Can We Retire Bob Herbert?

Yes, it is yet another edition of why oh why can't we have a better press corps. This time it is Bob Herbert who should be retired and sent to doing something socially useful:

Recession? What Recession?: If it looks like a recession and feels like a recession.... “Quite frankly,” said Senator Charles Schumer, peering over his glasses at the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, “I think we are at a moment of economic crisis, stemming from four key areas: falling housing prices, lack of confidence in creditworthiness, the weak dollar and high oil prices.” He asked Mr. Bernanke, at a Congressional hearing Thursday, if we were headed toward a recession.

An aide handed the chairman his dancing shoes, and Mr. Bernanke executed a flawless version of the Washington waffle.... With all due respect to the chairman, he would see the recession that so many others are feeling if he would only open his eyes. While Mr. Bernanke and others are waiting for the official diagnosis (a decline in the gross domestic product for two successive quarters), the disease is spreading and has been spreading for some time...

This is simply wrong: We may fall into a recession in the near future--odds are 50-50. We might be in a recession right now--but probably not. We almost surely were not in a recession in July-September. Ben Bernanke won't say whether we are headed for a recession because he does not know.

Herbert goes on:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards. The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking...

This is at most one-quarter true. The job market has not been as strong as the unemployment rate suggests, but it has not been extraordinarily weak. Inflation has been low--in 2002, we were scared that it was going to go too low. The problem is not that middle America's incomes have been falling since 2000: the problem is that middle America's spending has been rising rapidly while incomes have not.

And then there is:

In an interview after the hearing, Representative Hinchey discussed the disconnect between official government reports and the reality facing working families.... [T]he most popular measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, does not include the cost of energy or food, “the two most significant aspects of the increased cost of living for the American people.”

Yes, it does.

How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery.

Comments

[JJR]

When I saw the headline of Herbert's column, I couldn't bring myself to read further. I'm amazed you had the stomach to go through it.

Please NY Times: Leave the economics up to Krugman and Austan Goolsbee -- not Herbert or Ben Stein.

[Colin Danby]

I'm seeing a lot of this right now -- a weird belief, apparently popular in some libertarian circles, that the CPI is some sort of con and inflation is really much higher.

[Lewis Carroll]

But Brad, doesn't it take BOTH of these things (falling incomes and rising spending) to create the problem? In other words, if people hadn't spent, the economy would have been more sluggish, GDP lower etc. Isn't consumer demand 2/3 of the economy or something? So if consumers had only spent commensurately with their wages, we would most certainly have seen a slowdown in the economy, right?

[Retrogrouch]

Sorry, Brad, I think Bob Herbert bested you on this.

Do you not believe there is a problem? Or do you believe Bob Herbert is correct that times are harder right now for working families than it has been in the last few years?

I think Herbert is correct. I think times are toughr right now than at any other time i the last 5 years. I think the stress may not be showing up in traditional measures of the economy. And since it seems you are arguing this is not so, I must call ivory tower on you - I don't think you are in touch with what is happening in the majority of working families right now.

I'll give you his mistake about CPI, but it seems to me he has been correct about everything else. I think the job market has been weak. Any gains in income have been found at the higher end of the distribution. And if you want to write from the POV of working families, as Bob claims, what honest measure can you use other than real income?

When you make your argument about Middle America, you should note that Bob never speaks of "Middle America". When you start putting words in someone else's mouth, it rarely makes for a good rebuttal.

And as far as your statement that "middle America's spending has been rising rapidly while incomes have not", it seems more of an acknowledgement of Herbert's argument rather than a rebuttal.

When real income falls despite nominal income growing, wouldn't we EXPECT to see everything Bob talks about? And how is this NOT a problem?

Bob may use terms like recession in a colloquial rather than a technical sense, but who else is writing about the plight of working families, Maureen Dowd and Greg Mankiw?

Why are you criticizing Bob instead of helping him? It seems the noble purpose of studying economics is to help people improve their lives and fortunes. Since you clearly have a better grasp of the economics, so why not help him state his case?

Example, the Dollar has been falling, wouldn't that hurt the purchasing power of the average family, at least in the short run? Could this be contributing to the stress on working families? Would it be helpful to talk about it, and maybe propose some policy solutions?

Here's a serious question: if not for Bob Herbert and Elizabeth Warren, who even broaches the subject of the stress on working families, let alone advocates for them?

Brad, I have faith that you can be a hero here.

[Emma Anne]

I think retrogrouch has a point. BH is obviously not an economist and makes some errors in terminology (using CPI instead of core inflation, e.g.) but he is talking about real issues facing working Americans. Better to educate him than decide he's worthless, I say.

[JJR]

Retrogrouch says: "I think the job market has been weak."

Let's see some statistics here. Anecdotes don't cut it.

"Recession" is not just a word you throw around whenever you think things don't "feel" good. It has a technical definition. Herbert doesn't even try to understand.

[Winston]

Colin,

I'll flesh out those "weird" ideas for you. In 1999, the way the CPI was calculated was changed to eliminate what was felt was an upward bias in the numbers. This means that the CPI series reported today isn't directly comparable to the one reported before 1999. IF you calculate the inflation rate using the previous method then the inflation is running a bit over 6% and the US is in a recession.

Both methods are reasonable, but redefining the CPI to give a lower inflation rate is one of the reasons we're talking about 3% inflation instead of 6% as we were during the Reagan administration. Honestly, I think that 6% better represents the price increases on the basket of goods I consume (or did consume before I was forced to substitute cheaper, lower quality goods).

[Retrogrouch]

OKay, stats:

Real Income declining for bbottom 80%:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_income20070828

Employment rates declining:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_jobspict_20071102

[Colin Danby]

The question is not whether everything is great or everything is bleak, but about being specific about what's going on. Prices for milk, eggs, meat have risen in the last year (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ap) and that's important -- these are dietary staples for a lot of people. We're also in the middle of a serious financial crisis and face the possibility of a nasty recession; people with a lot of debt will be disproportionately hurt. If "real issues facing working families" is not just politician's cant, say what you mean.

And retro, Brad's been yammering about exchange rates for years!

Herbert's capable of writing well and thoughtfully, and there's definitely stuff on which Bernanke should be called. The disappointment is that instead he's phoning it in, fobbing us off with cheap populism. When I want that I'll read John Edwards speeches.

[Retrogrouch]

the more I thik of it, the more I regret offering any kid of stats in defense of my comments. I guess what I am saying is Anecdotal evidence is a legitimate form of argument. Anecdotes, after all are real world cases. You may wish to make the claim an anecdote is not representative of the norm, but then I guess it is you who need to put up the evidence of that...

As for cheap populism, well I'll take whatever I can get.

[Bruce Wilder]

I've read through Herbert's column three times now, and I have to agree with Retrogrouch. Herbert should have gotten a pass, here.

And, sorry JJR, Herbert does acknowledge the "official diagnosis (a decline in the gross domestic product for two successive quarters)" -- it is you, who are not trying to understand Herbert.

And, I don't get the "one-quarter true" assessment.

I think Brad is being more than a little unfair in picking out time periods. I do not think Herbert is complaining about inflation in 2002. And, hello, Brad, there has been considerable inflation in energy and food in the last year. Check the price of gas, of oil, of corn, of wheat, of beef, today, not in 2002.

And, most especially, let's acknowledge, in the midst of a financial crisis involving an orgy of predatory lending, that what Herbert says about credit card interest rates is 100% true.

[Colin Danby]

Winston 6% is not as on-the-face unreasonable as claims of 10% that I've run into elsewhere (which would make most current interest rates negative in real terms). And as you recognize, inflation is by its nature a construct. But as the unhinged Ron Paul showed at the same hearing, there's a lot of basic confusion out there.

Retro, the stats you pointed to are interesting and important. Why the regret? The problem with anecdotes is that people cherry-pick them to fit arguments, so you get dueling anecdotes and get no closer to truth. The move to statistics, or any sort of more aggregated data, is the moment when we acknowledge that our own feelings and impressions are often wrong, and we need some sort of check against a larger reality.

[Bruce Wilder]

The confusion between the CPI and core inflation is a legitimate clunker, but it is a forgiveable mistake, precisely because it is obvious. Better editing, please.

And, the New York Times really should both edit its opinion columns and fact-check them. That much I heartily endorse.

[knzn]

On the specific point of the weak job market, there are certainly statistics one could cite to support Mr. Herbert's case. The reason there has been any net job growth since the last recession is not that businesses have started hiring again but just that they stopped laying people off. So if you measure the health of the labor market in terms of new demand (e.g., help wanted advertising, BED gross job creation, etc.), the labor market really is extraordinarily weak. (Just to give a flavor, the Conference Board Help Wanted Index in August made a new all-time low, taking out an old record from 1958. That's admittedly distorted by the shift to online advertising, but it's striking nonetheless, given the much larger scale of the labor market today compared to 1958.)

This is also the first recovery in several decades wherein the employment-population ratio has failed to reach a new high, and indeed it has remained significantly below its high. That's partly a labor supply issue, but it still seems like enough (even just by itself) to support the contention that "the job market has been weak for years."

I think the main problem is with the definition of "recession". Mr. Herbert seems to want to use his own idiosyncratic definition -- something other than "a decline in business activity," which does not yet appear to be happening. And of course he should have fact-checked the CPI thing. (Obviously somewhere along the line, somebody confused the headline CPI with the core CPI. People like Barry Ritholtz complain that the Fed's focus on the core is deceptive, but to me that seems more like a conservative point -- favoring draconian monetary policy -- than a liberal one -- attacking Bush's record.) And of course, price increases have little to do with whether we're in a recession (under the usual definition).

[Bruce Wilder]

Colin Danby makes a good point, about measurement. One man's "warm" is another man's "cool". There's no more point in arguing the factualness of such a subjective assessment, than there would be in arguing taste. For some purposes, just saying, "70°F" would save a lot of misunderstanding.

But, people are still entitled to their tastes, likes and dislikes, and to express them and advocate for them.

Herbert is entitled evaluate the job market as weak, regardless of the nominal unemployment rate, if that's his impression and evaluation. He does not have to share Brad DeLong's subjective evaluation.

