J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail

Ten Economics Paragraphs: December 14, 2009

Worth reading:

1. Tom Barnett: Chinese turbines, Texas wind farm: "This is just the beginning": U.S. NEWS: "Chinese-Made Turbines Will Fill Texas Wind Farm," by Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, 30 October 2009. 'This is becoming a political storm of sorts, as Chuck Schumer is pressuring Energy Secretary Steven Chu to disallow any stimulus money to be used to buy Chinese turbines. China's Export-Import Bank is providing $1.5B in financing for the West Texas project. The U.S. was the global center for such turbine production in the 1980s, but then it shifted to Europe. Now it sits with China. A Chinese executive says, "This is just the beginning."' I think he's right...

2. Pro-Growth Liberal: Free Trade as a Stimulus Proposal – Little Bang: The Washington Post asks - How much bang would he get for the borrowed bucks? – in reference to the President’s latest stimulus proposals. This is an odd place to suggest that freer trade with Colombia and South Korea could represent “truly fresh thinking about job creation”. As Paul Krugman notes: "if you liberalize trade countries will export more. But they will also import more. If you’re worried about C+I+G+X-M, it’s a wash, because X and M rise equally … Even if the proposed trade deals with Korea and Colombia were remotely big enough to bear mentioning in the context of the crisis — which they aren’t — they wouldn’t be job creation measures." Using this source, one can see that our exports to these two nations during 2008 were only $46 billion, while our imports from these two nations were $61 billion. Let’s say the “equally” part of what Krugman wrote isn’t quite right and that free trade increases our exports by 20 percent (some $9 billion) while imports rise by only $10 billion (some $6 billion). With GDP in excess of $14 trillion, even our generous estimate of this WaPo policy proposal has it adding a mere 0.02 percent to aggregate demand. Not exactly a big bang! Do the folks at the Washington Post know how to look up trade information?...

3. Nate Silver: Greg Mankiw, Stimulus Critic: So Wrong He's Actually Right: So, to summarize: Mankiw is wrong that the stimulus consists mostly of Keynesian-type investments. So far, it has been closer to the tax cut end of the spectrum. But he's also wrong that the stimulus is not working. By the benchmark that he implicitly endorses -- GDP -- it's done very well. Mankiw is so wrong, in other words, that he may actually be right: the stimulus looks a lot like one he might have designed, and it's helping the economy...

4. Tony Judt: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?: Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime. When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an "interventionary" state, many of those same Americans respond: "But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes."... [M]y concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Our shortcoming—forgive the academic jargon—is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, "A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind." For the purposes of mental emancipation this evening, I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to "economism," the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs...

5. Paul Samuelson: Proof that Perfectly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly: One should not read too much into the established theorem. It does not prove that actual competitive markets work well. It does not say that speculation is a good thing or that randomness of price changes would be a good thing. It does not prove that anyone who makes money in speculation is ipso facto deserving of the gain or even that he has accomplished something good for society or for anyone but himself. All or none of these may be true, but that would require a different investigation. I have not discussed here where the basic probability distributions are supposed to come from. In whose minds are they ex ante? Is there any ex post validation of them? Are they supposed to belong to the market as a whole? And what does that mean? Are they supposed to belong to the "representative individual" and who is he? Are they some defensible or necessitious compromise of divergent expectation patterns? Do price quotations soehow produce a Pareto-optimal configuration of ex ante subjectivie probabilities? This paper has not attempted to pronounce on these interesting questions...

6. Joe Gagnon: The World Needs Further Monetary Ease, Not an Early Exit: Without additional stimulus, unemployment rates are likely to remain above equilibrium levels for many years at great cost to the world economy in terms of lost income and personal hardship. Moreover, with inflation rates already below desired levels, excess unemployment threatens to cause an unwelcome fall in prices that would further damp recovery and retard the necessary process of deleveraging. In light of high and rising levels of public debt, additional monetary stimulus is preferable to additional fiscal stimulus. Indeed, monetary stimulus reduces the ratio of public debt to GDP by reducing interest expenses, increasing GDP, expand- ing tax revenues, and enabling an earlier start to fiscal consolidation...

7. Paul Samuelson: Economics: Even if the authorities should succeed in forcing down short-term interest rates, they may find it impossible to convince investors that long-term rates will stay low. If by superhuman efforts, they do get interest rates down on high-grade gilt-edged government and private securities, the interest rates charged on more risky new investments financed by mortgage or commercial loans or stock-market flotations may remain sticky. In other words, an expansionary monetary policy may not lower effective interest rates very much but may simply spend itself in making everybody more liquid.... In terms of the quantity theory of money, we may say that the velocity of circulation of money does not remain constant. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” You can force money on the system in exchange for government bonds, its close money substitute; but you can’t make the money circulate against new goods and new jobs. You can get some interest rates down, but not all to the same degree. You can tempt businessmen with cheap rates of borrowing, but you can’t make them borrow and spend on new investment goods.

8. Paul Krugman: Gauti Eggertsson is in the process of presenting a new paper on fiscal policy; the paper is here. In his presentation — though not in the paper — he offers great phrase: the “paradox of toil.” According to his paper, when you’re in the liquidity trap, certain kinds of tax cuts have perverse effects. Cutting taxes on capital income, for example, encourages more saving — which is a bad thing, because we’re suffering from the paradox of thrift. In fact, reduced taxes on capital income actually end up reducing investment. So what’s the paradox of toil? If you cut taxes on labor income, this expands labor supply — which puts downward pressure on wages and leads to expectations of deflation, which increases the real interest rate, which leads to lower output and employment. All of this only applies in a situation of zero interest rates, which wouldn’t be interesting except that that’s the situation we’re in. The general point is that we’re really through the looking glass, in a world in which lots of things have perverse effects — and basing your policy ideas on intuition from “normal” times can lead you very much astray...

9. STUPIDEST THING I HAVE READ TODAY: Michael Cannon of the (Surprise! Surprise!) Cato Institute

10. FROM THE ARCHIVES: Brad DeLong (March 8, 2008): Does Michael Walzer Really Believe the American Revolution Was Illegitimate?: I knew that Nino Scalia thinks the American Revolution was illegitimate, sinful and blasphemous, first cousin to Satan's War Against Heaven. But can it be true that Michael Walzer agrees with him? Say it ain't so. But let me turn the mike over to Russell Arben Fox, who cites: 'In Medias Res: Thoughts on Kosovo, Mill, and Walzer: [In] Jeremy Waldron's review of Walzer's thought that I mentioned above... [Waldron] writes that "political community is the heart of Walzer's writing," and that he believes "communal integrity has a nonrelative claim upon us"; we morally and prudentially ought to, in short, allow all (or almost all) self-identifying communities the space to work out (and deepen, and thereby perhaps through an education in democracy extend) their own identities and claims. What others may see as a clear-cut issue of humanitarian justice (a state oppressing its ethnic minorities, a violence-prone secession movement gaining power), Walzer sees--at least in many cases--as more of the "traditional philosophical dislike for politics." Waldron adds: "Even in the absence of democracy, Walzer wants to hang on to the principle of self-determination. A political community 'is self-determining even if its citizens struggle and fail to establish free institutions, but it has been deprived of self-determination if such institutions are established by an intrusive neighbor'. The compromises that people make, the sacrifices they forgo, may trouble a philosopher.... But 'I don't believe', says Walzer, 'that the opposition of philosophers is a sufficient ground for military invasion'..."' The point, of course, is that the victory of the West Atlantic Anglospheric secessionists in their 1775-1783 struggle to depart from the unitary Anglospheric United Kingdom was the work of... THAT INTRUSIVE NEIGHBOR THE FRENCH!!!! Does Walzer really want to commit himself to the slogan: "LAFAYETTE, GO HOME!!"?

Then Again, Dragon Dictate Has Advantages Over My Fingers...

"Aplogires." Should be "Apologies." Sigh...

Ten Economics Paragraphs: December 13, 2009

Worth reading:

1. Jonathan Leake on the Younger Dryas: Climate change catastrophe took just month: Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found. They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic. Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years. The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted...

2. Jim Hamilton: Should the Fed be the nation's bubble fighter?: It is hardly the role of the Fed to be deciding that it knows better than the market what the price of every asset should be. Nevertheless, I think it is necessary for the Fed at least to be forming an opinion about what's driving asset prices as one input into the Fed's decision making. Booming U.S. real estate prices were accurately signaling that there was a problem with both the interest rate target and financial supervision, and it's desperately important to ensure that this same mistake is never repeated. Of course, it's easy enough to say what should have been done in 2004. but the real challenge is figuring out what to do in 2010. Are commodity prices experiencing a bubble right now?... [O]ther economic objectives take precedence at the moment, and it is too early to start raising rates yet. But it is not too early to remember that there are limits to how much you can help the U.S. economy by keeping interest rates low...

3. Paul Krugman: Paul Samuelson, R.I.P.: Oh, my. Paul Samuelson has died. He had a long, good life; yet he will be sorely missed. It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars. And he was a wonderfully down-to-earth human being besides. For a number of years I shared an office suite with him and Bob Solow; he always had time to talk...

4. Christie Romer: Obama economic adviser pitches job stimulus: WASHINGTON – A White House economic adviser says it would be "suicide" for the government to focus exclusively on the deficit when the economy is sorely in need of jobs. Christina Romer says money freed up from the repayment of financial bailout funds gives the government the leeway to boost try to employment while seeking to control the deficit over the longer term. She says "no one is talking about raising taxes" during a recession to pay for the proposed new stimulus plan. Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was asked Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether the recession was over, She said it might be over in official terms, but that it's not truly over until unemployment goes back down to normal levels, in the range of 5 percent...

5. Iris J. Lav, Nicholas Johnson and Elizabeth McNichol: Additional Federal Fiscal Relief Needed to Help States Address Recession’s Impact: Without It, States’ Steps to Balance Their Budgets Could Cost Economy 900,000 Jobs Next Year: States — which continue to face huge budget shortfalls that they must close — are taking steps now to plan their budgets for state fiscal year 2011, which starts on July 1, 2010 in most states. Governors will send their budget proposals to their legislatures between next month and February 2010 in almost all states. The legislatures will have to pass budgets as early as March or April in some states and by the end of June in almost all states. If states do not know they will receive additional federal fiscal relief, they will begin implementing new budget cuts and tax increases by this summer, at the latest. Presuming they will get no more fiscal relief, states will have to take steps to eliminate deficits for state fiscal year 2011 that will likely take nearly a full percentage point off the Gross Domestic Product. That, in turn, could cost the economy 900,000 jobs next year. [1] Mark Zandi, Chief Economist of Moody’s Economy.com, recently warned that these state budgetary actions “will be a serious drag on the economy at just the wrong time.” For economic and other reasons, federal policymakers should provide some additional fiscal relief, so that such relief is extended or phased down after 2010 rather than ending abruptly. That would constitute one of the most effective uses of additional federal dollars to boost the weak economy and preserve or create jobs.

6. Dean Baker on Brady Dennis of the Washington Post: The Post Flacks for the Financial Industry #43,875: Thirty Democratic members of the House voted against the creation of a consumer financial products protection agency. The Post told readers that these members were "moderate," and that "like-minded" Democrats in the Senate hold far more power. How does the Post know that the these members voted against a consumer protection agency because they are "moderate," and that their compatriots in the Senate are actually "like-minded" as opposed to both being under the influence of the financial industry? The Post would have as much justification in righting 30 Democrats in the House with strong ties to the financial industry voted against the bill and then warning readers that Senators with close industry ties have much more power in the Senate. It may not be possible to determine with certainty that these members of Congress cast their votes in ways that serve their political backers, it surely is not possible to determine the opposite, as the Post implies...

7. Jon Hilsenrath: Economists Revising Up Fourth Quarter Growth Projections: A string of stronger-than-expected economic reports provoked several analysts to revise up their projections for fourth quarter gross domestic product.  The reports show that businesses are rebuilding inventories at a faster pace than many economists thought, consumer spending has been firmer than expected and the U.S. trade deficit narrowed. GDP expanded at a 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter. Now it looks like it’s going at a fast pace in the fourth quarter. If it’s sustained, that could help to bring down the unemployment rate. Here’s a sampling of revisions we’ve picked up so far for the Q4 growth rate: RBS Securities: 5.0% from 3.7%. J.P. Morgan 4.5% from 3.5%. T. Rowe Price:3.8% from 2.7%. Macroeconomic Advisers: 4.2% from 3.8%. Nomura Securities: 3.3% from 3.2%. Aladdin Capital: 3-3.5% from 2.8%. Action Economics: 2.8% from 2.3%...

