For Some Reason, Mark Thoma Feels He Has to Acknowledge Stanley Fish...

And because Mark has acknowledged his existence, I feel impelled to do so too:

Economist's View: Interpreting Economic Statistics through Normative Lenses: Do economic statistics represent a value-free picture of the economy'sperformance, or are such judgments necessarily value laden? This is Stanley:

The All-Spin Zone, by Stanley Fish: It all sounds so – well – rational: There’s a world of fact out there waiting to be accurately perceived, but the distorting power of words, abetted by the psychological disorders of passion and bias, tends to obscure it and lead us astray. And the remedy? Watch your words and watch your mental processes, paying particular attention to your “existing beliefs” lest they “reject evidence that challenges them.” In short, Jackson and Jamieson recommend, “practice active open-mindedness.”

But... a 2006 statement by Karl Rove to the effect that “Real disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office.” Jackson and Jamieson regard this claim as “so divorced from reality as to seem unhinged.” Why? Because the real disposable income Rove cited “was a statistic that measures the total increase in income, not how that income is distributed.” That is to say, the 14-percent increase did not benefit everyone, but went largely “to those in the upper half of society”; the disposable income of the lower half had “fallen by 3.6 percent.”

Does this prove spin? I don’t think so. What it proves is that in Rove’s view, the health of the economy is to be gauged by looking at how big investors and property owners are doing, while in Jackson’s and Jamieson’s view, an economy is not healthy unless the fruits of its growth are widely shared. This is a real difference, but it is a difference in beliefs about what conditions must obtain if an economy is to be pronounced healthy. It is not a difference between a clear-eyed view of the matter and a view colored by a partisan agenda...

Dierdre McCloskey assures me that Stanley Fish is smart, so I cannot acknowledge Fish's existence by nominating him for the Stupidest Man Alive. I can, however, nominate him for Most Mendacious Man Alive. Here's why: If Karl Rove believed that an economy is doing well when its super-rich are getting richer and that the economy is doing well, Rove would say so. Rove would say something like:

We see that President Bush's economic policies are successful because the Forbes 400 today are far richer than they used to be.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao actually did say something similar: that the economy was doing well because the stock market was up, and the stock market is what matters.

But that's not what Rove says. He says "Real disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office." And then he is silent. And his subsqeuent silence speaks. His subsequent silence says that that 14% number is what you need to know--that there is no major qualification that needs to be made. And so Rove's subsequent silence is a loudly spoken lie: Rove agrees with Jackson and Jamieson that a healthy economy is one with large and broadly-distributed income gains. And he agrees with Jackson and Jamieson that that is not the case. But Rove wants his auditors to think that that is in fact the case--hence his one sentence, followed by silence.

Now Stanley Fish--whom Dierdre McCloskey assures me is very smart indeed--knows all this. But he doesn't say it.

So how are we to interpret Stanley Fish's false statement that Rove on the one hand and Jackson and Jamieson on the other have "a difference in beliefs about what conditions must obtain if an economy is to be pronounced healthy"?

Comments

[kevin quinn]

Stanley Fish: This is a guy who objects to blind review of the MLA review - which allows articles by grad students to appear - that if he and a grad student say the same thing, *his* saying it is more important. I am not making this up.

[Barry]

Brad, speaking of Fish: "I can, however, nominate him for Most Mendacious Man Alive. Here's why: If Karl Rove believed that an economy is doing well when its super-rich are getting richer and that the economy is doing well, Rove would say so. Rove would say something like:"

I really don't understand what you are saying here, Brad. Do you really think that Rove does *not* think that gains going to the richest are all that really matter? Do you think that Rove gives a flying f*ck about the majority of Americans getting anything other than the shaft, so long as he can BS 51% into voting for his candidate?

Rove would lie without hesitation; here he doesn't have to literally lie, because a one-dimensional stat can give a picture of the economy which it true, but which leaves most Americans ignorant.

[Borden Tarde]

I don't think that "Rove agrees with Jackson and Jamieson that a healthy economy is one with large and broadly-distributed income gains." He truly believes that "an economy is doing well when its super-rich are getting richer." He knows his true belief is politically unpopular, and that's why he lies. But when Fish claims that Rove believes "the health of the economy is to be gauged by looking at how big investors and property owners are doing," that is literally true. It would be better if Fish acknowledged that Rove was lying, but that would disprove his claim that there's no spin going on . . . oh never mind.

[Auto]

No, Brad got it right.

However happy Rove might be that rich Republicans are disproportionate beneficiaries of Bush's economic policies, it behooves the White House to spin that stastistic to make it appear that the gain in disposable income is widespread.

Politics 101, folks.

So no way would Rove say more than a single tight, taut, terse sentence.

[Maynard Handley]

(1) Stanley Fish is indeed a frighteningly smart guy, who has very smart things to say about how language can be used. You would do very well to listen to him, even if you don't agree with him.
You can hear him talk here:
http://name99.org/blog99/?p=81

(2) Is Fish saying anything different from the following?
There are precious few economists, as far as I can tell, who ever talk about GDP/capita and how it changes. The number you hear quoted every year, for example, is how US (or Japanese, or French) GDP changes, not how the GDP/capita changed.
Now, obviously, if your constituency is the investor class, it is growth of GDP, for the most part, that matters to you. If your constituency is most citizens, then it is GDP/capita that matters.