"Weak job market" does not have some canonical correspondence with a single statistic or measure. Many commentators have noted that wage growth and labor force participation have been anemic, so Herbert's observation is hardly unusual. And, of course, how the labor market "feels" varies, depending on where you are and who you are. San Franciso ain't Detroit and white ain't black. Herbert is entitled to speak from a point of view in making subjective evaluations.

[bobh]

With all due respect, I think Bob Herbert is more right than wrong about this and closer to an accurate prediction than you and some of the commenters above. We are locked into a trajectory that is leading to recession and stagflation. The use of "core inflation" by Bernanke to pretend that the dollar is holding its purcasing power for ordinary Americans and to justify inflationary FED interest rate cuts that decrease the value of our savings in order to keep up an overvalued stock market for speculators is a policy error that will increase the magnitude and duration of the coming recession. Look around you.

[Bruce Wilder]

I have to disagree with knzn -- I don't think Herbert wants to use an idiosyncratic definition of recession. And, I don't think he intends to deceive, either. He nods at the "official" definition parenthetically.

He just wants to adopt a rhetorical pose, from which to draw a contrast between elite concern about a recession, which might affect the elite, and the constancy of economic hardship, which afflicts the underclass.

Here's the meat of the column:
"The elite honchos in Washington and their courtiers in the news media are all but completely out of touch with the daily struggle of working families. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty and close to 60 million others are just a notch above the official poverty line.

"An illness, an auto accident, the loss of a job — almost anything can knock them off their rickety economic perch . . . Meanwhile, the elites are scouring the landscape for signs of a recession."

It seems a fair point. It is not, after all, 50/50 whether or not 100 million Americans will be in or near poverty tomorrow -- it is a certainty.

[knzn]

If he isn't using an idiosyncratic definition of recession, then what definition is he using? In standard English we already have the phrase "bad times," for which "recession" is not normally a synonym. Bad times we have (and have had for the past 8 years). And Mr. Herbert gives little evidence to support the conclusion that the standard definition of recession applies.

(The comment by "bobh" makes no sense to me. If we are indeed on the brink of a recession, then an easy money policy now will reduce the severity, not increase it. If anything, the problem is that Bernanke isn't sufficiently committed to using core rather than headline inflation.)

[ShortWoman]

If I were to beleive Bob Herbert, there would be a prostitute somewhere hiding in my garage (see: his recent series on Las Vegas and the perils that seem to only effect women somehow). Sorry if I'm using too technical a term here, but I'd written him off as an asshat a couple months ago.

Granted, the "official" inflation and employment statistics are manipulated in several key ways (people like Bill Fleckenstein are welcome to wax on about the details). Granted, the economy feels lousy to Joe Average. But unless he wants to present some sort of evidence that GDP is in fact being manipulated, he can't call it a recession just yet.

[anne]

I adore Bob Herbert, and am shocked that anyone would think to so denigrate his work and efforts. I have no reasonable words to describe how upset I am with such an attack by Brad DeLong.

Shame, shame, shame.

[Bob Herbert wants to claim that the word "recession" means something other than it does: don't expect me to be happy with this. Bob Herbert wants to claim that the CPI does not include food and energy costs: don't expect me to be happy with this. Bob Herbert wants to claim that statistics showing that inflation rates have been low are "flimflam": don't expect me to be happy with this.

He should care enough about accuracy to do better.]

[anne]

Imagine, here is a thinker who did all he could to prevent an insanely destructive war and occupation and who has done all he could ever since to make us understand how destructive we have been and we assume we are able to denigrate such a moral voice.

To suggest that Bob Herbert has not been useful is shameful.

[pgl]

Herbert hears some rightwing nut say the cost of food and energy are not including in the CPI and he doesn't go apeshit? The man's brain has died.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/opinion/18herbert.html?ex=1271476800&en=9f23787f95925a8f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 18, 2005

A Radical in the White House
By BOB HERBERT

Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.

That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.

To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. * He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.

After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."

Among these rights, he said, are:

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.

"The right of every family to a decent home.

"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

"The right to a good education."

I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?ex=1281153600&en=2b72c1d42e07ddea&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

August 8, 2005

The Pain Deep Inside
By BOB HERBERT

Washington

Specialist Craig Peter Olander Jr. has the look of a mischievous kid, except that his eyes sometimes telegraph that they've seen too much. And there's a weariness that tends to slip into his voice that seems unusual for someone just 21 years old. Killing can do that to a person.

Specialist Olander was a teenager from Waynesburg, Ohio, population 1,000, when he joined the Army in 2003. "It was very appealing," he said. "The benefits. College. And it was something I'd always wanted to do since I was a small boy - be in the Army."

He had mixed feelings about going to Iraq, but he wasn't particularly upset. He didn't dwell on the possibility of getting killed or wounded. And he gave no thought at all to the spiritual or psychological toll that combat can take. "I was very confident in my training and I was very religious," he said. "I'd always read Bible stories as a child and I believed the Lord would look over me and his will would be done."

He went to Iraq in early 2004 and quickly learned that nothing - not his military training, not the Bible, nothing - had adequately prepared him for the experience. By the time he returned several months later, he said, the trauma he had encountered in Iraq had reached deep inside him. There was both fear and the hint of a plea in his voice as he told me, with surprising candor, that he believed the things he'd had to do in Iraq might jeopardize the salvation of his soul.

"Our base was Camp Victory in Baghdad," he said. "We did raids, convoys, security, patrols - numerous, numerous things."

The first time he was wounded was in the spring. He suffered a severe concussion and a sprained back when insurgents attacked his convoy with an antitank weapon. The headaches that ensued were all but unbearable. He was wounded again the following August.

"I was driving the Humvee that day," he said. "The usual driver wasn't sure of the area, so we switched. He was a new fellow and he was up on the gun."

When insurgents attacked the unit with rocket-propelled grenades, Specialist Olander tried to maneuver the Humvee to safety. As he was turning, an explosion sent the vehicle into a roll.

"I stayed conscious," he said. "As soon as the vehicle stopped rolling, I hopped out and I heard my sergeant hollering on the radio that we were hit. So I knew he was O.K. ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15herbert.html?ex=1255579200&en=c6d0a53544563b0e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

October 15, 2004

Paralyzed, a Soldier Asks Why
By BOB HERBERT

DALE CITY, Va.

Sunlight was pouring through the doorway to the furnished basement of the neat two-story home on Reardon Lane. The doorway had been widened to accommodate the wheelchair of Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr., who was once a star athlete but now, at age 27, spends a lot of time in his parents' basement, watching the large flat-screen TV.

I asked the sergeant whether he ever gets depressed. "No," he said quickly, before adding, "I mean, I could say I was sad for a while. But it didn't really last long."

Sergeant Simpson's expertise is tank warfare. But the Army is stretched thin, and the nation's war plans at times have all the coherence of football plays drawn up in the schoolyard. When Sergeant Simpson's unit was deployed from Germany to Iraq, the tanks were left behind and the sergeant ended up bouncing around Tikrit in a Humvee, on the lookout for weapons smugglers and other vaguely defined "bad guys."

He said he felt more like a cop than a soldier.

One evening last April, Sergeant Simpson was the passenger in the lead vehicle of a four-vehicle convoy on a routine patrol in Tikrit. "It was a little housing area," he said. "We were just there to show a presence."

Iraqi soldiers were in the second vehicle of the convoy.

"I looked back and the Iraqi truck had stopped for some reason," Sergeant Simpson said.

He waved the driver forward, but the truck remained motionless. "That was odd," he said. "They wouldn't follow us." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/opinion/15herbert.html?ex=1281758400&en=4aa46475578896ac&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

August 15, 2005

Lives Blown Apart
By BOB HERBERT

Sema Olson was in the living room watching television when the phone rang. It was the Department of the Army calling. A voice asked if she'd heard from her son in the past 24 hours.

Ms. Olson tried to ward off the panic. "Is he still alive?" she asked.

After verifying her identity, the man on the phone assured her that her son, Bobby Rosendahl, who was stationed in Iraq, was still alive. But he'd been badly wounded.

With that Saturday night phone call, life as Ms. Olson had known it came to an end. Her family's long, long period of overwhelming sacrifice was under way.

Bobby Rosendahl, a 24-year-old Army corporal (and avid golfer) from Tacoma, Wash., was literally blown into the air last March 12 when an improvised explosive device detonated beneath his Stryker armored vehicle. He remembers landing on his back, with fuel spilling all around him and insurgents firing at him from the roof of a mosque.

Ms. Olson, during an interview in Washington, D.C., where Corporal Rosendahl is being treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, quietly cataloged her son's wounds:

"Both of his heels and ankles were crushed. He had a compound fracture of his femur in two places. Three-quarters of his kneecap was missing. His thigh was blown away. He had many, many open wounds, which all have closed except four right now."

She paused, sighed, then went on: "His left leg was amputated three weeks after he arrived here. He's not willing to give up his right leg. He's hoping to save it. All he wants to do is golf again. But we don't know. He's had 36 surgeries so far."

When you talk to close relatives of men and women who have been wounded in the war, it's impossible not to notice the strain that is always evident in their faces....

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/opinion/04herbert.html

May 4, 2006

When Warriors Come Home
By BOB HERBERT

The list of names on the Department of Defense Web site is ever-expanding: Sakoda, Davis, Mills, Gomez ...

Like a disease for which there is no vaccine and no cure, the war in Iraq drags on. American deaths have now passed 2,400. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children have died.

The suffering continues to spread like a fire sprayed with gasoline. Yesterday we heard the tragic story of Jose Gomez, a sergeant in the Army Reserve whose 21-year-old fiancée, Analaura Esparza-Gutierrez, a private, was killed by a roadside bomb in Tikrit in 2003. Last summer Sergeant Gomez, who had served in Iraq himself, was ordered to go back for a second tour. Last Friday he was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

The extent of the suffering caused by the war seldom penetrates the consciousness of most Americans. For the public at large, the dead and the wounded are little more than statistics. They're out of sight, and thus mostly out of mind.