8. Tony Barber and George Parker: EU leaders urge IMF to consider Tobin tax: European Union leaders urged the International Monetary Fund on Friday to consider a global tax on financial transactions in spite of opposition from the US and doubts at the IMF itself. In a communiqué issued after a two-day summit, the EU’s 27 national leaders stopped short of making a formal appeal for the introduction of a so-called “Tobin tax” but made clear they regarded it as a potentially useful revenue-raising instrument. In a separate initiative, Mr Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, suggested that revenues from the Tobin tax could be devoted to the world’s fight against climate change, especially in developing countries. They suggested that funding could come from “a global financial transactions tax and the reduction of aviation and maritime emissions and the auctioning of national emissions permits.” However British officials later argued the main point of a financial transactions tax would be provide insurance for the global taxpayer against a future banking crisis. European support for the Tobin tax, named after the late US economist James Tobin, has grown since the world’s financial system plunged into crisis 15 months ago, forcing governments in the US and Europe to rescue and recapitalise banks to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. But Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, said last month at a meeting of the world’s 20 main advanced and emerging economies that the US was unwilling to back a tax on daily financial market activity. Opposition was also voiced by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director, who said the Tobin tax was “a very old idea that is not really possible today”. The EU statement drew attention to “the importance of renewing the economic and social contract between financial institutions and the society they serve”...

9. STUPIDEST THING I HAVE READ TODAY: Stephen Bainbridge: The Demise of Newspapers: A Market Failure? I Don't Think So: I'm puzzled. What exactly is the market failure here? Welfare economics classically recognizes four basic sources of market failures: producer monopoly; externalities; the good to be produced is a public good; and informational asymmetry between producer and consumer... [As an exercise, readers are urged to tell Professor Bainbridge why there is necessarily a market failure involved in the production of commodities--like both breaking news and in-depth investigative journalism--that are non-excludible. For extra credit, your explanation should cite Sanford J. Grossman and Joseph E. Stiglitz (1980), "On the Impossibiility of Informationally-Efficient Markets." This isn't rocket science, people. This isn't even cutting edge.]

10. FROM THE ARCHIVES: Brad DeLong (August 1, 2002): Glassman and Hassett's Dow 36000 Once Again: I see that James Glassman and Kevin Hassett are writing in the Wall Street Journal today, lying about what their Dow 36000 book says. There are two different Dow 36000 books that they could have written. The first would say four things: (i) It looks like stocks held for a very long periods--30 years or more--are no riskier than bonds. (ii) If you valued stocks on the same cash-flow principles as you valued bonds, the Dow would be valued at 36000 (if you get your math wrong.) (iii) As long as you are planning on holding stocks for a very long time--more than 30 years--the overwhelming bulk of your returns from holding stocks come from the cash flows you receive, and the fact that stocks have not historically been valued on the same cash-flow principles as bonds will not greatly diminish your return. (iv) Thus if you have a long time horizon--can afford to let your investments ride for more than 30 years--you should realize that buying-and-holding a diversified market portfolio of stocks will be superior to a bond-based portfolio as long as stocks are cheaper than the Dow would be at 36000. The second book would say: THE DOW SHOULD BE WORTH 36000 NOW!! THE DOW WILL BE WORTH 36000 SOON!! IF YOU DON'T BUY STOCKS NOW, YOU ARE MISSING THE ALMOST-CERTAIN OPPORTUNITY TO TRIPLE YOUR MONEY OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS!! Which book did they write?.... Which book are they now pretending that they wrote? I leave that as an exercise to the reader...

Ten Economics Paragraphs: December 12, 2009

Worth reading:

1. Calculated Risk: Refinancing with Negative Equity: Unfortunately David Streitfeld doesn't provide any further information on Belvedere's loan. If the loan was held by a bank, then it might make sense for the bank to refinance the loan (this lowers the bank's risk of default). However Belvedere's "lender" might be a servicing company and the loan may have been securitized. Then it is impossible to refinance because the current holders of the note would be paid off, and no new lender would make a loan greater than the value of the collateral...

2. Mark Whitehouse: American Dream 2: Default, Then Rent: Schoolteacher Shana Richey misses the playroom she decorated with Glamour Girl decals for her daughters. Fireman Jay Fernandez misses the custom putting green he installed in his backyard. But ever since they quit paying their mortgages and walked away from their homes, they've discovered that giving up on the American dream has its benefits. Both now live on the 3100 block of Club Rancho Drive in Palmdale, where a terrible housing market lets them rent luxurious homes -- one with a pool for the kids, the other with a golf-course view -- for a fraction of their former monthly payments. "It's just a better life. It really is," says Ms. Richey. Before defaulting on her mortgage, she owed about $230,000 more than the home was worth...

3. Fake Steve Jobs: A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T: And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country. I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment. Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline. “Okay,” I said. “Nice talking to you.” Then I hung up.

4. Paul Krugman: Jobless Recovery: There was ample warning, even before the severity of the crisis was clear, that the recession was likely to be followed by a prolonged jobless recovery. E.g., here (January 2008): "I still keep reading articles asserting that the last two recessions were brief and shallow. Formally, that’s true. But … in both cases the employment slump went on for a long time after the recession was supposedly over. There’s every reason to think that the same thing will happen this time. There’s a huge overhang of excess housing inventory; it will probably take several years before housing prices fall to realistic levels; and it’s not at all clear what will fill the gap left by weak housing and consumer spending..."

5. Stan Collender: Baucus To Conrad And Gregg On A Budget Commission: Yo Mama: Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) yesterday delivered this speech on the Senate floor against the budget commission proposed by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Budget Committee Ranking Republican Judd Gregg (R-NH).  Although it was couched in the polite language typically used on the Senate floor, this absolutely was the Washington equivalent of "Yo mama"...

6. Mark Kleiman: "Anyone Telling You Uncertainty About Climate Change Is a Reason for Inaction Is Either a Fool or a Scoundrel": [G]reater uncertainty argues for more caution--more willingness to accept certain current losses to avoid possible large future losses--not less. That’s because it’s easier to adjust to small changes than it is to large ones, so damage is likely to increase more-than-proportionally as the size of the change increases...

7. Brad DeLong: Is This a Congressional Joke?: I am--in normal times--a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole. But when I look at Senators Conrad and Gregg, I don't recognize fellow members of my species. They may be glueing the feathers of deficit hawks onto themeselves, but they are birds of a very different order--doves, turkeys, chickens, whatever, but I hope they are dodos...

8. Mark Thoma: Why it May Take Almost Seven Years for Unemployment to Reach Five Percent: The average rate of decline in the unemployment rate over the last three recessions is .061 percent Using this figure, and starting from an unemployment rate of 10 percent — the rate that exists today — how long would it take for the unemployment rate to get to 5 percent? Answer: (10-5)/.061 = 81.8 months, or almost 7 years. (Getting to 6% would take 65.5 months, or just short of 5 and a half years.)

9. Ed Hugh: The Velocity Of Modern Financial Crises: Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president, noted when speaking in Cambridge last Thurdsay that the speed at which financial disruption can spread had “accelerated tremendously over the past few decades”. While debt crises in the 1980s occurred over years, the effects of the Lehman collapse “spread around the world in the course of half-days”. As Ralph Atkins pointed out, the Greek government is but the latest to learn that in the modern world you can be catapulted from relative obscurity to global prominence in a matter of hours. Everyone can be famous for five minutes, as Andy Warhol said, but this kind of fame most of us could well live without...

10. Brad DeLong (October 10, 2008): The wrong financial crisis: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The first good thing about this situation is that it does not call for different central banks and Treasuries to do different things, but rather for them all to do the same thing in unison without fouling each other’s oars. That should be relatively easy to arrange. What we need right now are: (a) Coordinated fiscal expansions across the globe. (b) If the world economy is not now in something close enough to a liquidity trap to make no difference, it soon will be: coordinated monetary expansions across the globe. (c) A bank is any organisation that borrows or accepts investments short and lends long; the durations of its assets and liabilities are deliberately mismatched; when the entire banking sector is insolvent at current market prices, anything that reduces interest rates all along the yield curve helps reduce the magnitude of the insolvency: coordinated banking sector recapitalisations across the globe. (d) Since at least 1844 there has been broad consensus that the short-term price of safe liquidity is too important to be left to the market; now there is growing consensus that the price of risk is too important to be left to the market as well. For the government to operate on the price of risk through Operations-Twist on a Galactic scale is infeasible. That means that the aggregate degree of capitalisation of the banking system must become the object of policy choice. Call it socialism in one sector. What we need in the longer term are: (e) Global rules to make outsized compensation incentive-compatible. The Princes of Midtown Manhattan and Canary Wharf need to know that their fortunes will be lost if their institutions blow up within a decade of their handing over operational control – only in this way can you make them truly long in the fortunes of their firms and of the global economy rather than simply long in volatility. (f) More progressive global tax systems...

The Opposite of a Pyrrhic Victory Is...

...a Laevinic defeat, according to "Benjamin." Hoisted from Comments:

Another Such Defeat and We Will Be the Winners!: Benjamin said...

a Laevinic defeat would certainly be the correct term, Publius Valerius Laevinus being on the receiving side of Pyrrhus' victory.

However, the Berkeley Classics Department inclines toward a different story.

It focuses not on the 280 BC Battle of Heraclea but rather on the 279 BC Battle of Asculum as the source of the "Pyrrhic victory" and of Pyrrhus's exclamation: "Another such victory and I am lost." The consul and commander at Asculum was Publius Decius Mus P. f. P. f. (yes, "Mus" does mean "mouse").

So now I am wondering whether "Musish defeat" or "mouseish defeat" is more appropriate as the antonym of "Pyrrhic victory."

From Peter Paul Rubens, "Death of Publius Decius Mus":

Dry Run for World Domination...

I may be teaching this semester's large undergraduate course--Twentieth Century Economic History--online next summer for Berkeley's International Studies program.

What components do people think are essential in trying to do education online? What components do people think are helpful? What components do people think are wasteful?

Best xkcd Ever!

Centrifugal Force - By Randall Munroe:

Look at the Laptops...

Microsoft runs a Windows Mobile event:

Windows Phone Thoughts: Mobius 2009: Fascinating, But Little That Can Be Shared:

Not quite you expect to see at Redmond, is it?

Econ 115 Amazon Associates Fees Party: December 1, 2 PM

As I said, I have collected $500 this semester in Amazon referral fees for books assigned in this course, and it seems appropriate to give this back.

Therefore Tuesday December 1 at 2 PM, after lecture, we are going to have an Econ 115 reception outside the classroom--either in the Bank of America Forum inside, or outside in the courtyard, depending...

Sydney Padua Presents: An Appeal for Funding from Charles Babbage...

With a forecast for our day:

Felix Salmon Catches a Self-Denying Prophecy About the Future of Media

He writes:

Felix Salmon: Sky News is using YouTube to host their entire “News Corp will block Google” interview with Murdoch...

I keep on thinking that there is something powerful and important to be written about Google's success and the elective affinity between non-rival commodities and advertising. In order to charge people who buy things money, you have to make the commodity excludable. As long as the commodity is rival--as long as only one person can use it at a time--setting up technological or legal barriers that also make it excludable adds significantly to its value. You can be secure in your enjoyment in a way that you could not possibly be if the commodity were rival and yet non-excludable.

A bicycle with a lock is thus much more valuable than a bicycle without.

But once commodities become non-rival, making them excludable by legal or technological processes reduces their use value--as I am reminded every time something goes wrong with the FT's automatic authentication system and it claims that I do not have a subscription.

Thus advertising is bound to be a second-best way of obtaining a revenue stream for rival commodities, and similarly likely to be a first-best way of obtaining a revenue stream for non-rival commodities.

The coming of a decent micropayments infrastructure may change this--iTunes, for example. But my father reminds me that dividing the number of songs purchased on iTunes by the number of iPods produces a number like 30...

In Celebration of a DMCA Takedown Notice: I Link to Elizabeth Kolbert on “SuperFreakonomics”

Well, this is new. My first ever DMCA takedown notice--from HarperCollins, publisher of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics. While other publishers these days are happy to have sample chapters of their authors' works read and distributed on the internet, not so with HarperCollins.

One thing I can do in response is--tit-for-tat--to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday's Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead.

I urge everybody--authors and readers alike--to just say no to HarperCollins in the future.

A second thing I can do is to link to Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Superfreaknomics in the New Yorker:

“SuperFreakonomics” and climate change: Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed.... By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.

This story—call it the Parable of Horseshit—has been told many times, with varying aims. The latest iteration is offered by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”.... Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change: “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”

Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, “like wearing sackcloth.” Wouldn’t it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet?... “Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write....

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed.... Levitt and Dubner claim to have solved the mystery of why crime, after soaring in the nineteen-eighties, dropped in the nineteen-nineties.... They also have proved—at least to their own satisfaction—that names like Ansley and Philippa will be popular for girls in the coming decade, that reading to your kids doesn’t matter, and that drunks should be encouraged to drive rather than walk.

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate....