What should we take from the fact that Brad DeLong frequently tells us how GDP has changed, not GDP/worker?
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/gdp_13.html
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/gdp_revised_dow.html

I think Fish's larger project, based on what I've heard him say in other contexts, is that he does not like the easy cop-out of claiming that one's enemies, whether Al Qaeda, communists, Iran, or the Republican Party are evil and/or mad, end of story. He regards this as both fruitless and unproductive and, intellectually, a cop-out; and considers that what an honest person should do is to try to rreally understand what truly is motivating this enemy, even though you do not agree with it.

On the other hand I will readily concede that Fish appears to love playing devil's advocate for its own sake, loves the game of twisting language to mean whatever he wants it to mean, in much the same spirit as Ben Wolfson's immortal take on Phillip Larkin
http://waste.typepad.com/waste/2005/11/this_be_close_r.html
and I'd say that this second spirit frequently obscures the valid things he has to say, as is the case here, where he leaps from a valid point regarding moral viewpoints to the claim that Rove is not attempting to hide his true project from the public.

[mike]

Stanley Fish is one of those academics who have come to dominate english departments. Stanley believes in reader response theory. Stanley believes there is no inherent meaning in a text, its what we say it means.

So Stanley would be untroubled by Brad's criticism. After all, Stanley doesn't have to mean anything by what he says. In the topsy-turvy world of crit-lit the only trouble Stanley would see is the meaning Brad assigns to what Stanley wrote.

[Maynard Handley]

"Stanley believes there is no inherent meaning in a text, its what we say it means."

This is an exceedingly stupid paraphrasing of Fish's point.
For example what does it mean when a Republican talks about troops "defending" America in Iraq. This phrase has some communicative value to its target audience but, taken literally, it is basically meaningless --- no-one in Iraq is interested in attacking America qua America.

Fish's point is that there is frequently no canonical "inherent" meaning in language; that there are always additional meanings, sometimes subtle and implied, sometimes directly contradictory (as, IMHO, the case of "defending America") that come about because of the situation of the person uttering/writing the words and the situation of the person reading them.
Only an idiot would deny this.
To take a trivial example, the phrase "the final solution" means something very different to a European in 1910 than it does to a European in 1960.

Fish is, then, interested in taking apart language and laying visible some of these additional meanings. This has been the business of critics (of literature, art, drama etc) for hundreds of years; it's nothing new. It's also the business of people like Robert Oden, trying to understand the history and structure of the Old Testament, or Elaine Pagels doing the same for the New Testament. It's also an interest of people in very different fields, like Robert Lekowitz, an engineering manager at AT&T Wireless,
here: http://name99.org/blog99/?p=80

[Tim Bartik]

There are some confusions in Marnard Handley's post of 12:54 p.m.

First, I believe that Rove was talking about per capita economic numbers, not total economic numbers. The relevant issue is not the distinction between total economic income or output versus per capita income or output, but the distinction between average income or output versus what the income is at different percentiles of the income distribution.

Second, it is simply untrue that economists rarely talk about per capita or per household figures, or other economic well-being measures for individual households. In fact, when any economist studying the income distribution or wage trends looks at those trends, they look at per worker or per person or per household figures, or the distibution of such at various percentiles of the distribution of wages or income or whatever economic variable is being considered.

Third, when economists talk about total GDP, they are simply trying to figure out where the overall economy is going in terms of the business cycle or overall growth. So, the posts that Brad DeLong made that look at GDP growth are really just posts on how the macro-economy is faring. No economist would claim that overall GDP is a direct measure of average household economic well-being. It is simply a useful measure of the size of the economy.

[Bloix]

Fish may be exceedingly smart and he may have lots of interesting things to say, but the use of average figures to disguise disproportionate changes in sectors of a population is the oldest and simplest bit of statistical legerdemain ever devised. For Fish not to call Rove out for it means either that he is inumerate and has no business commenting or that he is a liar.

[BlueStater]

Stanley Fish is the best Miltonist in the world; I'd even venture to say the best Miltonist there ever was. But that was not good enough for him. He had to become a pundit, famous for being famous, a public intellectual, an expert in everything, which led to his being an expert in nothing (save for Milton). He was one of the leaders in turning university English departments and graduate programs into utterly frivolous enterprises. The best line (of many) about Fish I've ever heard refers to him as the Pied Piper of English studies. His views on economics deserve no more attention than his views on law, linguistics, or any of many other "multidisciplinary" forays he's made over the years. His views on Milton, on the other hand, deserve a great deal more attention than they receive -- partly because, thanks to Fish, nobody reads Milton any more.

[mike]

Maynard is so dizzy from his spin in support of Stanley Fish that he can't even comprehend what Fish stands for.

Since Maynard is congenitally incapable of explaining Fish's nutty rejection of any meaning in words other than what the reader assigns, let me quote the distinguished Fish himself.

"In the procedures I would urge," he writes, "the reader's activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning." "The objectivity of the text is an illusion and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing." "What I am suggesting is that formal units are always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not 'in' the text, and I would make the same argument for intentions."