The media are much more focused on the trendy problem of steroids in baseball than, say, the agony of the once healthy young men and women who are now struggling to resurrect their lives after being paralyzed, or losing their eyesight, or shedding one or two or three or even four limbs in Iraq.

The truth is that the suffering comes in myriad forms. I spoke by phone this week with Stefanie Pelkey, a former Army captain who lives in Spring, Tex., with her 3-year-old son, Benjamin. Her husband, Michael, a captain with the First Armored Division, was sent to Iraq just a few weeks after Benjamin was born. Michael was a big man, 6 feet 4½ inches tall, who loved to play golf and, like President Bush, ride his bicycle.

When Captain Pelkey left Iraq and rejoined his family in the summer of 2003, he seemed "really agitated," Ms. Pelkey recalled. He was hyper-vigilant, she said, and insisted on keeping a loaded 9 mm pistol by the bed in their home in Lawton, Okla....

[save_the_rustbelt]

"the disconnect between official government reports and the reality facing working families...."

Wow, it that ever correct. True, true, true.

Two groups who have trouble connecting with reality are elite academics and Washington politicians.

10% of this country is in a Gilded Age. 20% are doing pretty well. 70% aren't doing so hot.

Recession? Technically no. Realisitically, yes.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/opinion/15herbert.html

September 15, 2007

The Nightmare Is Here
By BOB HERBERT

We've heard from General Petraeus, from Ambassador Crocker, and on Thursday night from President Bush. What we haven't heard this week is anything about the tragic reality on the ground for the ordinary citizens of Iraq, which is in the throes of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

President Bush may not be aware of this. In his televised address to the nation he warned that a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq could cause a "humanitarian nightmare."

A trusted aide should take the president aside and quietly inform him that this nightmare arrived a good while ago.

When the U.S. launched its "shock and awe" invasion in March 2003, the population of Iraq was about 26 million. The flaming horror unleashed by the invasion has since forced 2.2 million of those Iraqis, nearly a tenth of the population, to flee the country. Many of those who left were professionals marked for death — doctors, lawyers, academics, the very people with the skills necessary to build a viable society.

The Iraq Ministry of Health reported that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed from April 2003 to May 2006. It is believed that nearly half of Iraq's doctors have fled. The exodus of health care professionals in a country hemorrhaging from the worst kinds of violence pretty much qualifies as nightmarish.

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally. According to the Global Policy Forum, a group that monitors international developments:

"Most of these internally displaced persons, or I.D.P.'s, have sought refuge with relatives, or in mosques, empty public buildings, or tent camps. ...I.D.P.'s live in very poor conditions. Public buildings are particularly unsanitary, often overcrowded, without access to clean water, proper sanitation and basic services, in conditions especially conducive to infectious diseases."

Iraqis are enduring most of their suffering out of the sight of the rest of the world....

[Bruce Wilder]

knzn: "If he isn't using an idiosyncratic definition of recession, then what definition is he using?"

He isn't using any definition. He's using "recession" as a trope. He's not entering a dispute about whether we are in, or are headed toward an officially defined recession; he is criticizing the detachment of such a dispute.

He's not doing it particularly well. As Colin Danby said, Herbert appears to have phoned this column in. As knzn points out, introducing a homier term, without a technical definition, might have been the course of greater discretion.

What I do not accept, however, is Brad DeLong's scorn. I still don't know what Brad thinks is three-fourths wrong about the passage he quoted.

And, if we were to get down to it, Bernanke's testimony to Congress was not particularly useful or enlightening. We've institutionalized our economic policymaking in a way that ignores fundamental problems and prevents rather than facilitates discussion of the choices we are making. If Herbert wants to make that point, I say, try, try, again.

I question how useful a liberal, Brad "can't find the mechanism" DeLong is, in any case.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/opinion/l12herbert.html

Is This 'Supporting the Troops'?

To the Editor:

My 20-year-old son is nearing the end of his first deployment to Iraq with the United States Marines. Only a few days ago, we learned that he received a commendation for initiative and bravery for pulling wounded and dead Iraqi soldiers out of a bus hit by a roadside bomb during a recent midnight convoy.

Specifically, he was recognized for "tirelessly moving multiple wounded Iraqis to the casualty collection point and loading them on the medivac helicopters ... and also volunteering to help collect the dead and ensuring that they were evaluated."

It's bad enough that my son is risking his life fighting a war that was waged on lies and deception. How infinitely more galling it is to realize that his value to the Bush administration wouldn't even merit decent care at Walter Reed if he were wounded or disabled.

Bob Herbert is right about the troops being shortchanged: it's something I never thought that America would do either.

My son has been commended for extending a degree of professionalism, respect and devotion to duty in aiding wounded Iraqi soldiers that the United States government doesn't extend to its own troops.

The horror, the horror.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, March 8, 2007

[dissent]

Wow, long thread.
To this exchange:

Retrogrouch says: "I think the job market has been weak."

Let's see some statistics here. Anecdotes don't cut it.

I'll offer not stats but a view from my corner: software/IT. The unemployment rate is low for this group BUT hundreds of thousands of people had to leave the field after the tech bust and they have never gotten re-hired in the field. They're gone.

Still the unemployment rate for technical folks is very low.

See why people don't trust the statistics?

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/opinion/08herbert.html

March 8, 2007

Lift the Curtain
By BOB HERBERT

Neglect, incompetence, indifference, lies.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president's office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration's moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush's catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for "hillbilly armor" — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

Fellow soldiers cheered when the question was raised, and others asked why they were being sent into combat with antiquated equipment. The defense secretary was not amused. "You go to war with the Army you have," he callously replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." ...

[Colin Danby]

looks like it's gonna be the complete works of Bob H until we say uncle.

[anne]

Imagine, how shameful the criticism of such a moral force as though we would criticize Desmond Tutu similarly and we have even been criticizing Tutu as unfairly. We are wantonly squandering more than $2 trillion on war and occupation as though the century's risen imperialists and ignoring the needs of millions on millions of Americans.

We can afford $200 billion for the needless horror of Iraq this year, but not $7 billion to protect the health of 3.8 million children. And, we would so criticize a person of peace. Shameful.

[Kathy]

"The job market has not been as strong as the unemployment rate suggests, but it has not been extraordinarily weak."

Yes, it has. You are wrong.

I'm guessing that you are basing this statement on metrics and economic models with maybe a few quadratic equations thrown in for good measure.

I, on the other hand, am basing my flat statement above on that dreaded nemesis of all economists and financial analysts: personal experience.

I just found a job after looking for six months, being on unemployment only part of that time. The job I found is in my field, but it's only 25 hours a week. Which is nothing to sneeze at, because I'm being paid $20/hour, but there are no benefits, I only get paid for the hours I work, and it's only about $26,000 a year (on a calculator; it's less in reality because there are days I can't work my scheduled hours), which gets the ends of the rope almost touching, but not quite. Recently a couple of people at my new company were let go for budget reasons. I have no feeling that I am home free, although I'm grateful I have some money coming in.

More to the point, I am not the only one. If I were, obviously I would not be telling you that you are wrong. But the fact is, I am far from the only one. Before I found this job (and btw, it was pure luck that I found it; the person who hired me is a friend of the counselor I was seeing at one of the family services agencies I used.), a jobs counselor I saw (different person) was taking down basic information about me, and I asked her if the job market was really as bad as it seemed to me (you know, to reassure myself there wasn't something wrong with me). She replied, instantly, "This is the worst job market I have ever seen. I've never seen it this bad." This was an older woman, so she's seen a lot of years of job markets. But she has been having extraordinary difficulties placing people.

I know that the view from the street corner can be misleading. But the view from the corner office is not perfect, either. And just because Bob Herbert makes a mistake about what's included in the Consumer Price Index does not mean he's wrong about everything he says. He's not.

[Kathy]

"Let's see some statistics here. Anecdotes don't cut it."

This is exactly what's wrong with both Brad's analysis in particular and conventional economic measures in general.

Real people are behind those anecdotes -- people who can't pay their bills, who use credit cards to buy groceries, who put off doctor's visits because they don't have health insurance, who have to work 2 or 3 or 4 part-time jobs (if they can find even those) because full-time work in their fields is simply not available.

Your obvious contempt for real people's real life experience is extremely offensive to me. I'm not saying that to get an apology or to shut you up; I just think that when people like you make statements that are clearly based on largely unexamined assumptions, those statements should be challenged.

[anne]

All Bob Herbert was trying to noter is that Core Price Index figures exclude food and energy prices, which they surely do. Herbert of course had in mind those people who have suffered through this relatively difficult economic period, especially no doubt people of color who are always of concern to Herbert and who have fared relatively poorly through this Administration and more so recently.

The column was fine, and Herbert is a brilliant moral compass who deserves only respect and admiration.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/winter-of-our-discontent/

November 6, 2007

Winter of Our Discontent
By Paul Krugman

Oil at $97!

And heating bills are going to be a very big problem.

[anne]

Food matters, and high priced decent foods are a problem for poorer Americans. Try finding a Whole Foods store in poorer neighborhoods, and affording it in any case. Fuel is a problem, a big problem. Study on study shows a targeting of households of color for the highest risk-priced mortgages no matter the real risk. Looked at the cost of colleges and universities lately? Looked at the cost of health care? Looked at job creation now and during the 1990s? Looked at wage increases now and then?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/opinion/01herbert.html

November 1, 2004

Days of Shame
By BOB HERBERT

Overseas, our troops are being mauled in the long dark night of Iraq - a war with no end in sight that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,100 American troops and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of innocent Iraqis.

At home, the party of the sitting president is systematically stomping on the right of black Americans to vote, a vile and racist practice that makes a mockery of the president's claim to favor real democracy anywhere.

This will never be seen as a shining moment in U.S. history.

There is a hallucinatory quality to the news as Americans prepare to vote tomorrow in what is probably the most critical election the country has faced since 1932. Osama bin Laden made his bizarre cameo appearance on Friday, taunting the president who once promised to get him dead or alive. Commentators have been compulsively reading the tea leaves ever since, trying to determine who was helped by the video, George W. Bush or John Kerry.