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” is... [t]hough climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.... Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought).... There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe. “By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”...

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

If This Were to Be Played Upon the Stage, I Would Condemn It at Once as an Improbable Fiction...

I am completely bemused. This is either a proof of the existence or of the nonexistence of God, depending on your taste.

Stanford's Ken Caldeira attacks:

Yale Climate 360: The main misrepresentation [of my work and my beliefs by Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner] is the quote [in Superfreakonomics] that says that CO2 is not “the right villain”.... [P]ull back to the case of the biosphere taking up 70 percent of CO2--well, yes, we have a published study that said that. It also... [said we] risk melting Antarctica.... [T]here is a selective use of quotes. If you spend several hours talking to somebody and they take a half-dozen things and put it in a book, then it’s going to be in the context and framing of arguments that the authors are trying to make... very different from the context and framing that I would put those same facts in... So I think that the casual reader can [get]... a misimpression of what I believe and what I feel about things...

And Steve Dubner counterattacks:

The Anatomy of a Smear: Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, [Ken Caldeira,] whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not...

The world is indeed a most remarkable place...

On second thought, this is definitely a conclusive proof of the existence of Coyote...

Wall Street Journal Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (Jonathan Weisman Edition)

Who else? Jonathan Weisman:

Romer Predicts High Jobless Rate Through Election Year: The Romer testimony appears to be a shift toward the negative for the administration. On Tuesday, White House economist Jared Bernstein took a more upbeat position in a talk before the New America Foundation. While he called the lack of job creation “the most important challenge we face,” his speech emphasized progress made, not stagnation ahead. “I think we have to give the Recovery Act some props,” he said. “In the second quarter, the average monthly change in jobs was about 170,000 less bad than the baseline forecast. For the third quarter, the actual was about 270,000 better than the baseline. That’s about 1 million jobs saved or created so far”...

From the Christy Romer testimony that Jonathan Weisman was, ahem, "covering":

What kept the economy from heading into a second Great Depression in 2008 and 2009 was the strong and timely policy response.... A key piece... was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act... $787 billion...to counteract the shortfall in aggregate demand... the boldest countercyclical fiscal action in American history.... [Our] estimates suggest that the ARRA added two to three percentage points to real GDP growth in the second quarter and three to four percentage points to growth in the third quarter.... [A]s of August, the ARRA had raised employment relative to the baseline by between 600,000 and 1.5 million jobs...

Add up Jared's monthly numbers and you get the midpoint of Christy's range.

You know, if you are going to say: "X said something different from Y. X said Z." Then--unless you want everyone to conclude that you are a liar or an idiot--you check to make sure that Y said something different from Z. It's not a hard principle to grasp. It's not hard to do.

Is it too much to ask Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to have reporters who actually listen to what people say and read the texts they are handed? Apparently.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

In Which Daniel Davies Tells Nathan Myhrvold and Steven Dubner to Stand Up, Stop Whining, and Take Their Floggings Like Men

Daniel:

Rules for Contrarians:

1. Don’t whine.

That is all....

I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.

Viz Nathan Mhyrvold:

Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl....

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do.... If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

Viz also, Stephen Dubner:

They have given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific. Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not....

The other point of contrarianism is... you assemble... points which are individually uncontroversial... and put them together to support a conclusion which is surprising and counterintuitive.... [T]he aim of the thing is the overall impression you give.... [T]he entire point is to make a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one. So... you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying. Fair enough, you might not care to defend the controversial point it looked like you were making, but a degree of diffidence is appropriate here, because the confusion is entirely and intentionally your fault:

(That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)

No it doesn’t; it feels like someone read the first two pages for the plain meaning of the words and didn’t spot that you were actually playing a little crossword-puzzle game where the answer was “consensus”. In general, whatever “global cooling” meant, it was put on the cover in full knowledge of the impression it would give to a normal reader so once more, it is not legitimate to complain that this phrase was interpreted in the way in which it was intended to be interpreted.

In general, contrarians ought to have thick skins, because their entire raison d’etre is the giving of intellectual offence to others. So don’t whine, for heaven’s sake. Own your bulls---...

W00T!! Wifi-Equipped 757s! W00T!!

The future may not be evenly distributed, but there is definitely a lot of it around here! W00T!! W00T!! W00T!!!!

Correspondence on Global Warming and Superfreakonomics

Steve Dubner writes:

Brad,

It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value. His attack is full of deception and outright lies. He makes it sound as if we somehow twisted and abused Caldeira's research; nothing could be further from the truth. We will have to clear this up publicly, although as you suggest it will be hard to put out this fire no matter how wrongfully set. This is politics that's being played now, nothing else. Also: yes, Romm posted a PDF of the chapter on his website, which the publisher, in its routine effort to pull pirated copies of its copyrighted material off the web, asked him to take down. As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there's been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn't yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical), but Romm has done a great job of getting people to believe that a book they haven't read is full of errors.

I reply:

Brad DeLong to Stephen

Re: "It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value..."

As I said, I can't read your chapter--by your publisher's choice.

That's very bad for you: Romm's posting your chapter and a link to it is a way for him to establish credibility--"see for yourself"; your publisher's pulling it down is a way to diminish yours.

Over this weekend, people's views are gelling--Paul Krugman's, for example--while your voice isn't being heard, and once people's views are gelled, it takes a huge amount of evidence and the right kinds of psychological pressure to ungell them.

Thus, for example, I would love to believe in Myrhvold and in cheap geoengineering solutions. But I come from Berkeley, where Richard Muller is the dominant public-intellectual voice on geoengineering, and he is very knowledgeable and very skeptical. My second cousin Tom Kalil does solar panels and so forth for a living at OSTP. The reaction of the climate people I know to Myrhvold on solar panels, whom Romm says you quote:

"A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming..."

is simply unprintable--that it's like claiming that curve balls curve because of photon pressure from the stadium lights.

So given what is flowing past my computer screen at the moment, it looks very much to me as though you were simply hornswoggled by Myrhvold and company, who have formed their own tight self-reinforcing intellectual community reinforcing each other's beliefs up there in Seattle. There is nothing I can see contradicting that interpretation, and a bunch of things from Romm and others confirming it.

The place where I would concentrate, if I were you, would be Stanford's Ken Caldeira. Romm claims:

"[Caldeira] writes me: 'If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.' One sentence about Caldeira in particular is the exact opposite of what he believes (page 184): 'Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.' Levitt and Dubner didn’t run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it. But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly — it even makes the SuperFreakonomics Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary “Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?...”

If your principal experts truly do repudiate the interpretation you place on their work, that's very bad for you...

Levitt and Dubner Disarm Themselves in Their Battle of Wits with Joe Romm...

Joe Romm writes:

Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places. « Climate Progress: The reason I’m calling Levitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five of SuperFreakonomics, the “Global Cooling” chapter — aka “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” — has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong.  So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks.  [Note:  Most of the book is searchable online.  At the request of the publisher, I have taken down the PDF of the chapter]...

I want to read the Superfreakonomics chapter on climate change this morning. Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner's publisher is now keeping me from doing so.

That is a bad thing to do--and something that is, I think, very bad for Levitt and Dubner (if possibly good for their publisher's bank account). I can read Romm on Levitt and Dubner. I can't read Levitt and Dubner. And that is very bad for Levitt and Dubner: if I can't read them, Romm's argument that they (a) were sold a bill of goods by Nathan Myhrvold and company who do not understand orders of magnitude and (b) misrepresented the views of Stanford's Ken Caldeira win by default.

UPDATE: And Paul Krugman weighs in:

Paul Krugman:

A counterintuitive train wreck - Paul Krugman Blog: Uh oh. I trust Joe Romm on climate — and his verdict on Superfreakonomics is pretty damning. I’ll get to work on the book myself, but it doesn’t look good.

At first glance, though, what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. Ann Coulter is making sense! Bush is good for the environment! You get the idea.

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.

It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.

---

SECOND UPDATE: Joe Romm:

Climate Progress: [S]ince my original post and various other debunkings around the web, the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book.... I don’t know of a single instance where searching was allowed and then stopped.  It seems to me the publisher must be concerned that bloggers and others could actually see and quote the myriad errors and sheer illogic and patent nonsense for themselves...

This is very bad for Levitt and Dubner. They need to get on the horn to their publisher immediately, and get access restored.

To respond by shutting off internet access to the book may or may not be good for short-term sales, but it means that Romm's story becomes the default story for all time...

Erasmus, Tolkien, Clark Kerr, and Californium

Lance Knobel emails:

Your style of leaping from Erasmus to Tolkien to Clark Kerr to Californium is hard to capture in words, but I've had a go.

Clearly I read The Glass Bead Game at a too-impressionable age. The chain of associations Erasmus-Tolkien-Clark Kerr-Californium makes perfect sense to me...

He attaches a link to:

DeLong view of the future – Berkeleyside: Oct 14th, 2009 by Lance.

Ask Berkeley economist and blogger Brad DeLong about the future of higher education as digital technology develops and you’ll get a disquisition about Erasmus of Rotterdam and the puzzle about how the idea of the university survived Gutenberg and 1435. DeLong enjoys pointing out that UC Berkeley is the only university to have named four elements (Chicago only counts two). His blogging occasionally plunges into detailed macroeconomic arguments,  but he seems happiest when drawing on a seemingly inexhaustible trove of economic, political and social history to make cogent points about the present day. I caught up with DeLong in the new Peet’s in the university’s gleaming CITRIS building for some blogger-to-blogger chat, but also to see what he thought of UC Berkeley’s future given its dire budgetary straits.  DeLong has written frequently about the importance of Berkeley as a public university, often contrasting it with his own alma mater, Harvard. It was a day after the particular highpoint for a Berkeley economist of seeing yet another colleague, Oliver Williamson, awarded the Nobel prize for economics (the fifth Berkeley economist to win that honor).

Berkeleyside: Does Berkeley have a future as a great public university?

DeLong: There’s one view that it’s going to be absolutely fine. You look at the University of Michigan and UVa and they have made successful transitions to this mixed public/private institution. Berkeley should do even better. We are close enough to Silicon Valley and the extraordinarily unequal California economy that they money will flow. Not at a Harvard scale, but it will flow.

Berkeleyside: Is it just the California advantage?

DeLong: We’re Oxford 1880. Everyone at the rising superpower across the ocean wants their children to come. We’re culturally more friendly to Asia in lots of ways than other institutions. Then you think that there are 80 million 18-year olds in Asia. There are 800,000 of them in the top 1 per cent of income. There are 16,000 of them in the top 2 per cent of intellect and achievement. If we fumble that market position, we don’t deserve to survive. But we are also an amazingly bureaucratic organization and it’s conceivable that we could fumble the whole thing.

Berkeleyside: But if Berkeley and other UC campuses end up serving the Asian elite, what does that mean for its public role in California?

DeLong: There will still be pressures to fulfill Clark Kerr’s vision of creating a broad UC system. Since 1950 the system went from admitting 4,000 undergraduates a year to 50,000 a year. That’s institutional success at an extraordinary level.

Berkeleyside: Do feel the budget cuts directly?

DeLong: No, not me personally__but all kinds of administrators around me are feeling it. And economics has had a greater than normal number of faculty losses recently. It’s hard to know whether that’s just part of the cycle, or whether it’s people leaving because of the prospects. There’s also the fact that life for Berkeley economics faculty always becomes more stressed when there’s a Democratic administration in Washington. You lose some colleagues to that, but you also go from being someone who is carping on the sidelines to someone who’s ideas are sought.

For all the pressures, being a tenured professor at a research university is still an amazing deal. It’s the closest thing in our age to being landed gentry.

Berkeleyside: You’ve talked about the rosy scenario for Berkeley, but what could take it in the wrong direction?

DeLong: You could have a situation where more and more money gets sucked up into keeping our old tenured faculty. Instead of hiring new tenure track people you hire lecturers who are less expensive. You get the grant-running done by non-tenured researchers. Then we have something like the old regime in France where the aristocracy--the tenured faculty--is corralled into Versailles...

Berkeleyside: You’ve written often on your blog about the virtual university that exists in the blogosphere. Is the information age going to create something that supplants the university?

DeLong: Why didn’t this happen after 1435 when the price of a book fell 30-fold? The book is a sophisticated multimedia device. Reading takes place between the ears in a brain that is capable of extraordinary things. There were plenty of people who were disappointed when The Lord of the Rings movies came out because the characters didn’t look anything like the characters they had created in their own minds. So what you suggest ought to have happened in the 15th century.

Berkeleyside: But now in addition to books you can go online and follow courses at MIT or Berkeley.

DeLong: I’m going to teach my 20th century economic history course online next summer. I feel that if anyone is going to be making money or having influence teaching 20th century economic history, I want it to be me...

journamalism and Technology...

