.

Born to a minor railway official in China's northeastern Jilin Province, Mr. Chen joined the army in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution and won a spot at Beijing University. Many people were studying English, but Mr. Chen, ever swimming against the tide, picked Arabic.

"There were only about 15 students studying the language there at the time," he said between sips from a screw-top tumbler of steeping green tea leaves. Though he says he converted to Islam during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, a statue of the Chinese god of fortune grins atop a bookshelf. Mr. Chen eventually got a job as a Baghdad-based representative for Norinco, China's military trading conglomerate, selling everything from milk powder to antitank missiles across the Middle East.

He spent the first gulf war in the United Arab Emirates, but returned to Iraq in 1999 to trade for China under the oil-for-food program. He quit his job in 2001 to start trading on his own, and was doing pretty well until the war came.

Mr. Chen left Iraq just three days before the American bombing started, with a $1.5 million shipment of his Chinese textiles nearing Iraq's southern port of Umm Qasr. The payment to Mr. Chen had not cleared by the time the invasion began. So, just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, he was back to get the money. He eventually did.

Flush with cash, Mr. Chen smelled opportunity in the war's aftermath and opened a Chinese emporium selling cheap Chinese goods on Sadoun Street, Baghdad's main shopping thoroughfare. Next, he opened Dragon Bay Chinese Restaurant near the National Theater, outfitting it with high-backed emperor chairs and round Chinese banquet tables. Then he opened a smaller branch of the restaurant and a small hotel next to his trading emporium last year.

Some other adventurous Chinese citizens arrived by car from Jordan when travelers needed nerve, not visas, to get across the border. They set up a restaurant after his in what has become the high-security Green Zone. But Mr. Chen dismisses them as amateurs, saying that the place doubles as a massage parlor....

[Ari]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/opinion/11herbert.done.html

No End in Sight in Iraq
By BOB HERBERT

The news coming out of Iraq yesterday was that several more American soldiers had been killed. August's toll so far has been mind-numbing. For American troops, it's been one of the worst periods of the war. And yet there's still no sense of urgency within the Bush administration.

The president is on vacation. He's down at the ranch riding his bicycle and clearing brush. The death toll for Americans has streaked past the 1,800 mark. The Iraqi dead are counted by the tens of thousands. But if Mr. Bush has experienced any regret about the carnage he set in motion when he launched the war, he's not showing it.

Writing about Vietnam in the foreword to David Halberstam's book "The Best and the Brightest," Senator John McCain said:

"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay."

That point is no less relevant now. The administration is not willing to commit to an all-out effort to defeat the insurgents in Iraq, and is equally unwilling to reverse course and bring the troops home. Most Americans are abandoning the idea that the war can be "won." Polls are showing that they're tired of the conflict and its relentlessly mounting toll. It's hard to imagine that the population at large will be willing to sacrifice thousands of additional American lives over several more years in pursuit of goals that remain as murky as ever.

Ask a thousand different suits in Washington why we're in Iraq and you'll get a thousand different answers. Ask how we plan to win the war, and you'll get a blank stare.

Administration types and high-ranking members of the military have recently been teasing the media and the public with comments that are designed to give the impression that substantial numbers of American troops could be brought home next year.

Not only are these comments hedged with every imaginable caveat - if the transition to a permanent government goes smoothly, and if the Iraqis prove capable of providing their own security - but they are coming at a time when the U.S. is planning to increase American troop strength in Iraq in anticipation of elections scheduled for December....

[bakho]

Is Glassman just a cog in a broader coalition?

The Apparat
George W. Bush's back-door political machine

It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America

http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=18

[liberal]

Julian Elson wrote, "Yet here are a bunch of guys who are running what pretends to be a libertarian magazine, except they really ARE just advocates of wealth and power (for instance, they want a Federal ban on independent municipal wi-fi)."

I think most libertarians are actually like that.

An essay explaining why by a libertarian who isn't:
http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

[Randall]

Libertarians almost always strike me as advocates of wealth and power pretending to be otherwise.

[Bernard Yomtov]

"I would like to sentence Douglas Kern to live in the "middle class" sharecropping life of Fannie Lou Hamer's in Sunflower County, Mississsippi. How, over the space of two generations, have we come to such willful, massive ignoraance as he displays?"

Charles,

I share your outrage. I lived in the South in the 1950's and 60's. A black middle class was not much in evidence. I think there is an effort being made to rewrite the whole history of the civil rights era, and to redefine the forces that led to change. The period is a dark one in conservative history. The right was absolutely and almost unanimously on the wrong side of the issue. One way to rewrite this history is to claim that the gains made by the movement were not due to the civil rights movement, or to political action, at all, but were part of some grand and inevitable economic process. So we have laughable claims that discrimination cannot exist in a competitive market taken seriously in some quarters. And we have the notion that it was the wonders of great economic advances that stimulated the civil rights movement - not courageous people, with courageous leaders, who stood up against their oppressors. The advantage of these distortions is that they whitewash, if not the Bull Connors and Ross Barnetts, at least their more distant supporters.

[bakho]

The right wing funds a lot of non-sense publications that re-circulate the same old crap until they lose credibility. At that point, they simply switch funding to a new publication that has not yet lost credibility. Is TCS a response to the loss of credibility of "Junk Science" http://www.junkscience.com/ that is too closely tied to CATO to be considered anything other than right wing BS?

It is only embarassing when those that know better read these articles. Those that don't know better (includes much of the press) get suckered by these articles because of the self-reinforcing networks that promote them. These authors can write complete garbage, but if it suits their patrons, they have access to promote their garbage at will on Rush and other RW talk radio, Fox and other RW TV shows and dozens of mainstream newspapers. The same money is behind all these organizations and while they may present an independent face, they are all members of the same organization. This type of hype, promotion and payola is no different from what the music moguls use to promote the next Brittany Spears or NSync.

Prescience or knowledge count less than promotability and devotion to the talking points. This is why we see good looking Stepford clones like Coulter and company representing the GOP on TV instead of a more knowledgeable intellectual that is less likely to parrot the day's talking points.

[Movie Guy]

Brad,

There are bigger embarrassments than the nonsense at Tech Central Station.

Hell, I'm embarrassed that there are no economists in blogland other than Brad Setser and Nouriel Roubini who are willing to tackle head on the U.S. balance of payments situation that the U.S. is in.

We're headed into the biggest mess that I can recall, and most of the commentary in blogland is either little league or focused on very narrow pieces of our economic situation. It's time to get organized.

As an American, I am ashamed of the lack of effort to present meaningful central arguments which would help restore fiscal order and current account balance to the overall operation of the U.S. national economy. And we need both efforts.

It strikes me that courageous economists could play a key role in national elections for the next three or four election cycles. But that is unlikely to happen as most are still out in playground recess instead of focusing on the big picture, the one putting the United States at risk.

I rank this as the largest embarrassment. It's a shameful display.

The election issue: "It's about the U.S. balance of payments, stupid."