On Saturday, as if to take our minds off the sideshow, nine more American marines were killed in the Iraq slaughterhouse. It was the deadliest day for U.S. forces in six months. The death toll for Iraqis, which the U.S. government has tried mightily to keep from the American people, is flat out horrifying. Unofficial estimates of the number of Iraqis killed in the war have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000. But a survey conducted by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad compared the death rates of Iraqis before and after the American invasion. They estimated that 100,000 more Iraqis have died in the 18 months since the invasion than would have been expected based on Iraqi death rates before the war.

The scientists acknowledged that the survey was difficult to compile and that their findings represent a rough estimate. But even if they were off by as many as 20,000 or 40,000 deaths, their findings would still be chilling.

Most of the widespread violent deaths, the scientists reported, were attributed to coalition forces. "Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces," the report said, "were women and children."

That people are dying by the tens of thousands in a war that did not have to be fought - a war that was launched by the United States - is mind-boggling.

Also mind-boggling is the attempt by Republican Party elements to return the U.S. to the wretched days of the mid-20th century when many black Americans faced harassment, intimidation and worse for daring to exercise their fundamental right to vote. A flier circulating extensively in black neighborhoods in Wisconsin carries the heading "Milwaukee Black Voters League." It asserts that people are not eligible to vote if they have voted in any previous election this year; if they have ever been found guilty of anything, even a traffic violation; or if anyone in their family has ever been found guilty of anything.

"If you violate any of these laws," the flier says, "you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you." ...

[pgl]

Lost in all the Herbert columns is a wee mistake I made. The Congresmman from NY is a Democrat and not likely a wingnut. OK - but then to confuse core inflation with CPI inflation is still goofy. Hey Herbert's intentions here may have been OK as many of Brad's critics on this one note. But please - couldn't we expect higher quality writing from the NY Times (except when they invite the village idiot or was it hack known as David Brooks to write an oped).

[Chris]

I'm with Tom on this one:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/aMVp/~3/182907177/i-give-this-one-to-herbert.html

[Retrogrouch]

Colin Danby: “Retro, the stats you pointed to are interesting and important. Why the regret?”

I started thinking that there are many things happening in our society that are not captured by government statistics. A few years back, the Bush BLS decided not to report on mass layoffs anymore - I think we can agree it still happens even if there are no stats to verify it. Many stats that measure very real and very negative economic forces acting on Americans have a lag time that render them inadequate for “real time” conclusions. So, in cases like this, anecdotal evidence is perfectly legit, and may be all we have. Your point about some people cherry picking for the purpose of misleading is well taken. I just don’t see hat Herbert has a track record of this. In fact his track record seems to be rather good - he has a good network. Given that, I was starting to resent having to back him up. I think many economists get so caught up in the data we do have, they often forget the limitations.

Pgl: “But please - couldn't we expect higher quality writing from the NY Times”

No. I wish we cold, but we cannot. At least Bob is trying to point out the problems of our current economy. ll we could expect from Brooks is commentary about people in the income bracket that can afford Viking ranges. All we can expect from Dowd is wardrobe critique. Krugman gives us excellent policy analysis, but he’s not out talking about specific real people. Herbert gives us the specific real people, but lightweight (to be kind) policy analysis. Still Bob and Paul are both on the long end of the moral compass needle, so ... I guess we can only pray Bob gets some some chocolate in Paul’s peanut butter, and Paul gets some peanut butter in Bob’s chocolate.

Dissent & Kathy - [read their comments]

I think your experiences better illustrate my comments about stats v. anecdote better than anything I have been able to write. Thank you.

Colin Danby: “looks like it's gonna be the complete works of Bob H until we say uncle.”

ROTFL.

UNCLE!

[knzn]

Kathy, as Colin Danby pointed out earlier in this thread, the problem with anecdotes is that people on both sides of an argument can always find anecdotes to support their side. For example, I've heard anecdotes about how hard it is to find workers these days. There's no way to tally up the sum of all available anecdotes except by using statistics. Anecdotes are useful for understanding the human significance of the statistics, but they can't begin to settle a question like whether the job market is extremely weak.

However, as I pointed out earlier, there are plenty of statistics one could cite that show an extremely weak labor market. Your anecdote reminds me of another statistic: the average duration of unemployment is higher today than it was at the depth of the 1975 recession. (Previously I cited help wanted advertising and, by allusion, the Business Employment Dynamics data, which show very little creation of new jobs -- less than in 1992, for example, which was considered a very weak job market at the time; and other have cited weak wage growth.)

If all the statistics paint a coherent picture, it is one of an "illiquid" or "quiescent" labor market. That is, there just isn't much going on: not many workers looking for work, and not many employers looking for workers. I would argue that such a labor market should be considered weak, because there isn't much upward pressure on wages: when employers aren't hiring, they have little reason to raise wages, no matter how few people are looking for jobs.

[Joe S.]

Bad Brad! No enemies on the left!

We used to do this a lot in the 1990's--attack the fuzzier thinkers on our team. In public. It might have made sense then, but it doesn't now. Our team has won that battle. (FWIW, Ward Churchill is not on our team; Bob Herbert is.) We don't need to discredit and displace the fuzzy thinkers on our side. We do need a better set of propagandists, whether they think fuzzy or clean.

I don't know if Herbert is an effective propagandist or not. I'm not skilled in those black arts, and cannot detect those so skilled. If he is, no enemies on the left. Please.

[knzn]

Retrogrouch, I don't think the problem is so much that people can cherry pick anecdotes to intentionally mislead, but that everyone's individual experience (and even regional experience, or experience of a particular industry) is a very limited picture. It's kind of like the blind men with the elephant. Statistics get you a little closer to seeing the whole elephant. If you know how to interpret the mosaic of statistics in combination with relevant anecdotes that help explain their practical meaning, you can get a lot closer to seeing the whole elephant.

Today's labor market statistics, for all their diversity, form a coherent picture for me when taken together (along with many of the anecdotes I've heard). There really aren't many people looking for work, but those that are looking are having a very hard time finding jobs. And there really is growing employment, but not because firms are doing much hiring, but because they aren't laying many people off. But layoffs are more salient, because when you do get laid off, it's harder to find a new job.

[Sly Bri]

Well at least Herbert didn't run out the soup kitchen nonsense like he is apt to do from time to time.

[Retrogrouch]

knzn: :veryone's individual experience (and even regional experience, or experience of a particular industry) is a very limited picture"

I think you are underestimating the social information networks of everyday people. When I say that my personal experience tells me the economy is as rough as I've seen it since winter 2001 and compares with summer 1991, I'm aklting about personally acquired data points. The datum from Kathy or the datum from Dissent just add to the data. I think it is fair to say these data indicate *something* is going on.

To use the elephant metaphor, we are feeling something snake-like. We may need more data to ID the elephant, but the data provided is only incomplete - it isn't *wrong*.

[knzn]

I realize that people's anecdotal impressions include what they've heard from other people, but I still think they can give a biased view of the economy, because individual social information networks are biased. For example, if you are a college graduate working in the information industry in northern California, a disproportionate number of your social contacts will be similar, and you may totally miss information from, say, high school graduates working in the auto industry in Kentucky.

[Bob Herbert Sucks]

I advised long ago that Bob Herbert should simply title each of his op-eds "Kill Me Now. Life Sucks." To call him or moralist is absurd.

[anne]

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

1925

The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

[anne]

Notice all the inane hatred that pours forth from all the inane haters. My, my. I wonder why. I rather think I know all too well.

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[Kenneth Almquist]

pgl: "Couldn't we expect higher quality writing from the NY Times?"

You and Brad are professional economists. Bob Herbert is a journalist who, as far as I know, has never taken an economics course in his life. Given that disparity, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that Bob Herbert comes across as an economic illiterate.

I do wonder why the New York Times doesn't do a better job of fact checking its Op-Ed pieces, but Brad doesn't indicate that he fact checked his blog post. My guess is that the reason that Brad, unlike Herbert, got the definition of CPI right is not superior fact checking on Brad's part. Rather, I suspect that this is a topic that Brad knows like the back of his hand--one that he is able to get right without fact checking.

A journalist is a generalist, not a specialist, and as such can be expected to make mistakes that a specialist would not. You can certainly hope for higher quality writing in the New York Times, and in fact if you read Bob Herbert for a while I think you will find that most of his efforts are better than this one. But I don't think you can expect the generalist to consistently live up to the standards of the specialist.

[Then he shouldn't be writing about this topic, should he? And he should know that he shouldn't be writing about this topic, shouldn't he?]

[M. Simon]

Anne,

You are so right about Herbert's moral voice.

What could be more moral than abandoning the Iraqi people to the head choppers?

If his economic understanding matches his moral understanding he should be listened to avidly by the great and small. He has a lot to teach us all.

[davod]

"Try finding a Whole Foods store in poorer neighborhoods, and affording it in any case."

Whole Foods is now the benchmark for the suppply of food to the nations poor?

[John Drake]

“Try finding a Whole Foods store in poorer neighborhoods, and affording it in any case.”

Try finding a Tiffany’s in poorer neighborhoods.

But on a more serious vain, how many people believe the CPI accurately reflects the increases in the things they buy? At the very least, it’s disconnected with people’s perceptions of rising costs. For example, CPI does not directly reflect the increase in prices of residential real estate. Instead it uses the rent of tenet-occupied and imputed rental value of owner-occupied housing. This might work if rent increases tracked housing price increases. But since about 2000 real rents have stayed about flat while the Case-Shiller index has gone through the roof. (See Figure 1 from Shiller’s Jackson Hole talk.) Then we have hedonistic adjustments, quality adjustments and the change from an arithmetic mean to the geometric mean. Shouldn’t BLS also publish some kind of unadjusted market basket?

The core inflation excludes volatile components like energy and food. Why eliminate these components instead of down weighting them by something like 1/variance? After all people do buy these components however volatile they might be. BTW Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that this measure is no better than a moving average of the Consumer Price Index as a predictor of inflation http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr236.html

[Dan - NYC]

"Can We Retire Bob Herbert?"

I doubt it. He's relatively young and his sinecure at the Times seems secure. I think the best we can hope for is the return of TimesSelect.