Via Atrios, via Dan Gillmore. Weston Kosova writes:

Techtonic Shifts : Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?: The executives who run big, ailing news organizations—in particular Tom Curley of AP and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch—complain every chance they get that search engines—in particular Google—are stealing from them, because Google links to their stories but doesn't pay the AP or News Corp. to do so. The way the news bosses see it,  that is theft, plain and simple. They say Google is making tons of money by shamelessly lifting their content, and it's driving newspapers out of business. At a meeting of media executives going on this week in Beijing, Murdoch and Curley gave impassioned speeches, saying they're mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. They warn that aggregators like Google had better start paying up, or else....

Curley and Murdoch's macho outrage is calculated to be quotable, but it is fake. Here's why: go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like "Obama wins Nobel" into Google's search box. What do you get? Headlines and very brief teasers linking to news stories from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that news site, where you can read the story, which is surrounded by that site's ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this scenario? If you don't click on the link, you don't see the story. If you do click on the link, you see the story on the originator's Web site. Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.

Murdoch and Curley know this. How do we know they know? Because if they really thought Google was stealing from them, and if they really wanted Google to stop driving all those readers to their Web sites at no charge, they would simply stop Google from linking to their news stories.... All they have to do is go to the Web site's robot.txt file and type this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don't exist....

Perhaps... Curley and Murdoch really didn't know that they had the power all along to rid themselves of the Google scourge any time they wanted to. If that's so, they know now. So go right ahead, gentlemen. Stop the thievery. Pull the plug on Google right now. I double-dog dare you.

Skitch: Most Wonderful Piece of Software I Have Found This Year

I find that on the internet ease-of-use is all: things that take one click happen; things that take one click, one click-and-drag happen, and then a second click happen; things that require that one download files, type in file names, upload files, and type in link ids... they simply do not happen.

Lots of times I find that I want to grab an image or an image with a little bit of associated text and keep it--either for myself, or to republish it on the web.

Skitch is by far the easiest way I have found to do this, and has become a very normal part of my day.

Email Solvency!

The good news is that my MUST ANSWER THIS EMAIL IMMEDIATELY THAT MEANS NOW!!!!!! directory is down to 25 messages...

The bad news is that if you are waiting for a reply from me and sent me an email that you think ought to be in that directory, you probably need to send your message again...

Signs of the Apocalypse...

One of the benefits of reading the Financial Times online was that you did not have your eyes polluted by its incredible, horrifying, and abominable "How to Spend It" magazine supplement...

(I can hear them now: "It raises a lot of advertising dollars to pay our salaries--if you want our reporting you have to swallow HtSI as well...")

It Would Be Fun to Get a Google Wave Invitation...

That is all.

The Spine Column Moves to "Et Tu, Mr. Destructo?"

Yes, that is what they say:

Et Tu, Mr. Destructo?: Marty Peretz Just Bought Us...

I expect great things. I will be satisfied with nothing less...

The Sensible Bipartisan Center Has a New Home...

At Capital Gains and Games:

First Bartlett Post...

Bruce Bartlett, I hasten to say, not Josiah Bartlett--although there is considerable confusion between the two, even though Martin Sheen is much the prettier. Reactions vary between: "but he's not real!" "I thought he was a very good president," "he has very good judgment," and "really too bad that his family was kidnapped by terrorists"...

Lindsay Beyerstein Joins Obsidian Wings

Publius:

Obsidian Wings: Welcome!: I wanted to take a moment to welcome Lindsay, and to thank her for joining the team. I know I'm speaking for everyone else in saying we're very excited that she joined. I've enjoyed reading Majikthise (along with her other journalistic work) for many years now -- as have many of you. So again, welcome!

Curious how neither the Washington Post nor the New America Foundation is this smart...

A Note for Eric Schmidt and Bernard Schwartz...

I am hearing very bad things about NAFs Fellows for next year containing a large wingnut welfare component. If these things were true then, were I in your shoes, I would pull the plug on NAF and fund CNAS and CAP (which are, I think, doing a much better job in the space that the NAF wants to occupy) instead.

Think-Tank Effectiveness: Dean Baker of CEPR Says: "Ahem!"

And directs me to:

Cost Effectiveness of the Most Widely Cited Think Tanks - CEPR: June 2008: The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was the most cost-effective think tank in 2007 measured by both media citations and web traffic. It ranked first in media citations per budget dollar for the fourth consecutive year. It also ranked first in web traffic per budget dollar. CEPR has been first in web traffic per budget dollar in two of the last four years. In the other two years it came in second...

Touche...

Big Mommy Is Watching You!

Courtesy of Chase and AT&T.

Ben of Unfogged:

Unfogged: Whilst driving up and down the five... I learned of two remarkable technologies friendly corporations have developed.... Chase, the bank, will email you about unusual or noteworthy purchases made using cards linked to your account--even if the cards themselves are your child's! This would allow worried fathers to keep updated about whether or not their daughters are shopping at stores with such silly names as Teen Hottie. American Telephone and Telegraph... will... allow one phone (yours, let's say) to display the GPS-determined location of a different phone (your wayward teen's, for instance). This would allow worried mothers to keep up to date about whether or not their sons are... use your imaginations, people.

Oddly, in the advertisements, only the son, in the latter case, evinced any unhappiness with the prospect of being so closely monitored by his opposite-sexed progenitor...

Wonk Watch Resurrexit II

Still not bored...

Mark Thoma reports Arin Dube's finding that the absence of a public option turns health reform into a gold mine for insurance companies, laments the continued reach of the right-wing slime machine, tells us to read Paul Krugman on how national health insurance works in the socialist hell-hole that is Switzerland, says we will know when the recovery has started well before we will know why, points out that public and private firms compete in garbage collection, and sends us to Bruce Bartlett's meditations on how Keynes was really a conservative.

Justin Fox is driving across the country from San Francisco to New York. I saw him just before he left while I was drinking a Mexican chocolate mocha at Papillon in Lafayette's La Fiesta Square, and moaning about how spaces that in Yurp would be pleasant parks and gardens are in America parking lots filled with SUVs on the one hand, Priuses and Teslas on the other, and a few convertibles.

Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen despair at the possibility of informed democracy. Cheer up, Alex! James Madison assures us that:

The science of politics... has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles... either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients... distinct departments... legislative balances and checks... courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people... by deputies of their own election... are wholly new discoveries... means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided...

Nino "Equal Protection of the Laws Requires that George W. Bush Be President by 5-4" Scalia and Charles "Death Panels" Grassley will save us all, with the assistance of the filibuster! They also think we are doomed never to reform our health care system, and report on math suggesting that eternal vigilence and preemptive attacks are the only security against zombies.

Wonk Watch Resurrexit!

There was a thing called Wonk Watch:

Wonk Watch | The Big Money: We read the smarties so you don’t have to. The economic blogosphere has two distinct sects: the communicators and the brilliants. The communicators are the journo-bloggers who rehash the news with a dash of insight but a dearth of big-think vision. The brilliants are the wonky bloggers who break news with a visionary thesis that nobody can read all the way through.

The Sausage is a communicator. We'd like to help you understand. Thus, we bring you Wonk Watch, where we read the brilliants so you don't have to. We've chosen the wonks that most set the agenda for the rest of the econosphere, based on a totally subjective assessment. For now, our debut roster will include two economists, a blogger who may as well be one, and an analyst. Introducing:

Brad DeLong, UC-Berk[e]ley economist
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times
Felix Salmon, Reuters blogger, formerly of Portfolio
Barry Ritholtz, CEO of only research firm Fusion IQ

It now appears to be dead.

But it was useful.

Someone should put their foot down and continue it, and that foot is me (until I get bored, at least):

Brad DeLong surveys the birther movement of 1377 and is annoyed at the cancellation of Wonk Watch and at Dick Armey's belief that Medicare = slavery. His main outings are a correct-the-record piece on how Brookings's Barry Bosworth is solidly in the pro-stimulus camp (and not "skeptical" as David Bleeping Broder claims), and some musings on a theme by Paul Krugman about the end of the possibility of bipartisanship and how this meshes up with Harold Pollack's call-out of Orrin Hatch for lying on TV.

Paul Krugman says that he and Robin liked Julie and Julia and that German politicians talk classical but walk Keynesian economics. His main outing consists of thoughts on why recently when the government deficit is high interest rates are probably low--basically that movements in animal spirits either boost economic activity and so raise both interest rates and government revenues or cause economic slumps and thus lower both interest rates and government revenues.

Felix Salmon's views may or may not be his own, but are extremely unlikely to be the views of Reuters. They include that shares of the music company EMI may go to zero, that the P/E ratio is high (needless to say because earnings are low), wonders whether Rahm Emmanuel is actually the Treasury Secretary, and applauds Justice Emily Jane Goodman for keeping that Snidely Whiplash that is WaMu from forcing Little Nell to surrender her virtue to keep her farm--all because WaMu decided that the fees from foreclosures made them something it wanted to do as much of as possible.

Barry Ritholtz notes that he was seven at Woodstock, is pleased that restaurants in the Hamptons are now full, snarks at quotes from President Herbert Hoover, and says that Gene Epstein of Barrons is as bad at choosing books as he is at economic forecasting--and that the worst book recommended is Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust, which "mixes in just enough reality to keep you wondering. The problem I found is the reality-based work is filler, there only to legitimize the political talking points..."

Tomorrow--unless I get bored--Mark Thoma, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Justin Fox. Tuesday: James Hamilton, Menzie Chinn, Yves Smith, and Calculated Risk

Does Anybody Know where Amy Tennery and Gabriel Beltrone Are?

Seemed to me that they did a good job, and thus are people whom I should put a tracer on somewhere. But there is no interest on the part of Slate in telling me where they have moved on to.

Jay Rosen has something harsh and shrill to say about this mindset, I am sure.

Wonk Watch Takes a Hiatus | The Big Money: The TBM office is mourning the loss of our trusted interns for many reasons, not the least of which is their dogged devotion to this daily feature. Amy Tennery and Gabriel Beltrone have moved on to full-time jobs elsewhere in the media world, and for that we're happy. But it means Wonk Watch will lay dormant until we can figure out who will keep its flame burning. Until next time, WW diehards.

Tom Ricks Unleashed (Media Criticism Department)

James Fallows:

Notes on repatriation (recession, media depts): The NYT... is a recognizable version of the publication I'd previously known.... The poor Washington Post is not. Laying off -- that is, buying out -- so many reporters who knew so much about their topics has had a more profound effect than I would have guessed. (Locus classicus: Tom Ricks on defense.) And the resulting paper seem more obviously desperate to try anything that will draw attention in this new age.... [E]veryone in every field needs to make his or her work as entertaining and attractive as it can be. But trying to compete for attention on sheer yuks is a step toward the brink. "Real" entertainment will always be more entertaining.... Anyone hungry for more on this theme is invited to check out the whole chapter on the death-spiral of infotainment in Breaking the News...

Matthew Yglesias comments:

Matthew Yglesias: Fallows on Newspapers: It’s also worth noting that though Ricks’ departure from the Post certainly counts as a major loss to that organization, that it’s not as if Ricks or his insights has vanished from the planet.... Foreign Policy... includes a really good blog by Tom Ricks. He’s also a senior fellow at the influential Center for a New American Security think tank and still producing excellent, well-regarded, and commercially successful books. And thanks to the Internet, all kinds of people around the world who are interested in defense issues can read what Ricks has to say, which really wasn’t the case 15 years ago...

I think Matt is massively understating his case. Back when Tom Ricks wrote for the Washington Post, you see, he did not say what he thought. You had to wait three years for him to write a book before you could learn what he really thought was going on.

For example, courtesy of Billmon, Tom Ricks in September 2003:

Senior U.S. commanders here are so confident about their recent successes that they have begun debating whether victory is in sight. "I think we're at the hump" now, a senior Central Command official said. "I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly" -- possibly within a couple of months, he added...

But Tom Ricks in 2006:

[T]here is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of [Saddam] Hussein['s regime] helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been...

When called on this "inconsistency" between what he was reporting in 2003 and what he knew back then was really going on, Ricks said:

I sometimes think that the left would only be happy if we started labelling all their enemies liars. I noticed that one leftish blogger criticized me for quoting generals who said in 2003 that we were winning the war. I don't think he understands that part of my job is to quote people accurately--even if I don't agree with what they are saying. Next!...

When he was writing for the Washington Post, Tom Ricks claimed that it was unprofessional for him to do anything to inform his readers when the people he was interviewing were lying to him. Now things are different. Now Tom Ricks's Foreign Policy weblog is much more likely to include material like this:

Tom Ricks: CORRECTION: The other day this blog referred to right-wingers recklessly calling Obama weak for his careful handling of the Iranian crisis as "clowns." In fact, they should have been called "dangerous clowns." Best Defense regrets the error.

This is a big gain, no?

Not only are Tom Ricks's writings now accessible to the whole world, but now they come without editing by that truly dangerous clown Len Downie and his staff, no?

And now they come with Ricks not guarding his tongue and so misleading his readers. no?

This is win-win-win-win, no?

Tax Policy Center on Twitter

I suspect that this is a case in which the message cannot be compressed into the medium:

Tax Policy Center on Twitter:

Endnotes

My view: endnotes are totally useless. Footnotes are useful. But instead of endnotes you should make up a file of your footnotes and post it on the web keyed to pages. That way people can at least open a window on their computer as they read the book--it's close to footnotes, if they are at their computer. End notes... fah!

John Quiggin:

Endnotes, again — Crooked Timber: I really, really hate endnotes. But now that I am writing a book I have to decide whether I have to swallow my pride and use them, and if not, what alternative to adopt. To start with, I want to distinguish between explanatory notes, spelling out a point that is marginal to the main text and references giving authority for some claim made in the text, or examples or a person making a claim that I may endorse or criticise. In academic work, I’m used to the Harvard format where explanatory notes are placed as footnotes, and references cited in the body of the text as “Quiggin (2009)”, then listed in full at the end. This is much better than the all-footnotes system used, for example, in legal writing.

For a popular book on a technical subject like “Zombie economics”, there are a few options, which can be mashed up in various ways.

• The standard endnotes setup with explanatory notes and references listed at the end of the book
• Footnotes for explanation only: this leaves open the question of how to deal with references
• A further reading section at the end of each chapter, in place of references
• A book without references, but with an online hypertext version in which readers who want to chase references can find them.

Any thoughts?

The Revolt of the Stenographers...

At the moment, at the top of nytimes.com are four stories:

• A pretty good story by Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston filling in details in stories reported at lest three years ago by Ron Suskind in his The One Percent Doctrine--and, of course, they do not cite or reference Suskind in any way: Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston: Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests: "The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States. The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests. Most former officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations about the case involved classified information...": + 1/2

• Tobin Harshaw well out of his depth on finance: he truly darkeneth counsel without wisdom--it really is too bad that he took Chris Suellentrop's "Opinionator" and trashed it: -1

• Peter Baker and Helene Cooper adding absolutely nothing to the state of play on Crowley-Gates-Obama: 0

• Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore "As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary" with a truly self-parodying headline adding nothing to the state of play on Crowley-Gates-Obama: 0

That's minus one-half for four--a batting average of -0.125.

At the moment, at the top of washingtonpost.com are four stories:

• Ernesto Londono doing real reporting from the urban battlefield in Iraq: "After the Shooting, Another Showdown: Deadly Clash Underscores Rift Over Interpretation of U.S.-Iraq Deal": "When insurgents attacked an American convoy with AK-47 rounds and a couple of grenades on a dusty highway in a Baghdad suburb this week, U.S. soldiers returned fire, chased the suspects through narrow alleyways and raided houses. When the shooting subsided, another confrontation began. A senior Iraqi army commander who arrived at the scene concluded that the Americans had fired indiscriminately at civilians and ordered his men to take the U.S. soldiers into custody. The U.S. military said the soldiers had acted in self-defense and had sought to avoid civilian casualties; U.S. commanders at the scene persuaded the Iraqis to back down. The incident, apparently the first time a senior Iraqi commander has sought to detain U.S. soldiers, signals a potential escalation of tensions between U.S. and Iraqi forces trying to find a new equilibrium as Iraq assumes more responsibility for its security...": +1

• Michael Rosenwald: "Digital Nomads Ditch Their Cubicles for Diners and Pool Decks"--a piece that doesn't even try to provide any information at all about how many "digital nomads" working at coffeeshops there are these days or how their lives have really been changed by the coming of wifi and lattes, and so is more an embarrassment than anything else: 0

• Jason Straziuso and Rahin Faiez doing competent stenography about the war in Afghanistan: "Suicide attackers strike southeastern Afghan city": + 1/2

• Dan Balz sucking hs thumb and adding absolutely nothing to the state of play: Obama's Ambition: Was His Strategy a Mistake?: 0

That's one and a half for four--a batting average of +0.375

Taking the eight lead stories of the New York Times and the Washington Post together, we have a batting average of +0.125.

Now let's take a look at the most recent stories for the eight top feeds in my RSS reader:

• Chris Whalen at The Big Picture on financial regulatory reform: "Is the Fed About to Lose On “Systemic Risk” Legislation?": "It is really fascinating to see how much people underestimate the political staying power of technocrats such as FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair and SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. I get the distinct feeling that some senior members of the media, analysts and the banking community, still don’t see the ladies as serious players. If you bother to look at the Players’ Roster of American politics, it is clear that the ladies are very much in the ascendancy in Washington, both in government and in the lobbyist community. Consider the movement in terms of legislation on regulatory reform. The ebb and flow of the debate is headed very much in the direction of collective, shared authority for determining when a TBTF bank or, more specifically, a non-bank company such as AIG needs restructuring. This goes directly contrary to the Geithner proposal to give this function to the Fed...": +1

• rdan of Angry Bear sends us to Mark Thoma of Economist's View who tells us to read a 1983 New York Times story about health care reform in Canada: Douglas Martin: "Health Care in Canada: Popular System Now ROcked by Criticism": +1`

• Steve Benen reports and analyzes Obama's attempt to sell health reform: "Not surprisingly, President Obama devoted his weekly multi-media address to health care reform today -- the sixth address to emphasize reform in the last eight weeks. But what I found noteworthy about today's was the target audience of the pitch. In his five-and-a-half minute message, the president didn't mention the word "uninsured." In fact, the address wasn't geared towards the tens of millions of Americans without coverage at all. Instead, Obama talked almost exclusively about the importance of reform on businesses and employers. In fact, the president referenced the words "small business" 11 times in his message this morning...": +1

• Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "These statistics cast an interesting light on Brandon del Pozo’s defense of police doctrine... police work is less dangerous than many other possible occupations, and that less than half that danger stems from violent resistance by suspects – the kind of 'loss of control' that defenders of Officer Crowley’s conduct during the Gates arrest point to as a major danger.... What statistics alone can’t untangle is the impact of police praxis on the danger level: is police work relatively safe because police are hardcases about maintaining control, or is it relatively more dangerous because the provoke confrontations. And the ultimate question begged previously is where police safety ought to rank in the hierarchy: is it better that police feel as safe as possible or that citizens be respected...": +1

• von of Obsidian Wings advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "Pithlord makes clear a point that I consider essential, namely 'We all act like dicks sometimes, and I can sort of understand both Gates and Crowley's point-of-view in a subjective sense. I imagine I'd feel pissed off if I was either of them. The difference is Crowley acted illegally and unprofessionally.' (Emphasis mine.) That's a huge difference.  As I've written in comments, I don't know and don't really care if Professor Gates lost his cool and acted like a jerk.  I do know, however, that Gates didn't have a gun and the power to throw Crowley in jail...": +1

• Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo doesn't advance the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says he'd be happy to have a beer at the White House with Officer Crowley and President Obama...": 0

• Heebie-Geebie on the social isolation of the mother of the neonate in modern American culture: "Lately I've gotten really into making the bed each morning. It only takes a minute, and the room looks so much tidier. I think this means I've got too much time on my hands, or maybe my brain. At least I'm not fretting about imaginary baby symptoms.... Being around babies too much is a kind of sensory-deprivation zone where you start hallucinating symptoms out of sheer boredom...": +1/2

• Steven Teles at The Reality Based Community advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: [T]his little micro-dispute in Cambridge was fundamentally a conflict about "honor." This whole thing would have been a big nothing if either man were willing to swallow his pride. The cop could have defused it by letting Gates call him a racist and have it roll off his back. He couldn't because, I think, he has a self-conception as precisely not a racist cop.... To back down would have been to... be dishonored. Gates couldn't back down and say "yes, officer, whatever you ask, officer" because he believed he was being treated in a way that was inappropriate to his status as a Harvard professor and because he thought he was being hassled because he was black. To back down would have been untrue to his idea of himself.... So they both stood their ground, and the guy with the gun won. And so Gates retaliates in the media, and with the president.... Now the Cambridge cops think that they are being dishonored.... The question is, is there any way for everyone involved here to retain their honor? That is, can they back out of this thing with the way they understand themselves, and that they want others to understand them, intact?.... Today... Obama seems to have realized that taking sides in this zero-sum conflict was not the right move, at least given his office. Which is why this is so refreshing. Whatever his flaws, Obama knows when he messed up and he knows how to find the right way to clean up his mess. Whatever his flaws, I do believe this is a man who has a touch of greatness--not from being flawless, but from being able to recognize his flaws and counteract them...": +1

That is a score of six and a half out of eight--a batting average of 0.8125: I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the "Daily Me" phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of... bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald).

And then there are Jason Straziuso and Rahin Faiez performing the very useful service of writing up the briefings in Kabul, and Ernesto Londono putting his life on the line to inform us about what is going on half the world away.

With this as background, let's consider David Simon's proposals for the future of journalism. Here's David Simon with the mike:

Build the Wall : CJR: To all of the bystanders reading this, pardon us. The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism--two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good... [and] still have a card to play... the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution.... Yet incredibly, they delay, even though every day of inertia means another two dozen reporters somewhere are shown the door by a newspaper chain, or another foreign bureau closes, or another once-precise and competent newsroom decides it will make do without a trained city editor, an ombudsman, or a fully staffed copy desk.

This then, is for Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth: Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry.... I know that content wants to be free on the Internet.... I know that commentary--the froth and foam of print journalism--sells itself cheaply and well on thousands of blogs.... I know that if one of you should try to go behind the paywall while the other’s content remains free, then, yes, you would be destroyed.... But also apparent is the fact that absent a radical revisiting of the dynamic between newspapering and the Internet, there will be little cohesive, professional, first-generation journalism at the state and local level, as your national newspapers continue to retrench and regional papers are destroyed outright.

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future--let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it--both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only.... No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling.... You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums... make a voluntary donation--let’s say $10 million--to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products....

[T]he need to create a new revenue stream from the twenty-first century’s information-delivery model is, belatedly, apparent to many in the industry. But no one can act if the Times and The Post do not; the unique content of even a functional regional newspaper--state and municipal news, local sports and culture--is insufficient to demand that readers pay online. But add to that the national and international coverage from the national papers that would no longer be available on the Internet for free but could be provided through participation in the news services of the Times and The Post and, finally, there is a mix of journalism that justifies a subscription fee. Time is the enemy, however....

[F]or the Times and The Post--entities that are still providing the lion’s share of journalism’s national, international, and cultural relevance--their reach has never been greater. The proof is that while online aggregation and free newspaper Web sites have combined to batter paid print circulation figures, more people are reading the product of America’s newspapers than ever before....

No doubt some mavens of new media who have read this far have spittle in the corners of their mouths at the thought of the dying, tail-dragging dinosaurs of mainstream journalism resurrecting themselves....

[T]he fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished--some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day.... Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one....

[T]hree factors are worth noting--if only because of their relevance to the online subscription model that is clearly required:

• First, there is the familiar industrial dynamic in which leaders raised in one world are taken aback to find they have underestimated the power of an emerging paradigm. When I left my newsroom in 1995, the Internet was a mere whisper, but even five years later, as its potential was becoming a consideration in every other aspect of American life, those in command of The Baltimore Sun were explaining the value of their free Web site in these terms: this is advertising for the newspaper.... Looking back, it sounds comical....

• Second, the industry leaders on both the business and editorial sides came of age in an environment in which circulation had long been a loss leader, when newspapers never charged readers what it actually cost to get the product to their doorstep. Advertising, not content, was all. This specific dynamic maximized everyone’s blindness to the real possibilities of a subscription model.... [I]f there is no profit to be had in delivering the paper product to homes at existing rates, then by all means, jack up those rates—raise hard-copy prices and drive as many readers as possible online, where you charge less, but at a distinct profit....

• Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets.... [L]tle was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.... The cancer devouring journalism began somewhere below the knee, and by the time the disease reached the self-satisfied brain of the Washington and New York newsrooms, the prognosis was far worse....

[H]ere are a few possible outcomes, if the Times and The Post go ahead and build that wall.

• First scenario: The Times and The Post survive, their revenue streams balanced by still-considerable print advertising, the bump in the price of home delivery and newsstand sales, and, finally, a new influx of cheap yet profitable online subscriptions. And reassured that they can risk going behind the paywall without local readers getting free national, international, and cultural reporting from the national papers, and having seen that the paid-content formula can work, most metro dailies will follow suit....