"How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery."

Not really. The Times had earmarked a slot for a liberal columnist of color with experience at a major daily. That narrowed the field considerably, and since BoHerb had already made his bones at the down-market Daily News he was a prime candidate. "Diversity" was achieved, albeit at the expense of literary and intellectual quality. But it could have turned out much worse. Eugene Robinson was on their short list too.

[anne]

Simply notice the crazed viciousness of the attacks against any person, let alone a voice of incredible intelligence and decency.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03herbert.html

November 3, 2007

Worsening the Odds
By BOB HERBERT

Lonnie Lynam, a self-employed carpenter in Pipe Creek, Tex., specialized in spiral staircases. Friends thought of him as a maestro in a toolbelt, a whiz with a hammer and nails.

"His customers were always so pleased," his mother told me. "There was this one family, kind of higher class, and he built them one of those glass holders that you would see in a bar or a lounge, with the glasses hanging upside down in different sizes. It was awesome."

Lonnie had a following, a reputation. He was said to have a magic touch.

What he didn't have was health insurance.

So when the headaches came, he tried to ignore them. "We've had migraines in our family," said his mother, Betty Lynam, who is 67 and lives in Creston, Iowa. "So he thought that was what it was."

Lonnie's brother, Kelly, said: "He wasn't the type to complain. And since he didn't have insurance ..."

Kelly, 45, worked on different jobs with his brother. He was the one who rushed Lonnie to an emergency room one day last fall when the headaches became so severe that Lonnie couldn't stand up.

It would be great if there were something unusual about this story: A person without health insurance gets sick. The person holds off on going to the doctor because there's no way to pay the bill. The person is denied the full range of treatment because of the absence of insurance. The person dies.

Lonnie Lynam's headaches had been caused by cancerous tumors in his brain. During surgery, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread from other parts of his body.

Cancer is no longer the all-but-automatic death sentence that it once was. Extraordinary progress has been made in fighting the myriad forms of the disease.

But, as the American Cancer Society has recently been stressing, the health coverage crisis in the U.S. is a major drag on this fight.

"A woman without health insurance who gets a breast cancer diagnosis is at least 40 percent more likely to die," said John Seffrin, the cancer society's chief executive.

According to the cancer society: "Uninsured patients and those on Medicaid are much more likely than those with private health insurance to be diagnosed with cancer in its later stages, when it is more often fatal."

The uninsured (and underinsured) are also much less likely to get the most effective treatment after the diagnosis is made.

There are 47 million Americans without health insurance and another 17 million with coverage that will not pay for the treatments necessary to fight cancer and other very serious diseases.

The bottom line, said Mr. Seffrin, is that "the number of people who are suffering needlessly from cancer because they don't have access to quality health care is very large and increasing as I speak."

Part two of the Lynam family's nightmare began when Lonnie returned home from the hospital. Lonnie had very little money, so Kelly stepped in and began paying most of his brother's nonmedical bills....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html

October 23, 2007

The Long, Dark Night
By BOB HERBERT

Nashville

I was making small talk with Dan and Sharon Brodrick in a waiting area filled with anxious-looking patients on the first floor of St. Thomas Hospital. Mrs. Brodrick seemed tired, but she managed a smile. Her husband, a former truck driver who is now an ordained minister, was the talkative one.

"We found out five days after her 56th birthday," he said. "How's that for a happy birthday?"

While maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, the Brodricks, married 37 years and still deeply in love, are spinning toward the abyss.

"We're in big trouble," said Mr. Brodrick.

Mrs. Brodrick learned last May that she had cancer of the duodenum, and it had already spread to her liver and pancreas. Not only is the prognosis grim, but the medical expenses will soon leave the couple destitute. Mrs. Brodrick has no health insurance.

The emotional toll has been nearly as devastating as the physical. Mrs. Brodrick told her husband that she wasn't ready to leave him. "I don't want to die," she said. When he told her they had to cling to their faith in God, she replied, "I know that God can take care of this. But how's he going to do it?"

The American Cancer Society has been campaigning to raise awareness of the desperate plight of people trying to deal with cancer without health insurance. I offer Dan and Sharon Brodrick as Exhibit A.

The Brodricks never had much money, but they raised two boys and managed to buy a modest home in Gainesboro, a rural town about 90 miles east of here. Dan Brodrick severely damaged his back in an accident at work several years ago and is disabled. His wife has suffered from a variety of illnesses.

But by carefully managing their meager income, they have lived in reasonable comfort. "With a little bit of savings," said Mr. Brodrick, "and with what I've been drawing in disability, we figured we'd be all right."

But the absence of health insurance for Mrs. Brodrick left a gaping hole in their financial plan, and they knew it. She had been covered by her husband's health insurance while he was driving a truck. But that coverage ended when he was forced to retire.

"We tried to buy insurance for her," said Mr. Brodrick. "We applied to dozens of companies. But they wouldn't touch her because she already had health problems."

Without insurance, Mrs. Brodrick received treatment for her various ailments under a special program for uninsured patients at St. Thomas. But the cancer diagnosis was an entirely different story, a step for the Brodricks into a realm of dizzying, unrelieved horror.

First came the biopsy, accompanied by reassuring comments from doctors. Then came word that the tumor was indeed malignant. That was followed by surgery.

"They opened her up, and then they closed her right up again," said Mr. Brodrick.

Not only had the cancer metastasized, it was moving very aggressively. Various estimates were given, each one shorter than the last, about how long Mrs. Brodrick might live.

While his wife was being prepped for chemo, Mr. Brodrick sat in the corner of another room and spoke about what it was like to have one's life all but literally blown apart.

"It tears you down," he said. "You'd like to fight this with your bare hands, but you can't. We've been married 37 years Sept. 2, and when I think about it, it was the quickest 37 years I've ever seen go by in my life. It went by in a flash. And we have leaned on each other that whole time."

The hospital is not billing the Brodricks for its costs. "But," said Mr. Brodrick, "I've still got to pay the doctors' bills and pay for the drugs. And the drugs are very expensive."

He reeled off a long list of charges that are coming at him like machine-gun fire, bills that he cannot afford to pay....

[Moneyrunner]

Is Anne stalking Bob Herbert? Her comments are more than a little creepy.

[anne]

Thank you, Dear Bob Herbert, thank you for being such a wonderful voice for American idealism. Thank you, Dear Bob Herbert for being the voice of American decency.

[anne]

Notice the crazed viciousness of the attacks against a voice of intelligency and decency, attacks against all that is American idealism.

[Neil]

I've always been of the opinion that the federal government's economic policies should always be based on my personal sitaution. After all, I am more representative of the country as a whole than anyone else. They should just index the price of Golden Grahams at my local Safeway to keep track of the cost of essential goods.

In the meantime, I am doing everything I can to improve my situation by posting comments on how the government needs to look out for me more. Eventually, with enough of these comments on various blogs, we will have a Democratic Congress that will solve my--and by proxy, all of our--economic problems.

I'm glad that this one lone columnist has the guts to stand up and criticize the President for his failings in a paper whose readers aren't always receptive to such radical ideas.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06herbert.html

October 6, 2007

Send in the Clowns
By BOB HERBERT

It's embarrassing.

The U.S. is going through a transitional period at least as important as the early post-World War II years. New worlds in energy, technology, the economy and global interdependence are either upon us or coming fast.

Yet much of the nation's top leadership is either wasting its time on complete nonsense or trying with great determination to push us back to the era of top hat and tails.

Among other things, Republicans are trying to figure out what to do about Larry Craig, the loony senator from Idaho who got caught in a public toilet behaving as if he thought the promised land was just one stall away.

Democrats, unable to do anything about George W. Bush's policy of eternal war in Iraq, found themselves reduced to fulminating in official Congressional proceedings about the latest wackiness from Rush Limbaugh.

Meanwhile, the president and his priceless band of can't-get-it-right-wingers, are busy vetoing health insurance for children, dreaming up secret torture protocols, funneling lucrative federal contracts to friends and cronies and fulfilling their paramount mission — making the very rich richer.

So much for leadership.

The nation's failure to deal constructively with the new realities of employment, education, health care, retirement and so on has taken a toll.

The Times's David Leonhardt, in a column that ran in September, noted that when Americans think about their lives in relation to the past, they are very upbeat. Life for most Americans is better than it was for their parents and grandparents.

"But," wrote Mr. Leonhardt, "when the discussion is about the future, the national mood darkens. In one typical poll from last year, only 34 percent of people said they expected today's children to be better off than people are now, down from 55 percent when a similar question was asked in 1999."

Americans have every reason to be concerned. A study released last spring showed that men who are now in their 30s earn less than their fathers' generation did at the same age. The median income for men in their 30s in 1974, in today's inflation-adjusted dollars, was $40,210. According to the study, which used Census figures compiled for 2004, those annual earnings had dropped to $35,010.

President Bush's unconscionable veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program comes at a time when the number of uninsured children is rising and employer-based health insurance is going the way of rotary phones and carbon paper. That's not neglect. That's willfully doing harm to children.

In the first two or three decades after World War II, there was a broad sense of optimism, a strongly held belief, despite many crises, that Americans could achieve great things. Men and women of talent and vision gave us the Marshall Plan, the G.I. Bill, the interstate highway program, the Peace Corps, the space program, the civil rights movement and much more.

Where is the comparable vision for the early-21st century? Who is rallying America with the clarion call that we can do great things?

From the Republicans, we get the message that the most important thing to hold on to is fear itself. The terrorists are out to get us. From the Democrats, heavily armed with thermometers, barometers and windmills, comes the usual timidity. They behave as if their hearts would stop if they actually took a tough stand.

Meanwhile, there are many millions of Americans who are not doing well, and the nation is not addressing their plight. Thirty-seven million Americans, many of them children, are officially classified as poor. What is not widely known is that another 57 million are struggling just one notch above the poverty line. This is spelled out in a new book, "The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America," by Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen.

Near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four. They work at jobs that are highly unstable and offer few if any benefits. Many of their children would qualify for insurance coverage under the S-chip program that the president so coldly vetoed on Wednesday....