• Second scenario: In those cities where regional papers collapse, the vacuum creates an opportunity for new, online subscription-based news organizations that cover state and local issues, sports, and finance, generating enough revenue to maintain a slim—but paid—metro desk.... In a metro region the size of Baltimore, where 300,000 once subscribed to a healthy newspaper, imagine an initial market penetration of a tenth of that--30,000 paid subscribers (in a metro region of more than 2.5 million), who are willing to pay $10 per month... for the only product in town that covers local politics, local culture, local sports, and financial news--using paid reporters and paid editors to produce a consistent, professional product. That’s $300,000 a month in revenue, or $3.6 million a year, with zero printing or circulation costs.... At $100,000 a position for editors and reporters, that’s a metro desk of some thirty-five paid souls....

• Third scenario: Except for one in which professional journalism doesn’t endure in any form, this is the worst of all worlds. The Times and The Post survive because their coverage is unique and essential. But the regional dailies, too eviscerated to offer a credible local product, cannot entice enough online subscriptions to make do. They wither and die....

But all of this is, of course, academic. Because at this moment, Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth have yet to turn that last card. Until they find the will and the courage to do so, no scenario other than the slow strangulation of paid, professional journalism applies. Meanwhile, we dare to dream of a viable, online future for American newsrooms.

A few comments:

• I think Simon has gotten the hierarchy wrong. In terms of willingness-to-pay, mine is, in order: (1) the FT; (2) the Economist; (3) the Contra Costa Times; (4) the WSJ (and double if my online subscription came with the editorial page excluded); (5) the New York Times; (6) the San Francisco Chronicle... (666) the Washington Post.

• So I don't see the Washington Post surviving in any scenario: what does it have to sell, after all? At the international and national level, there are lots of organizations for whom aggregating up the international and national news makes sense as a loss leader.

• I do see the Contra Costa Times surviving: at a local scale, the task of aggregating up all of the press releases and police blotters and local gossip blogs is not of sufficient interest for anyone to do it for free, so there is value there.

• I do see the FT and the WSJ and the Economist and--alas! given its employment of the odious Stuart Taylor, Jr., he who slammed Sonia Sotomayor for being insufficiently grateful to Princeton for its beneficence in admitting her--the National Journal surviving: beat-level knowledge and expertise at that level is valuable.

• I don't know what is going to happen to the Atlantic and the NYRB and the New Yorker: it could go either way.

• I don't know what is going to happen to the New York Times: it could go either way.

• And I think Simon has gotten the situation very wrong: if the WP and the NYT move together on September 1 to cut off access, they die immediately and everyone switches to reading the Manchester Guardian, which flourishes. If the WP and the NYT and the LATimes and the Grauniad and the Times of London and the Telegraph all move together on September 1, they die and the Chicago Tribune flourishes. If the CT also cuts off access--if everyone with a White House correspondent cuts off access--then the White House web page becomes America's daily national newspaper, and that State and Treasury webpages become our daily free international and financial newspapers, respectively--with lots of webloggers peering over their shoulders to try to keep them somewhat honest...

David Lat Describes His Panel at the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference

He is surprised that Monterey is cold in the summer:

At the Ninth Circuit Conference: Kathleen Sullivan and Janet Napolitano - Above the Law - A Legal Tabloid - News, Gossip, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession: Greetings from the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. We've been having a great time schmoozing with federal judicial celebrities, here in lovely (but surprisingly chilly) Monterey. Yesterday we participated in an excellent panel discussion about the future of journalism, together with some boldface names: Linda Greenhouse (moderator), former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times; Nina Totenberg, of NPR; Judge Robert Lasnik, chief judge of the Western District of Washington; and Hal Fuson, Executive Vice President, Copley Press. We got to play the role of blogger-barbarian at the gate, which was fun...

David is very polite. He did not mention the two "huh?" moments of his panel:

• Nina Totenberg, saying that organizations that lead people to expect that they can get their news without paying for it or watching ads on it are destructive--organizations, that is, like the National Public Radio that pays her her salary...

• Nina Totenberg again, saying that sometimes when she goes on the air in the afternoon she hasn't read the just-released-that-morning Supreme Court case she is talking about...

Very Bad News for America's Public Discursive Sphere...

Hilzoy writes:

Obsidian Wings: Bare-Faced Go-Away Bird: I'm taking this opportunity to retire from blogging.... The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die. I thought: we've gone mad. And I have to do something -- not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment. I had heard about times like this in the past -- the McCarthy era, for instance -- though I had never expected to live through one. Nonetheless, I was. And I had to try to do something, however insignificant.... Then, in 2004, I was asked to join Obsidian Wings. It was an honor: at the time, ObWi was, for my money, the best blog that really tried to create a dialogue between liberals and conservatives. And that was what I really wanted to do: to listen to people I disagreed with, to engage with them, and to try to show that it was possible to care deeply about politics without hating your opponents. Being civil doesn't mean you're lukewarm, and being committed to your principles doesn't mean you have to be hateful. Being asked to write for the Washington Monthly was a further honor, and one that I never expected.

That said, it seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more.... And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

It has been wonderful, though.... I put something up, and suddenly all these wonderful, smart, and articulate people whom I've never met pop up and start saying interesting things about it. It's a gift for which I will always be grateful. Thanks to everyone...

Now she goes to sleep in her cave near Caermarthen, to awake and post again in Britain's hour of need when King Arthur once again grasps Excalibur and returns from the Faerie Isle of Avalon... No, wait... wrong legend...

I urge everyone to post and send me links to or simply email their appreciations of Hilzoy--and of their favorite things that she has written over the past five years.

Burning Chrome...

Greg Farrell:

Former Goldman employee accused of cyber-theft: Law enforcement officials in the US arrested a former Goldman Sachs employee over the July 4 holiday weekend, accusing him of stealing sensitive automated trading codes and uploading them to a server based in Germany. Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer who joined Goldman in May 2007 and resigned last month, was arrested late Friday as he disembarked from a flight at Newark International Airport and charged the next day with theft of trade secrets and transfer of stolen property.

According to an affidavit filed by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in the matter, Mr Aleynikov – who held the title of vice-president at Goldman before leaving June 5 – was part of a team that developed and improved the software codes used in the firm’s computerised trading programs. Mr Aleynikov was bound by Goldman’s standard confidentiality agreements. The FBI affidavit alleges Mr Aleynikov, after accepting the offer from his new firm – which has yet to be identified – downloaded approximately 32 megabytes of proprietary trading platform data from his desktop computer at work as well as his laptop at home on four separate occasions between June 1 and June 5, his last day at Goldman.

Hoisted from Archives: The Invisible College

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Invisible College: J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Invisible College," Chronicle of Higher Education Review 52:47 (July 28, 2006):

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: The Invisible College: Right now I'm looking out my office window, perched above the large, grassy, Frisbee-playing, picnicking, and sunbathing area that stretches through Berkeley's campus. I'm looking straight out at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a view that I marvel at every day. I wonder why the chancellor hasn't confiscated such offices and rented them out to hedge funds to improve the university's finances.

I walk out my door and look around: at the offices of professors who know more about topics like the history of the international monetary system or the evolution of income distribution than any other human beings alive, and at graduate students hanging out in the lounge. It's a brilliant intellectual community, this little slice of the world that is our visible college. You run into people in the hall and the lounge, and you learn interesting things. Paradise. For an academic, at least.

But I am greedy. I want more. I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be really nice to have Paul Krugman three doors down, so I could bump into him occasionally and ask, "Hey, Paul, what do you think of .. ." Aggressive younger people interested in public policy and public finance would be excellent. Berkeley is deficient in not having enough right-wingers; a healthy college has a well-diversified intellectual portfolio. The political scientists are too far away to run into by accident — somebody like Dan Drezner would be nice to have around (even if he does get incidence wrong sometimes).

Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least.

Plus, Web logging is an excellent procrastination tool. Don't feel like grading? Don't feel like writing that ad hoc committee report or completing the revisions demanded by clueless referee X? Write on your Web log and get the warm glow of having accomplished something.

Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience rather than merely an ivory-tower audience. That is true of those on the right as well as the left. Web logging is a promising way to do that.

Plus, there is the hope that someday, somehow, all of this will develop in a way to provide useful tools for teaching or marketing one's books, or something — that Web logging is a lottery ticket to something in the future, unknown but good.

Plus — and this is the biggest plus — it is a play in the intellectual influence game. My blog got about 20,000 page-views a day last month.

The hope of all of us who blog is that we will become smarter, do more useful work, be happier and more productive, and will also impress our deans so they will raise our salaries. The first three hopes are clearly true: Academics who blog think more profound thoughts, have a bigger influence on the world — both the academic and the broader worlds — and are happier for it. Are we more productive in an academic sense? Maybe. We will see when things settle down.

Are our deans impressed? Not so far, but they should be. A lot of a university's long-run success depends on attracting good undergraduates. Undergraduates and their parents are profoundly influenced by the public face of the university. And these days, a thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed Web logger like Juan Cole or Dan Drezner is an important part of a university's public face. Michigan gains in reputation and mindshare from having a Cole on its faculty. Yale loses from not having an equivalent.

A great university has faculty members who do a great many things — teaching undergraduates, teaching graduate students, the many things that are "research," public education, public service, and the turbocharging of the public sphere of information and debate that is a principal reason that governments finance and donors give to universities. Web logs may well be becoming an important part of that last university mission.

With High Page Rank Comes Great Responsibility...

anonymous writes:

The Dreadful Armenian Star Thistle...: Congratulations, your blog is now the #1 Google result for "armenian star thistle".

Posted by: anonymous | July 01, 2009 at 08:32 AM

Gang War: The Stenographers vs. the Aggregators

Matthew Yglesias on the hissy-fit the policy substance-free "opinions on shape of earth differ" journamalists of the Stenographer faction are pulling. It seems it was unfair for Barack Hussein Obama at his press conference to have asked an Aggregator, Nico Pitney (who has been doing a wonderful job on covering Iran via new and social media), to give him a question from Iran:

Matthew Yglesias: Pitney vs Millbank: I actually ran into Nico Pitney, destroyer of journalism, last night at a party. Neither of us seem to be on the Georgetown cocktail party circuit, but we’re both on the Green Line accessible beer ‘n Beam circuit. To me, it just brought home the extent to which this controversy is driven by status anxiety. It’s a convention that White House Correspondent for an Important Media Outlet is a highly prestigious and incredibly important job. The idea that a more interesting question might come from a young guy who writes for some website and has been aggregating news out of Iran would upend the whole thing. The case against Nico might make some sense if you could say he lobbed Obama a softball or asked about some pointless trivia. But that’s not the case, so…

Scene: Washington DC: A TV Studio: Enter two journamalists of the faction of the Stenographers, armed with notebooks and fountain pens...

Dana Milbank: A dog of the house of the Aggregators moves me.

Howard Kurtz: To move is to stir; and to be valiant is to stand: therefore, if thou art moved, thou runn'st away.

Dana Milbank: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid who is an Aggregator.

Howard Kurtz: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall.

Dana Milbank: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push the Aggregator men from the wall, and thrust the maids to the wall.

Howard Kurtz: The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.

Dana Milbank: 'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids, and cut off their heads.

Howard Kurtz: The heads of the maids?

Dana Milbank: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; take it in what sense thou wilt.

Howard Kurtz: They must take it in sense that feel it.

Dana Milbank: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Howard Kurtz: 'Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor John. Draw thy tool! here comes two of the house of the Aggregators...

As to what followed, Amanda Terkel reports:

Think Progress: The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank calls Nico Pitney a ‘dick’ after heated debate on CNN.: By Amanda Terkel at 3:04 pm The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank calls Nico Pitney a ‘dick’ after heated debate on CNN. Last week, the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney (who is also a former member of ThinkProgress) found himself in the center of controversy after President Obama called on him at a press conference. One of the harshest pieces came from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who called Pitney a “planted questioner.” Today the two faced off on Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” segment on CNN. Pitney called some of Milbank’s past reporting “pathetic,” and Milbank claimed that Nico had “worked in collusion with an administration.” Watch it:

The discussion was evidently so heated that Milbank called him a “dick” at the end of the segment, as Pitney writes on Huffington Post:

The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a “dick” in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, “You’re such a dick”). Howie Kurtz wrote on Twitter that he didn’t hear it, which is understandable — he was doing the lead-in for the next part of the segment on the ABC White House special. But it happened (I urge Howie to watch the video of the panel during the ABC intro) and it was frankly pretty odd.

And TBogg:

Dickgate: Now comes the after-action report from Ana Marie Cox:

Sources say that at the end of the Dana/Nico segment, Dana says, "You're such a dick." Wishful thinking? Can anyone confirm?

Howie Kurtz whose bread is buttered by the WaPo is all, nuh-uh:

Dana Milbank did not call Nico Pitney a dick or anything else after their Reliable debate, @anamariecox. It was civil. I was there.

Ana Marie is all, yuh-huh:

@HowardKurtz Nico stands by the quote. Obviously, you both were there.