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23herbert.html

March 23, 2006

George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War
By BOB HERBERT

Call it the trillion-dollar war.

George W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60 billion. When Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, said the war was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was fired.

Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and a fanatical hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

The president and his hot-for-war associates were as wrong about the money as they were about the weapons of mass destruction.

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.

"Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by 2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars," the authors say.

The study was released earlier this year but has not gotten much publicity. The analysis by Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes goes beyond the immediate costs of combat operations to include other direct and indirect costs of the war that, in some cases, the government will have to shoulder for many years.

These costs, the study says, "include disability payments to veterans over the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to their home bases."

The study also notes that Defense Department expenditures that were not directly appropriated for Iraq have grown by more than 5 percent since the war began. But a portion of that increase has been spent "on support for the war in Iraq, including significantly higher recruitment costs, such as nearly doubling the number of recruiters, paying recruitment bonuses of up to $40,000 for new enlistees and paying special bonuses and other benefits, up to $150,000 for current Special Forces troops that re-enlist."

"Another cost to the government," the study says, "is the interest on the money that it has borrowed to finance the war."

Among the things taken into account by the study are some of the difficult-to-quantify but very real costs inflicted by the war on the American economy and society, such as the effect of the war on oil prices, and the economic loss that results from the many thousands of Americans wounded and killed in the war.

The study does not address the substantial costs of the war borne by Iraq or by any other countries besides the United States....

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28herbert.html

November 28, 2005

Cut Our Losses
By BOB HERBERT

Washington — Jack Murtha is as tough as they come, but he's seen enough of the misguided, mismanaged, mission impossible war in Iraq to know that it's not sustainable, not worth the continued killing and butchering and psychological maiming of thousands of American G.I.'s.

"I mean, this was a war done on the cheap and we're paying a heavy price for it," he said in an interview just before Thanksgiving.

Mr. Murtha is the Pennsylvania congressman, former marine and traditional war hawk whose call for a quick withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has intensified the national debate over the war. He makes weekly visits to wounded troops in military hospitals, and when he talks about their suffering it sometimes seems as if his own heart is breaking.

"These kids are magnificent," he said. "They've done their duty."

He talked about the former Notre Dame basketball player Danielle Green, a left-handed guard ("heck of a player") who lost her left hand in a rocket attack in Baghdad. And he recalled a young marine who was trying to defuse a bomb when it exploded. "It blinded him and took his hands off," said Mr. Murtha. "It killed the guy behind him."

In Congressman Murtha's view, the troops who have displayed so much valor and made so many sacrifices in Iraq deserved better from their leadership here at home. "We went in with insufficient forces," he said. "We had people in the wrong [specialties], people driving trucks who couldn't back trucks up. We had security forces without radios. I found 40,000 troops without body armor."

He has no faith in President Bush's repeated calls to stay the course. "The number of incidents have gone from 150 a week to 772 a couple of weeks ago," he said. As additional U.S. forces have been deployed, casualty rates have increased, not decreased. And his many conversations with G.I.'s have convinced him that American fighting men and women don't have much confidence in their Iraqi allies.

"They don't trust them - that's all there is to it," said Mr. Murtha. The disparagement of Iraqi security forces by American troops was so widespread that Mr. Murtha was surprised when one soldier "started talking about how good they are, how much they've improved, and so forth."

It was a miscommunication. The congressman soon realized that the soldier was talking about how much the insurgents had improved; how they had become more sophisticated, and thus "more deadly." ...

[Moneyrunner]

I can understand Bob Herbert's pessimism. He is, after all, working in a dying industry. He is well paid but there are fewer and fewer people working for the NY Times.

I wonder why that is when the Times has so many adoring fans? And why has the stock dropped from $50 to under $19 in five years? Help us Bob Herbert.

[Moneyrunner]

I can understand Bob Herbert's pessimism. He is, after all, working in a dying industry. He is well paid but there are fewer and fewer people working for the NY Times.

I wonder why that is when the Times has so many adoring fans? And why has the stock dropped from $50 to under $19 in five years? Help us Bob Herbert.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/opinion/27herbert.html

October 27, 2005

Driving Blind as the Deaths Pile Up
By BOB HERBERT

Much of the nation is mourning the more than 2,000 American G.I.'s lost to the war in Iraq. But some of the mindless Washington weasels who sent those brave and healthy warriors to their unnecessary doom have other things on their minds. They're scrambling about the capital, huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that their habits of deception, which are a way of life with them, don't finally land them in a federal penitentiary.

See them sweat. The most powerful of the powerful, the men who gave the president his talking points and his marching orders, are suddenly sending out distress signals: Don't let them send me to prison on a technicality.

This is not, however, about technicalities. You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit that gave us the war that never should have happened.

Oh, it was heady stuff for a while - nerds and naïfs swapping fantasies of world domination and giddily manipulating the levers of American power. They were oh so arrogant and glib: Weapons of mass destruction. Yellowcake from Niger. The smoking gun morphing into a mushroom cloud.

Now look at what they've wrought. James Dao of The Times began his long article on the 2,000 American dead with a story that was as typical as it was tragic:

"Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane from Iraq and an impish grin on his face, sauntered unannounced into his wife's hospital room in Georgia just hours after she had given birth to their second son."

The article described how Sergeant Jones, over a blissful two-week period last May, "cooed over their baby and showered attention on his wife."

"Three weeks later, on June 14," wrote Mr. Dao, "Sergeant Jones was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on his third tour in a war that is not yet three years old. He was 25."

Three times Sergeant Jones was sent to Iraq, which tells you all you need to know about the fairness and shared sacrifices of this war. If you roll the dice enough times, they're guaranteed to come up snake eyes.

Sergeant Jones told his wife, Kelly, that he had "a bad feeling" about heading back to Iraq for a third combat tour. After his death, his wife found a message that he had left for her among his letters and journal entries.

"Grieve little and move on," he wrote. "I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves."

In addition to the more than 2,000 dead, an additional 15,000 Americans have been wounded. Some of these men and women have sacrificed one, two and even three limbs. Some have been permanently blinded and others permanently paralyzed - some both. Some have been horribly burned.

For the Iraqis, the toll is beyond hideous. Perhaps 30,000 dead, of which an estimated 10 percent have been children. The number of Iraqi wounded is anybody's guess.

This is what happens in war, which is why wars should only be fought when there is utterly and absolutely no alternative....

[anne]

Thank you, Dear Adored Bob Herbert.

[kstills]

Lol, nice Anne.

However, you lost me when you posted how great Mr. Herbert thought FDR was. It's easy to trace the decline of individualism to that particular POTUS, and the racial and class divisions he created are still extent in this society.

[PersonFromPorlock]

Regarding its use in a number of Mr. Herbert's columns, it should be pointed out that "squandered" is not a Progressive word: the proper term is "invested."

[PersonFromPorlock]

Whoops, embarassing; I see it's Anne, not Herbert who used "squander." That'll teach me to read an hour before I comment. The point on nomenclature remains, however.

[Bruce Rheinstein]

If Bob Herbert wants to say everything is going to Hell in a handbasket that's one thing, but economic terms such as recession have definitions that Herbert ignores at his peril. To redefine them to fit his own subjective feelings of gloom and doom is a form of Newspeak.

[Quilly_Mammoth]

Hi Brad, long time no talk. I'm concerned that any predictions we make about the economy are going to be wrong because all the tools we use leave out a significant portion of the economy...illegal immigrants and the black economy they live in.

With the decline in housing starts who is going to be let go first? Anecdotally crew sizes are shrinking in all the trades, and the faces going away are brown. How does that get reported? I think it doesn't.

[Reid]

Firstly, Anne, filling up space with Herbert columns is really rude. What makes you think this is an effective means of persuasion?

Now, whatever one's perspective, do we have any constructive recommendations on what might be done to make the economy better since nobody can claim it is or ever has been perfect?

There have been a number of articles I have read which have pointed out that the misguided bankruptcy reform put in place a negative feedback which has compounded the housing market debacle. And, by converting previously unsecured debt into effectively secured debt, it wrenched open the seams of the entire debt market, leading to the subprime mortgage debauch.

As far as I am concerned, the credit card companies are no better than crack dealers seeking to hook vulnerable people into what is effectively indentured servitude for their entire lives. They are predators who do not deserve the expanded protection they have received.

Thoughts, anyone?

[anne]

http://atbozzo.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-give-this-one-to-herbert.html

November 10, 2007

I Give This One to Herbert
By Tom Bozzo

Brad DeLong is very unhappy with Bob Herbert. Herbert's latest column says:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards. The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking...

DeLong's verdict:

This is at most one-quarter true.

I say:

Oh no, Good Brad DeLong has been transported beyond our workaday four to twenty-six ordinary dimensions to Earth-W [*], and an Evil Doppelganger has taken his place! (Note to Brad's colleagues: be on the lookout for unexplained facial hair and/or agitation over the need to "fix" the Social Security system.)

Let's take Herbert's claims one at a time:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise.

Check. Joe Stiglitz (h/t Felix Salmon) describes a "bankruptcy boom" in the new Vanity Fair. Stiglitz notes, "Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent." This is despite the 2005 bankruptcy "reform" legislation. Foreclosure rates likewise are soaring. (I suspect that this is what may be meant by "homelessness;" I won't argue with Brad that the NYT's copy-editing has gone to the dogs.) Actual homelessness statistics are hard to come by [PDF], but they appear to show increases in homelessness over the last 20 years or so. It would stand to reason that inability to pay one's mortgage is at least associated with an increased hazard of loss of housing of all sorts.

The job market has been weak for years.

Check. See again Stiglitz:

A young male in his 30s today has an income, adjusted for inflation, that is 12 percent less than what his father was making 30 years ago.

The labor market's generally lagging growth is a longstanding problem, as our Angry Bear friends have documented repeatedly.

The auto industry is in trouble.

Check. It's perhaps in less trouble per headline statistics than it might be, but the part of the industry associated with domestic union jobs certainly isn't helped by its reliance on manufacturing gas-guzzling trucks. Plus, it's only a few percent of the economy, even if it's a very visible few percent. The uncomfortable truth here is that the "macroeconomy" is an analytical fiction. This economy is composed of firms and individuals that may be grouped into somewhat less-fictional sectors, some of which are in or seemingly headed towards deep recessions (housing, housing-related finance), others that appear to be there (autos), and others that are hanging in or better. For now.

The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards.

Check. In non-elite world, putting a grand or two of extra expenses on plastic is a step towards the bankruptcy and/or foreclosure nightmares.

The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families.

This states a conclusion that may not require a response. It does, however, seem to be shared by a sizeable chunk of the non-elite country which has been expressing deep-rooted pessimism about the future of the economy.

That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking.

Perhaps the reading that "flimflammery" implies that the official statistics are deliberately dishonest rankles. I think what Herbert is getting at is the spin on the official statistics, where flimflammery is plentiful. It's not like Herbert is alone here.

From the Center for American Progress:

In the second quarter of 2007, household debt amounted to 131.3% of disposable income, which is only slightly below the record high of 131.4% recorded in the fourth quarter of 2006. In the second quarter of 2007, families spent 14.3% of their disposable income to service their debt, up from 13.0% in the first quarter of 2001.

And Stiglitz:

The administration crows that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts. Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century.

And the Federal Trade Commission:

A cash advance loan secured by a personal check - such as a payday loan - is very expensive credit. Let's say you write a personal check for $115 to borrow $100 for up to 14 days. The check casher or payday lender agrees to hold the check until your next payday. At that time, depending on the particular plan, the lender deposits the check, you redeem the check by paying the $115 in cash, or you roll-over the check by paying a fee to extend the loan for another two weeks. In this example, the cost of the initial loan is a $15 finance charge and 391 percent APR. If you roll-over the loan three times, the finance charge would climb to $60 to borrow $100.

And Elizabeth Warren (from 2005!):

Problems not even on the horizon when this bill was written are now front and center.

• Companies in Chapter 11 that cancel pension plans and health benefits, leaving thousands of families economically devastated
• Companies that continue to pay executives and insiders tens of millions of dollars, while they demand concessions from their creditors.
• Military families targeted for payday loans at 400% interest, insurance scams, and other forms of financial chicanery.
• Scandals have rocked the so-called non-profit credit counseling industry, exposing how tens of thousands of consumers struggling desperately to pay their bills and not file for bankruptcy were cheated.
• Sub-prime mortgage companies, financed by some of the best names in American banking, have unlawfully taken millions of dollars from homeowners, then fled to the bankruptcy courts to protect their insiders and bank lenders.
As I see it, Herbert has all of these things substantially right. Moreover, Herbert has been working a substantially thankless opinion beat, covering the plight of the non-elites. Brad owes him an apology.

[*] Earth-W is a hypothetical planet with mass, geography, concentration of atmospheric gases, flora, and fauna much like our own. However, on Earth-W, George W. Bush is a brilliant military tactician, World Scrabble Champion, and moral compass to the world. Also, at the Sermon on the Mount, the hypothetical Jesus-W said:

Cursèd are the uninsured, for their poor spending decisions unfairly burden the income taxpayer. Especially cursèd are middle-class uninsured children, for they should have chosen their parents better.

[*] Where Max Sawicky and Greg Mankiw work on Earth-W is left as an exercise for the reader.

[anne]

Brad DeLong:

"This time it is Bob Herbert who should be retired and sent to doing something socially useful...."

There is never a time when Bob Herbert is not writing what is socially useful, but understanding this takes the perspective of those most needy in America. Suggesting that Herbert is not being socially useful is disgraceful. I am shocked and angered and saddened.

[tommy higbee]

Thank you, Anne.

One might wonder whether Herbert is as bad as Brad DeLong suggests, but by posting so many of his columsn in one place, you have really helped to answer the question.

He's much worse.

Looking at column after column of Herbert's, it becomes quite obvious that every ill in the world can be laid at the feet of President Bush. Oh, and Iraq is a total failure, as well as immoral. But that brings us back to Point One.

My impression of the columns posted can be summed up in a word: overwrought. Unfortunately, that leaves out other useful words such as simplistic and moralizing.

Herbert is unpersuasive, because he can only bash Bush, never credit him. Not even for 6 years without a single successful terrorist attack on American soil. Or for getting us past the recession at the end of the Clinton administration, and leading us to about 20 successive quarters of economic growth, and record low unemployment. Or the successful campaign in Afghanistan, right about the time that the media was calling it a quagmire. Or the rapid victory in Iraq, coincidentally just about the time the media was questioning whether there was "an end in sight".

There's lots of room to criticize Bush, but the constant onslaught by Herbert reveals that to his mind, Bush can do no good.

If Bush turned water into wine, I'm confident there would shortly be a Herbert column about the disparate impact of alcoholism on the poor, and the hypocrisy of a well-known former alcoholic promoting it to deliberately hurt overwhelmingly democratic voters. And of course, he would sniff at the low quality of the wine.

Fortunately, Herbert doesn't have to persuade anyone about Bush, because his intended audience is those who are already persuaded, and just want a little confirmation.

Everyone loves a story with a good villain. Herbert appears to have found his.

[andres]

Wow. I read Brad's post yesterday afternoon and already it has 85 comments. Guess he struck a nerve. And yes, Colin, even skimming the complete works of Bob Herbert is good for you. Go go, anne.

But what strikes me is the contrast between Brad's writing from post to comment and on.

Here is Brad writing as Dr. Jekyll, in intellectual/data accuracy mode:

"[Bob Herbert wants to claim that the word "recession" means something other than it does: don't expect me to be happy with this. Bob Herbert wants to claim that the CPI does not include food and energy costs: don't expect me to be happy with this. Bob Herbert wants to claim that statistics showing that inflation rates have been low are "flimflam": don't expect me to be happy with this.

He should care enough about accuracy to do better.]"

Now that particular Brad I can respect even though I might have disagreements with him. And I can agree that a columnist who writes about economic trends should engage in more fact checking than in a non-economics based column.

But unfortunately, any left-wing sentiments that do not coincide with standard economic theory tend to bring out the Mr. Hyde/Limbaughesqe side in Brad DeLong. Witness these from the original post:

"Can We Retire Bob Herbert?...This time it is Bob Herbert who should be retired and sent to doing something socially useful."

As if Herbert writes _only_ sloppy economics for the NY Times. And:

"How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery."

Would he rather have Bob Colmes or Naomi Klein or even a non-liberal leftist like Eric Hobsbawm?

I am fully in agreement with anne that both of these passages are inexcusable. Bad manners are understandable when one is confronted with a bad attitude, as is typical with trolling wingnuts. But they are inexcusable (and also indicative of snobbery and elitism) if they are used simply to cut down those like Herbert who have simply gotten their facts wrong. Brad, please do yourself a favor and apologize for the tone (not the content) of your criticism of Herbert. How you say something is sometimes as important as what you say.

[anne]

About homelessness, and about the costs of the insane immoral war in and occupation of Iraq:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/11/09/iraq_veteran_healthcare_could_top_650b?mode=PF

November 9, 2007

Iraq Veteran Healthcare Could Top $650b: Doctors group warns possible crisis looming
By Bryan Bender - Boston Globe

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonprofit organization, found that 194,254 out of 744,313 homeless people on any given night are veterans. The findings, released yesterday, were based on information from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Census Bureau.

[andres]

For bad manners being understandable in the face of a bad attitude, one need only point to tommy higbee's comment above as justification.

Is there one single case where the Bush administration has come even slightly close (metaphorically) to turning water into wine? Or more specifically, is there even a single domestic or foreign US policy outcome in the past seven years for which we can _credit_ George Bush and Dick Cheney? Or even the Republican party in general? I have a lot of problems with the Democratic Party, but I can't think of a single thing that Republicans have done since 1992 that isn't an embarrassment for the US at best and a disaster for the US at worst.

Columnists like Bob Herbert and Frank Rich may sometimes get their economics wrong, but that is not an excuse for _trashing_ them either for their accuracy (Brad DeLong) or for their overall outlook (tommy higbee).

[Allen]

Sweet lord, I can't imagine what some of your people's teachers went through in school. I can just see it, they give you a definition for a term, like recession, and you piss around in circles arguing that someone is that very term despite it not fitting the definition. Herbert knows the word "recession" means in economic terms. That he chooses to ignore the commonly accepted definition of it doesn't make it okay for him to misuse it. That's nothing more than willful ignorance.

[andres]

Allen: true, but then a good schoolteacher says, "No, Bobby, that is not the correct definition of a recession"; please check your textbook again". A good schoolteacher does not say, "For God's sakes Bobby, you're a stubborn idiot who belongs in LD classes or in the principa's office, and not in my classroom."

That is what is really at issue here. We do not _know_ that Herbert knows the correct definition of a recession or of the CPI, so we must assume that he used incorrect definitions out of ignorance rather than irresponsibility. N'est ce pas?

[Colin Danby]

I think the point, Andres, is that it's not just a mistake, but a false assertion that plays a large role in evidencing Herbert's argument. If you're going after someone, especially someone like Bernanke who is not an idiot, it behooves you to get your facts straight. "Flimflammery" is a moderately serious charge, no? If I wrote a regular NYT column, I'd save an accusation like that for occasions when I could back it up.

And as Retro and others showed above, it's the work of ten minutes to pull out figures that give a nuanced picture and suggest that quite a few folks, especially in the bottom 40% of the income distribution, are in serious trouble right now. That sets you up to say something along the lines that the calming aggregate numbers that the Fed uses for prices output and employment are concealing widespread hardship.

Brad may be a little quick with the cudgel, but I cringe when I see people who could be making smart arguments settling for this easy, lazy rhetoric.

Still, if it'll help me get back into your and Anne's good graces, I think Bob H's moral compass is fine, and there's a huge difference between careless and bonkers. Yikes, if you consider what Tommy Higbee thinks are successes, what would failure look like?