Howie backs off:

Well, maybe it got heated betw Pitney and Milbank after they left the set. I DID suggest (jokingly) that they take it outside...

Page Rank

Robin Sloan's Iran News Superfilter

#IranElection tracker for the easily overwhelmed (robinsloan.com): Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed...

Via Xeni Jardin.

Morning Daniel Froomkin News Roundup

Hamilton Nolan:

Gawker - Washington Post Fires Token Liberal - Dan Froomkin: The Washington Post, which pays money to opinion writers such as Bill Kristol (smarmy) and Richard Cohen (smarmier), has fired blogger Dan Froomkin, one of the only WaPo opinion writers who pointed out that the Bush White House was crooked. Froomkin wrote the "White House Watch" blog and he was extremely "Liberal" because he generally pointed out the Bush administration lied all the time. (While the rest of the paper's opinion page supported the Iraq War, etc, they really do suck). Here's the paper's s----- explanation:

I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com

Translation: the Washington Post has to be even more conservative now with Obama as president or else they won't be taken "Seriously"...

John Harris of The Politico:

John Harris: This is a quick note on your recent items on Dan Froomkin's ouster from the Post.

I blundered four years ago in allowing myself to have an overwrought public disagreement with Dan over what now seems (and if I was thinking clearly at the time would have seemed then) an insanely narow [sic] issue--i.e., whether his column was appropriately labeled. I don't want any current references to that now ancient episode to obscure my actual view of Dan and his work. I think he is a distinctive and valuable voice on the presidency and on journalism. I particularly admire the entpreneurialism [sic] he has shown in his career--using the power of the Web to build a community of followers and create his own franchise. This was actually my view at the time, though it got lost in the smoke when I got indignant over a couple points that seem distant now. But my view has strengthened in the years since, with more appreciation of how the Web is changing journalism and how enterprising writers thrive in this new environment.

It's been nearly three years since I have had anything to do with decision-making at the Post, and I have no insight into what prompted he and the Post to part ways. But he had some impressive achievements there, and I hope he'll find the right home for his voice soon.

Best,

John Harris

Actually, I don't think that last is true. I think John Harris has considerable insight into what prompted the Post to fire him--how could it possibly be otherwise? I would be interested to learn what his insights are.

Glenn Greenwald:

Glenn Greenwald: [T]his Froomkin firing is so revealing.  The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real "journalist" -- and has now been fired by the Post -- is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is.  Along those lines, Harris might want to consider also acknowledging that Froomkin was absolutely right when insisting (and Harris wrong when doubting) that Froomkin was not acting as "liberal opinionist" when criticizing Bush, but rather, was as an "accountability journalist" because he was merely pointing out facts, and would subject the actions and claims of a Democratic president to the same journalistic scrutiny.  Froomkin's tenacious criticisms of Obama leave no doubt about that... 

Jane Hamsher:

Campaign Silo » Froomkin v. Washington Post — The Battle Continues: Glenn Greenwald says most of what needs to be said about the Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin.  But having been involved in the early rounds of this battle and watched it ferment over the years, I thought I'd add a few notes of context. When Debbie Howell wrote that Dan Froomkin was "highly opinionated and liberal," she didn't just think that up by her little old "yippie ki yeah motherf-----" self.   It was the consensus of the newsroom, where it was believed -- correctly -- that Froomkin's writing about the war and US foreign policy were an inherent criticism of the WaPo's own coverage and editorial position.  And so they wanted to make it clear that he was Not One Of Them, nor did he rise to their high standards.   Here was Len Downie at the time:

"We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion," Downie told E&P. "And that readers of the Web site understand that, too."

And here's John Harris (now chief of Politico):

They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

But aside from the desire to play access footsie with the White House, Downie and Harris were bristling at Froomkin's critique of -- well, them.  While they were fawning over Bush, his war and his codpiece, Froomkin was writing about Bob Woodward's "unique relationship" with the White House.   When Froomkin was transferred into Fred Hiatt's fiefdom a couple of months ago, it didn't bode well for his consistently popular column.

There was always a sympathetic ear in the halls of the Washington Post for anyone who wanted to complain about Dan Froomkin.  The arrogant presumption that they were carrying on some sort of noble journalistic tradition that Froomkin violated is just baked into the concrete over there.  In the end, the bitter petty people who discredited the entire profession with their coverage of the war and its fallout just did not like the mirror he held up to them. 

And an organization that has long felt it could change reality simply by refusing to acknowledge its existence runs true to form once again.

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander:

Ombudsman Blog: Post Axes Froomkin's "White House Watch": After five and a half years as a regular feature on the Web site, Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch column is being axed. Froomkin was quietly passing the word today that he was told by The Post that his contract will be terminated in early July....

"I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t 'working' anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well," Froomkin said. "I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online. I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day," he continued. "I’m not sure at this point what I’m going to do next. I may take White House Watch elsewhere, or may try something different."

Froomkin bills his often-irreverent online column as a “pugnacious daily anthology of White House-related items from news Web sites, blogs and other sources.” He does not operate as a White House reporter. Rather, he compiles material about the White House and offers his own commentary, often with a liberal bent.

That slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president.

Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, whose stable of contributors includes Froomkin, said late Thursday: "With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision."

When it began, the column was called “White house Briefing.” But the name was changed after concerns by some at The Post newspaper that readers might believe Froomkin was a White House reporter, working alongside those offering objective news reporters.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank's comment on this is that it would have been much more popular with readers for the Post to have kept Froomkin and fired Alexander.

Jay Rosen:

The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media: Froomkin came along, in the wreckage of that, and from a position way on the wing, as a columnist for washingtonpost.com, this new entity which to the guys downtown at The Washington Post didn't even matter at first, came along and he basically picked up the signals from that event, and started to write it up, and started to bring that story, that whole narrative of the radicalism of the Bush years, into The Washington Post. And the truth is, that the Washington press corps, and the people at the White House themselves, helped to normalize Bush; they normalized a radical move. They didn't know what to do in the case of an outlier. All the things they would have had to do to respond, they failed to do. And Froomkin was reminding them of that. And that is ultimately why he was let go...

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: I think one mistake people, including me, have been making in discussing Froomkin was to assert that he's a liberal and, as Glenn Greenwald said, is almost alone in the mainstream media in criticizing Obama from the Left. This is true, in some sense, but only because our political discourse has become so weird. I mean, a decade ago, whatever I thought of conservatism, I wouldn't have considered "following the law" and "constitutional limits on executive power" and "skepticism about government secrecy" and "acknowledgment of the 4th amendment" and "accountability for government misdeeds other than blowjobs" and "lying our way into war is maybe wrong" and, perhaps, most of all, "torture is bad" to be just "liberal" positions. But since we just came off the age of Bush, where only liberals actually got upset about these things, and conservatives haven't yet (for some reason) become all that concerned that Rahm Emanuel might be bugging their phones, these are now apparently "liberal" positions. So in our discourse Froomkin became an extreme leftist, even though I don't remember him actually expressing opinions on the vast range of issues which, in non-crazy times, we associate with liberalism.

James Fallows:

James Fallows: egative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.

A Reader of Glenn Greenwald:

From a reader, via email: As of this moment the post on the WaPo Ombudsman's blog about Froomkin has 395 comments (most in support of Froomkin). His previous post, on Howard Kurtz, has 9. The post before that has 25. The one before that 0, as in none [and the 3 posts prior to that have 3 each, and the one prior also has zero]. Genius of the WaPo to get rid of the writer who readers are most passionate about.

And Glenn comments:

Number of comments isn't a perfect barometer of interest, but when the disparities are that large, it is certainly probative. The bottom line is that I'd be willing to bet anyone that Froomkin generates more outside traffic to The Post than the overwhelming majority of Post blogs that remain.

Steve Clemons:

Dan Froomkin and White House Watch - The Washington Note: Politico's Patrick Gavin (who is editing Michael Calderone's column this week) reports and I have confirmed that Dan Froomkin's invaluable White House Watch blog has been discontinued at the Washington Post. Froomkin was the new media hybrid of Woodward and Bernstein during the George W. Bush administration and provided one of the best informed portals into America's palace politics. I want all TWN's readers to know that Froomkin was one of those who greatly furthered serious public discourse about torture, domestic spying, the Iraq War, and many other stressful and important subjects -- and his platform at the Post will be missed.

Steve Benen:

The Washington Monthly: if Froomkin is leaving the Post, it's a real loss. Froomkin has been a great writer with keen instincts, often picking up on a burgeoning story before it's gained traction elsewhere. The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions...

Megan McArdle:

Froomkin Fired - Megan McArdle: Dan Froomkin is out at the Post, for reasons that aren't clear to me.  Was there really room for only one liberal political blogger?

And Dan Froomkin:

Froomkin, Lord Carlile, and US Political Journalism: Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central.  The threat comes from inside.  It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do…

Calling bulls---, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

It also resonates with readers and viewers a lotm ore than passionless stenography I’m not sure why calling bulls--- has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access fo  insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bulls----calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bulls--- more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bulls----calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat.  We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship — or whatever it is — out of the way.

Six Reasons that the Washington Post Is Much Weaker as an Information Source Now than It Was Two Days Ago

It is--I confess--very rare that I learn anything save the multiple forms of error from Washington Post stories: what's true in them is rarely new to me, and what's new to me in them is rarely true. But here are six very good stories over the past six months that taught me things:

1) June 8, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: How Cheney Bent DOJ to His Will: Three newly-disclosed Justice Department e-mails thoroughly vindicate the most cynical suspicions about how former vice president Dick Cheney bent ostensibly independent Justice Department lawyers to his will and forced them to manufacture legal cover for his torture policies.... They reveal Cheney's extraordinary influence over then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales and key lieutenants.... Comey describes an exchange with Ted Ullyot, then Gonzales's chief of staff: "I told him that the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the s--- hit the fan. Rather, they would simply say they had only asked for an opinion."...

The e-mails date back to DOJ's second round of finding legal rationalizations for torture. By 2005, the department had renounced the original August 1, 2002, "torture memo" from the OLC, the CIA's office of inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the techniques being used at the CIA's secret prisons, and the CIA had abandoned waterboarding -- but not many other extreme measures. Cheney's quest to restore the necessary legal cover resulted in three new memos, which were among those declassified and released in April by the Obama administration. The first memo concluded that brutal interrogation techniques including waterboarding did not individually violate the federal criminal prohibition against torture. The second memo concluded that even the combined use of those techniques didn't violate that particular statute. Those two memos were issued on May 10, 2005. The third memo, dated May 25, managed to conclude that the techniques didn't even violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture's prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

The previously undisclosed e-mails from Comey were Web-published on Saturday by the New York Times. But Scott Shane and David Johnston chose to focus on a minor point -- that Comey and other lawyers, even while expressing their grave concerns about the interrogation methods in question, had approved the first memo.... [T]he e-mails were probably leaked to the Times in a "pre-emptive strike" on an upcoming report from the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility. That report is said to harshly criticize former OLC lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury for their role in approving torture. The message their defenders clearly wanted to send -- and which the Times conveyed -- was that even those DOJ officials who had thus far "escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law" agreed with at least some of the rationales put forth by Yoo et. al.

But the actual e-mails, in which Comey documents his various conversations on the matter, don't really support that message. Rather, they paint a portrait of a hopeless rear-guard action by Comey and others against Cheney and his willing lackeys.... In his April 27 e-mail, Comey describes telling Gonzales directly about his "grave reservations" about the second memo. Gonzales's response? "The AG explained that he was under great pressure from the Vice President to complete both memos, and that the President had even raised it last week, apparently at the VP's request and the AG had promised they would be ready early this week."... Comey concludes: "People may think it strange to hear me say I miss John Ashcroft, but as intimidated as he could be by the WH, when it came to crunch-time, he stood up, even from an intensive care hospital bed. That backbone is gone." And by his May 31 e-mail, his wistful regrets have turned into barely contained fury...

2) June 3, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: Celebrity Journalism at the White House: What would you do if you -- and your 32 camera crews -- were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill? There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually make decisions? What if anything changes his mind? What blows his cool? How does he settle disputes among his advisers? Who is the last one to whisper in his ear? How does he treat his staff? How furious is the competition for his attention? Who wins? Why is he so sure, so confident, that thinking big is the solution to every problem? How do he and his staff really feel about the mess Bush left them? How does the former constitutional law professor reconcile his devotion to civil liberties with a handful of recent decisions that have horrified civil libertarians? Does he have second thoughts?

But sadly those were not the sorts of things that seemed to interest anchor Brian Williams and the more than two dozen NBC News producers responsible for the "Inside the Obama White House" special showing last night and tonight, a show that treats Obama like a celebrity rather than a president.... [W]hat seems to fascinate Williams the most is what everyone is eating. There are, it turns out, apples and M&Ms all over the White House. In fact, the show devotes a whole montage to people pouring, throwing and consuming M&Ms. And the high point of the day, the centerpiece of the hour-long show last night, what Williams calls Obama's "brief shining moment," is a hokey, obviously staged burger run to Five Guys. The cameras literally languish over greasy paper bags full of french fries.