[christofay]

the econ stats have been dumbed down so even a vortex of disaster like Bush gets a gentlemen's C. our country recovered from the internets bust by throwing a debt party, everyone borrow, everyone satisfied, helped by the Greenspan/Bush job policy.

i agree with Rusty, the country is being run for the benefit for the 10%, 20% are doing okay serving the 10%, and the rest is treading water and they don't speak of the ones going down. even the 20% (I give good service) don't speak of the ones going down. Rusty didn't quite say it that way. i did.

we're coalescing around group think here, anne says look at the harsh criticism then she gets criticized herself. (moneyriver, it just ran down your leg, please go change the panties) anne does over quote her beloved nytimes, please do less of that.

our mantra is 'free market' but to succeed you better get closer to free lunch which includes Bernanke lowering rates for the finance industry (beehive of the 10 and 20%), farmers, Hallie Burton, Bongwater the private militia group, which are some important Republican special interests.

most of the readers here I'd say are in the 20%, and even here we get nasty when someone points out the group think. while we don't all watch Rush Limbo we're pretty dittoed.

otherwise show your creativity, go out start a company, hire some people, and prosper.

oops, no volunteers

Roubini has done it, is it the market discipline that has made his forecasts more accurate than Brad Delong's expectations?

[Jack]

Bob Herbert reminds me of the idiotic Herblock cartoons, where the world is divided into two classes of people: 1) uncaring business tycoons, and 2) poor helpless plebes who are powerless and can't think for themselves and can't change their behavior and whose one and only savior is the Federal Goverment who will feed, clothe, educate, and change their diapers.

[christofay]

Bob Herbert a joke?

But who is a greater joke than the reverend Sir Greenspan, consistently making the wrong call at market turning points, refered to as a gold bug but an underground inflationist, played along with the Bush job preservation scheme by lowering the fed rate to sub-inflation, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Greenspan said inflation is a change in behavior, how do you like that for a non-formal definition? Then we had two wicked bouts of asset price inflation, the petsdotcom era, and the everyone into the debt pool housing era. There, that's inflation on you.

The first people that Bernanke the lifeguard saves when he jumps into the pool are the financiers

Brad Delong's economics are making me worried that the liberals want another crack at the heavy hand so they can demostrate they can screw up too

[steve]

For the sake of argument, assume the cpi is accurate. Since 1914, the real value of the dollar has been crushed. You have to be an idiot to save any money in US dollars. The fed's track record is beyond dismal when it comes to inflation over 93 years, it is criminal.

A saver is forced into to taking more risk just to stand still with the real value of his big banks, the government and all those that contract with them.

The Fed also by virtue of printing money contributes to the boom bust economy we know so well. It is time we abolish it.

[Earl]

To be fair, one of Prof Delong's nemeses is inaccurate reporting in the media, particularly when it comes to the various sciences. While I agree w/ Bob Herbert's sentiments, and think that the Prof overstates the case, his complaints are of a kind with his general complaints about the media. Since I too would prefer to see accuracy and truth in reporting, I don't think we should give Bob a pass just because he's on the side of the angels.

Accuracy, correctness, and precision count. So does specific evidence carefully chosen to bolster your argument.

Earl

[andres]

Sheesh, Colin. You'll have to do a lot more if you want to fall off my good graces.

Strictly speaking, Herbert in his column only accused Bernanke of doing a tap dance, ie of hedging and refusing to make a definite prediction or concrete statement. The accusation of "flimflam" was used against the faceless Washington statisticians

[The faceless Washington statisticians are my friends--men and women who are doing the best they can to produce the best estimates they can. As far as I know, Herbert has not deigned to talk to any of them.]

, not against Bernanke. As some of the above posts confirm, Herbert is definitely not the only critic of economic statistics, though there are as many critics who argue that the CPI overestimates inflation.

As for taking 10 minutes to check your facts, one has to remember that even if column deadline restraints permit taking this time, one has to know where to look. Herbert is mostly a sociological journalist who only occasionally ventures into the realm of economics. In order to _carefully_ point out the "flimflammery" of Federal statistics, he would have had to venture into issues such as estimates of discouraged workers, expected future foreclosures, and median or income-distribution adjusted measures of income. Many readers, if not Herbert himself, are not proficient with such ideas.

Which means that it is perfectly all right to point out where and how Bob Herbert makes mistakes in criticizing official statistics. But to go from this to saying that he needs to be fired/retired and that the Times could have much better liberal columnists is totally inexcusable.

[christofay]

Check Steve on the one way ticket for the value of the xera.

A good way to hide the rising cost of living to the 20 percenters is to constantly have a new breed of organic figs in the Wholefoods, yes they taste great, yes the only people shopping are the people that can afford it.

Steve also makes a comment that references the forced migration to riskier investments for people living on a budget during the drive to the 1% Fed rate during the Greenspan/Bush Job Program. Interest rates feel below the pace of rising living costs so conservative investors on a retirement budget had to go risk hunting. That's one of the functions of the 70 percenters, biomass to take the hit.

[denise]

I'm economically pretty ignorant, but I have to say that everyone I know stopped believing anything being reported about the economy a few years ago. There seems to be a huge disconnect between the pronouncements of experts and people's experience; almost everyone I know says he's having a much harder time making ends meet. I believe that the figures must be omitting or distorting something important about the real world.

[mitchell porter]

Colin Danby: "I'm seeing a lot of this right now -- a weird belief, apparently popular in some libertarian circles, that the CPI is some sort of con and inflation is really much higher."

There is indeed a sector of opinion, which I have encountered on bearish investment blogs, which regards contemporary official US statistics as subject to late-Soviet levels of distortion and falsification. M3 isn't being reported so that people won't see how fast the money supply is growing; 'core inflation' is preferred to CPI because it's lower; figures are massaged to provide spurious justifications for (say) actions by the Fed which have other motivations, only to subsequently be revised; and so forth. There is even a continuum between these ideas, the idea of a Plunge Protection Team which intervenes on a near-daily basis to keep the market going up, and the belief that the major Wall Street banks are engaged in fantasy accounting (e.g. reporting of 'Level 3' assets).

[John Drake]

I am not impressed with the Stiglitz essay in Vanity Fair. For example he says:

“We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India.”

This sounds like Stiglitz is reading the talking points of the industrial lobby for an expansion of the H1-B non-immigrant visa program—or he is actually a part of it. A recent report from the Urban Institute, “Eye Into the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand” provides ample information to refute this canard. From the abstract:

“However, our review of the data fails to find support for those presumptions. Rather, the available data indicate increases in the absolute numbers of secondary school graduates and increases in their math and science performance levels. Domestic and international trends suggest that that U.S. schools show steady improvement in math and science, the U.S. is not at any particular disadvantage compared with most nations, and the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally.”

You can read the whole report here

http://www.urban.org/
UploadedPDF/411562_Salzman_Science.pdf

[Retrogrouch]

PGL, Colin and knzn:

Let me back up a moment. I still maintain that anecdotal evidence, at least *honest* anecdotal evidence, is perfectly legit in discussions about economic, political or social issues. As I said before, it represents incomplete knowledge, not wrong knowledge. We all know enough about sampling to understand the limitations of small data sets, but longitudinal data for even a small and unrepresentative sample can yield insight.

Think of Bob Herbert's social network as a small sample of the New York working class population. *Trends* Herbert sees in his sample do have validity when speaking of the overall economy. If had an actual panel survey of his network, he could write this bad boy up and publish: "Current measures of economic stress among my panel rival levels historically only seen in significant job-loss recessions."

Since he doesn't have an actual panel with actual surveys, he instead publishes an opinion article where the theme is sunstantially the same: "My observation of my social network indicates economic stress levels historically only seen in significant job-loss recessions."

So we readers no longer have the benefit of reviewing panel makeup and survey instruments, we are left in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to trust Herbert's assessment.

Based on Herbert's track record in other articles, I would tend to trust his assessment. Based on what his article is trying to accomplish, I would want to see the professional *economists* respond, not by demanding more rigorous social science from Herbert, but by using Herbert's observations as the hypothesis and start testing.

As Colin pointed out, I found some stats and research supporting Herbert fairly quickly. I am personally a fan of the lads at EPI, but I'm sure my more conservative friends could find some opposing research.

Now, all of the above relates to the credibility of Bob Herbert. As to my credibility, you are right to demand more than simple anecdotes. I read enough comment sections to know that one needs to establish early on in a discussion whether the other person is serious and honest.

I must say I am flattered that the three of you thought it worthwhile to discuss this matter with me. I have you at a disadvantage there, since I know much more about you than y'all do about me. Such is the magic of pseudonymity.

[anne]

Andres, thank you. Brad DeLong has been terribly shamefully shockingly intemperate, and I imagine has learned. I adore Bob Herbert, and find the critics' comments on the thread revealing alone of the vacuity and meanness of the critics. Such is where modern conservatism has taken us. Herbert will continue on wonderfully.

[Colin Danby]

I've also seen this on bearish blogs -- occasional sensible critique mingled with claims from the batty "shadowstats" site etc. As I suggested to Winston above, a quick way to distinguish between someone who may have a plausible critique of the CPI and a complete loon is that the loons are prepared to believe that inflation is higher than nominal market interest rates.

We're getting a confluence of two streams. One is folks like Bob Herbert who don't know what the statistics measure but who believe that if they feel distress in their own lives and see it around them, the aggregate stats should show distress too. The distress they see and feel is real enough, and the useful way to pursue that is to *disaggregate* and then use richer data about things like family budgets to assemble finer-grained pictures. (The non-useful way is to judge an aggregate by one's individual "feel," which would be like me assessing U.S. health statistics on the basis of my last checkup.)

Call the first stream the impatient social democrats, people who rightly perceive that there's distress and that relevant gov't institutions are neither set up nor particularly inclined to deal with it, but who don't want to go to the work of making the policy argument, figuring out the institutions, and sifting the data.

The second stream is the tinfoil-hat antigov't paranoids who are always with us and who cultivate elaborate monetary crankery. Ron Paul is a good example. Once you're deep enough into this all facts are suspect, all appearances deceive, conspiracy is everywhere!

I worry when the impatient social democrats borrow rhetoric from the antigov't paranoids, both because of the politics and because of the epistemological rot. Dumb claims and dumb reasoning that give you temporary advantage hurt you in the long run.