It's the kind of substanceless fawning that leads some to conclude that the press is soft on Obama. But this show wasn't about his politics or his policies. It was a celebration and amplification of the star power of the presidency in general, and of this president in particular. Simply showing him eating a burger they apparently consider great television. And tonight, we're promised an interview with Bo the dog...

3) May 26, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapersb: We’re all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we’ve been used to doing in print. A big part of the problem is that we’re doing a really poor job of connecting buyers and sellers on our newspaper Web sites.... But some of our shortcomings are purely journalistic. We... are still fundamentally failing to deliver the value of our newsroom to Internet users. Our reporters and editors are curious, passionate, and voracious discoverers and devourers of information; talented storytellers; and smart people with excellent bullshit detectors. As long as human beings are curious about each other and clamor for trusted information, there’s a place for us out there. The Internet hasn’t changed that. In fact it’s increased the market for what we’ve got: The Internet highly values people who know things, who can find things out, who can distinguish between what’s important and what’s not, who can distinguish between what’s true and what’s not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively.

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations.... [T]he dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story... is mostly a throwback... a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community....

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice.... If we were to start an online newspaper from scratch today, we’d recognize that toneless, small-bore news stories are not the way to build a large audience.... One option might be to imitate cable TV.... But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.... We stifle some of our best stories with a wet blanket of pseudo-neutrality. We edit out tone. We banish anything smacking of activism. We don’t telegraph our own enthusiasm for what it is we’re doing. We vaguely assume the readers will understand how valuable a service we’re providing for them — but evidently, many of them don’t....

Making political decisions through triangulation – trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political decision. It’s just often a not very good one. Those who argue that truth-telling has become too political for us to engage in need to reexamine why they are in this business.... That seven in 10 Americans at one point believed that Saddam Hussein had a role in the 9/11 attacks is a profound indictment of our reluctance to champion the truth when it is under attack.... The high priests of the church-state separation may take offense, but the fact is that there’s long been a confusing continuum in journalism ranging from straight news to opinion. And I suspect our hairsplitting distinctions have been lost on our readers. In the Internet age, the answer is not censoring ourselves in the name of obscure in-house rules, or trying to put inscrutable labels on everything. The answer is for us to call things as we seen them, and be up front about it....

[L]et’s allow the folks on the “news” side to give members of the public the kind of analysis they’re craving. That means putting things in their proper context. It means not being afraid to explain that one position on an issue is better supported by the facts than the other, when that’s the case. It also allows for the advocating of basic human and journalistic values. I don’t think that conveying outrage over nondisclosure of public records — or children going hungry, or torture — disqualifies someone from calling themselves a news reporter...

4) April 14, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: Obama Connects Most of the Dots: ware that many Americans are wondering how all his different economic programs and policies fit together, President Obama today tried to connect the dots. He explained why he believes each of his various short-term economic initiatives is a critical element of the economic recovery, how his ambitious long-term budget proposals are essential to building an economy that won't crash like this one did, and that, although some initiatives are already producing glimmers of hope, most of the hard work still lies ahead....

He strongly rebutted the criticism, largely from Republicans, that he shouldn't be spending so much either now or in the long term. He noted how it is economic common sense that "the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending." And, in an analogy that resonated particularly well with an audience heavy on college students, he talked about the need to invest in the future. "Look, just as a cash-strapped family may cut back on all kinds of luxuries but will still insist on spending money to get their children through college -- will refuse to have their kids drop out of college and go to work in some fast food place, even though that might bring in some income in the short term, because they're thinking about the long term -- so we as a country have to make current choices with an eye to the future."...

But he failed to persuasively rebut the most urgent critique of his economic policies.... Obama raised it on his own, noting that some critics think he has "been too timid" about shoring up the banking system. "This is essentially the nationalization argument that some of you may have heard. And the argument says that the federal government should have already preemptively stepped in and taken over major financial institutions the way that the FDIC currently intervenes in smaller banks and that our failure -- my administration's failure -- to do so is yet another example of Washington coddling Wall Street: 'Why aren't you tougher on the banks?'"

But his answer was vague and unconvincing: "So let me be clear. The reason we have not taken this step has nothing to do with any ideological or political judgment we've made about government involvement in banks. It's certainly not because of any concern we have for the management and shareholders whose actions helped to cause this mess. Rather, it’s because we believe that preemptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end, and because it’s more likely to undermine than create confidence."

Obama's belief has never been in question. It's the reasoning behind that belief that we've been missing, as well as the source of his faith in the judgment of economic advisers. But he once again left us all in the dark on that count...

5) March 30, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked: Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture. That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture.... But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong. Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives. All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.

Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House's motive. The most charitable interpretation at this point of the decision to torture is that it was a well-intentioned overreaction of people under enormous stress whose only interest was in protecting the people of the United States. But there's always been one big problem with that theory: While torture works on TV, knowledgeable intelligence professionals and trained interrogators know that in the real world, it's actually ineffective and even counterproductive. The only thing it's really good as it getting false confessions. So why do it? Some social psychologists (see, for instance, Kevin M. Carlsmith on NiemanWatchdog.org) have speculated that the real motivation for torture is retribution. And now someone with first-hand knowledge is suggesting that was a factor in Zubaida's case. Quoting a "former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida," Finn and Warwick write that the pressure on CIA interrogators "from upper levels of the government was 'tremendous,' driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates.... "'They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new,' the official said. 'They'd say, "You aren't working hard enough." There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.'"'...

Author and investigative reporter Suskind first exposed the rampant fallacies of the administration's Zubaida narrative in his explosive June 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine. See my June 20, 2006 column for a summary. But mainstream news organizations, unable to match Suskind's sources, largely refused to acknowledge his reporting. Indeed, in September 2006, when the White House for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA detention and interrogation program, Bush had no qualms about putting Zubaida front and center. In a major speech, he proudly described how Zubaida -- "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden" -- was questioned using the CIA's new "alternative set of procedures" and then "'began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives." All lies and euphemisms. But all reported pretty much straight at the time by a mainstream media that, if it noted Suskind's reporting at all, did so as an afterthought...

6) January 12, 2009:

Dan Froomkin: Bush's Last Press Conference: Bush responded most angrily to Washington Post reporter Michael Abramowitz's observation that members of the incoming Obama administration have spoken extensively about the need to restore America's moral standing in the world. "I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged," Bush said. (Even though it has, dreadfully. See, for instance, this Pew Global Attitudes Project report.) "It may be damaged amongst some of the elite. But people still understand America stands for freedom; that America is a country that provides such great hope," Bush continued, before launching into a defensive tirade heavy on 9/11 references....

He continued to prove unable to admit any serious mistakes on his part. As before, he expressed regret for his cowboy rhetoric and said he should have pursued immigration before Social Security restructuring. But while he acknowledged disappointments, he avoided responsibility. "Abu Ghraib, obviously, was a huge disappointment, during the presidency. You know, not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment," he said. "I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were -- things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way.... Look, I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better or, you know, mistakes I made."...

One thing Bush hadn't shared previously was his thinking about Hurricane Katrina, which up until the financial crisis was seen as his biggest domestic failure. "I've thought long and hard about Katrina; you know, could I have done something differently," he said. Like what? "[L]ike land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge." But the problem with the archetypal photo of Bush peering out at the catastrophic damage from his 747 was not that he didn't land -- it was how the photo symbolized his overall lack of concern and the inadequacy of the federal response. Later in the press conference, Bush grew angry defending that federal response. "Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed," he said. But this is not exactly a controversial conclusion. A 2006 report from House Republicans concluded that leaders from Bush on down disregarded ample warning of the threat posed by Katrina and did not execute emergency plans or share information that could have saved lives. And the White House's own report acknowledged that the response was botched because federal officials were confused, poorly prepared and communicated badly...

---

UP:DATE: Dan Froomkin emails:

I would like to make a minor point. Of the six Post items [in the last six months] you generously list as being valuable to you, two of them were notably not in the Post. The second one was actually spiked by my editors (and yes, you can say that if you want) so I ran it on NiemanWatchdog and Huffpo instead. The third, I admit, I never even pitched to the Post, It ran over at the Nieman Journalism Lab Web site.

It is... interesting... that the Washington Post do not want to publish this kind of report on the hall-of-mirrors that is the White House press corps:

[A]nchor Brian Williams and the more than two dozen NBC News producers responsible for the "Inside the Obama White House" special.... a show that treats Obama like a celebrity rather than a president.... [W]hat seems to fascinate Williams the most is what everyone is eating... a whole montage to people pouring, throwing and consuming M&Ms.... [T]he centerpiece of the hour-long show last night, what Williams calls Obama's "brief shining moment," is a hokey, obviously staged burger run to Five Guys. The cameras literally languish over greasy paper bags full of french fries...

If you read the Post, think hard about what the editors are spiking and not showing you. Just saying...

"Retro Me Sathanas!" Internet-Always-on-a-Problem Blogging

Mark Thoma emails:

Uh oh. The iPhone cut and paste works a little too well. Wonder how much time this will suck up. It will be good in boring seminars though. Or pretty much anytime the mind has a moment. Yep, uh oh.

Just Arrived in the Mail Blogging...

The Root Desk--the desk bought by my great-grandmother around World War I from the Root family. There is a tradition that this is the desk at which George F. Root wrote "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (but when "there is a tradition" that X, that of course means that X is not true but it is nice to think that it is).

This is worth mentioning because I have been peeking over the intelligent and thoughtful Ta-Nehisi Coates's shoulder as he reads James McPherson's Civil War history The Battle Cry of Freedom, reflects on it, and blogs about it. It's all very very good. For example:

Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers. I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites  from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost. This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.

As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally. I've actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground. The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior's beard. His story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time. Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.

At the end of his book, McPherson has a section where the Confederacy, now desperate, considers raising regiments of black slaves to fight for them. For years, now, they've seen black soldiers--many of them their own ex-slaves--actively contributing to the South's demise. But faced with the prospect of doing the same, Lee and Davis are ensnared by the very lies that they've, until now, heartily embraced. Conceding that blacks could be soldiers, would be a tacit admission of their equality. As Southerner Howell Cobb puts it, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." The South eventually raises two black regiments, but the Confederacy is defeated before any of them see action. And yet, in this section, you can see them trying to square the circle, trying to find another lie that will allow the lie of white supremacy to stand.

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me.

And "One Last Thought on [Nathan Bedford] Forrest".

The Future Is Here, It Is Just Not Easily Distributed (Iran Edition)

Author Walter Jon Williams says that he has an unimportant problem toay:

Angel Station: Watching My Uncompleted Novel Go Down in Flames: There is a scene just like this in the novel I'm working on. My whole novel is playing itself out before my very eyes. All its specialness and wonderfulness, coolness and invention is curling up and dying in fire, as if one of the incendiaries from Fahrenheit 451 found it before I could even finish it. The Twitter Revolution in Moldova was bad enough, but at least it didn't get a lot of coverage over here, and most Americans never heard of Moldova. Iran is different. I feel like all those guys who were working on Cold War novels when the Wall fell.

The parade of demonstrators in Tehran today was nine kilometers long. It's a People Power revolution fired up by social media--- you don't get a crowd that big by sticking up posters on lamp posts. (Does the use of Twitter in Iran somehow absolve it of totally sucking?) Hackers are also proving useful, by attacking Iranian government web sites. (But be careful, script kiddies of the world--- you don't want to bring the whole system down.)

And he has a recommendation for what you can do to help the people with serious problems:

If you want to turn your computer into a proxy server to help Iranians avoid government roadblocks, "Austin Heap" provides instructions here. Be sure to read the disclaimers. I'd do this myself, but I have to admit that it's all beyond my competence.

And he notes that the usual suspects are still acting badly, as usual:

As a final note, I'm startled by the wave of support for Ahmedinejad by American neocons like Marty Peretz ("Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity.") and Martin Rubin. Maybe if there's regime change, and the Iranians liberate themselves, then the neocons won't get their holy war with Iran, and we won't get to liberate the Iranians by killing zillions of them. A great disappointment, to be sure.

UPDATE: The neocons aren't all speaking with one voice, it seems. Bill Kristol now demands that Obama immediately issue a statement of support to the protestors. Why? Because Hitler invaded Poland in 1939! (No, really! Read it yourself!) Ahmadinejad is Hitler! Obama is Chamberlain! So I guess Kristol's idea is for Obama to support the protestors, Ahmadinejad to denounce them as American puppets and kill them, and then we still get to invade Iran! Yay!