Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs: The Heritage Foundation made something of a splash with its study suggesting that immigration reform will cost the public trillions…. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation… asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races… partly due to genetics…. [H]e argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent…. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”… Rather than excluding what he judges to be low-IQ races, we can just test each individual’s IQ and exclude those with low scores. “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection,” he writes, “since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” He does caution against referring to it as IQ-based selection, saying that using the term “skill-based” would “blunt the negative reaction.”
That rhetorical strategy is reflected in Heritage’s current work on immigration. His and Rector’s report recommends greatly reducing “low-skilled” immigration and increasing “high-skilled” immigration…. Richwine also invoked skill considerations in arguing against the “diversity visa” program…
This, I think, poses a huge problem for everybody associated with the Heritage Foundation in the future. It is a reasonable inference to hear "superior race" when DeMint and Rector and company say "highly skilled".
Twenty-eight hours before Sullivan posts--thus showing that Ta-Nehisi Coates's worldline is capable of following closed timeline paths--Ta Nehisi Coates delivers the smackdown. And in the process he says what Sandy Jencks, George Borjas, and Dick Zeckhauser really should have said to Jason Richwine when he first proposed his dissertation topic, and he lays out arguments that Richwine really should have been forced to acknowledge and grapple with before they signed off on his dissertation:
Dave Weigel is one of my favorite reporters, but I think this piece on Jason Richwine, intelligence research, and "race" deserves a closer look:
Academics aren't so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers -- George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser -- for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas "helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school," he wrote. "Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work…." Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city's a bit like a college campus, where investigating "taboo" topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals "racism," and they hear the political-correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thought crime.
It is almost as though the "dark arts of race and IQ" were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it's important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in. A brief reminder seems in order.
Iraq War 10-Year Anniversary: What It Was Like to Oppose It in 2003: There were, of course, people who opposed invading Iraq—Illinois State Senator Barack Obama among them—but within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded foes. When The New Republic’s editor-in-chief and editor proclaimed the need for a “muscular” foreign policy, I was usually the only vocal dissenter, and the only people who agreed with me were the women on staff: Michelle Cottle, Laura Obolensky and Sarah Wildman. Both of the major national dailies—The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting)—were beating the drums for war. Except for Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington’s thinktank honchos were also lined up behind the war.
Att. Jason Richwine: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb: The human brain remains, in many crucial aspects, a mystery to science. So what is IQ? It is a measure of the capacity to learn in the linear fashion prized by Western culture, and we know that it is partially determined by genetics. Yet in the life of the average, individual human, those "innate" genes are vastly, vastly overpowered by the effects of environment: decent nutrition; an emotionally stable, vocabulary-rich home life; physically and emotionally attentive parents; good schools and teachers. All those factors are in shorter supply among high-poverty populations. Claiming that such populations are genetically inferior ignores about a century of research and writing on the malleability of IQ and the proper uses of intelligence assessments.
But do note you are no longer claiming that Paul Krugman trying to radicalize the Obama administration's position on "the stimulus" in the winter of 2008-2009. You are, instead, making a different argument: an argument that Krugman's position at the end of 2010, after the largely-Republican politicization of everything, was not centrist enough.
And do note that the rest of Krugman's column--the part you do not quote--undermines your new argument pretty completely.
Apropos nothing at all I thought I might address the suggestion, sometimes raised, that John Maynard Keynes’s “love” for Carl Melchior, German representative at Versailles, might substantively have influenced Keynes’s position on what reparations the Germans ought to pay. Keynes made early calculations for what Germany should pay in reparations in October, 1918. In “Notes on an Indemnity,” he presented two sets of figures – one “without crushing Germany” and one “with crushing Germany”.
Not Everything Is Political: Clive Crook demands that I engage respectfully with reasonable people on the other side, but somehow fails to offer even one example of such a person. Not long ago Crook was offering Paul Ryan as an exemplar of serious, honest conservatism, while I was shrilly declaring Ryan a con man. But I suspect that even Crook now admits, at least to himself, that Ryan is indeed a con man…
Asked by Gerald Cohen whether he agreed with DeLong’s assertion that Republicans today are more partisan and less compromising, David Gergen replied in the affirmative.
It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction [for Carl Melchior]…. [T]here is no question that the attraction Keynes felt for him strongly influenced his judgment…. [T]hose familiar with Bloomsbury will appreciate why Keynes fell so hard for the representative of an enemy power. Only those--like Robert Skidelsky--who seek to rescue his reputation as a monetary theorist may find Keynes's conduct less easy to account for.
Though his work at the Treasury gratified his sense of self-importance, the war itself made Keynes deeply unhappy. Even his sex life went into a decline, perhaps because the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up…
Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes…. I was duly attacked for my remarks and offered an immediate and unqualified apology. But this did not suffice for some critics, who insisted that I was guilty not just of stupidity but also of homophobia…. To be accused of prejudice is one of the occupational hazards of public life nowadays. There are a remarkable number of people who appear to make a living from pouncing on any utterance that can be construed as evidence of bigotry….
Keynes’ sexual orientation did have historical significance. The strong attraction he felt for the German banker Carl Melchior undoubtedly played a part in shaping Keynes’ views on the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath….
I have labored long and hard to expose precisely what was wrong about the theories that condemned homosexuals, Jews and others to discrimination and death. I have also tried to explain what made those theories so lethally appealing…. I doubt very much that any of my vituperative online critics have made a comparable effort to understand the nature and dire consequences of prejudice. For the self-appointed inquisitors of internet, it is always easier to accuse than seriously to inquire. In the long run we are all indeed dead, at least as individuals. Perhaps Keynes was lucky to pre-decease the bloggers because, for all his brilliance, was also prone to moments of what we would now call political incorrectness….
What the self-appointed speech police of the blogosphere forget is that to err occasionally is an integral part of the learning process. And one of the things I learnt from my stupidity last week is that those who seek to demonize error, rather than forgive it, are among the most insidious enemies of academic freedom.
Niall Ferguson certainly thought so in 1995. Donald Markwell, author of Donald Markwell (2006), "John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace", emails me a copy of Niall Ferguson's 1995 Spectator article, with its claim that Keynes's belief in "the ideas contained in The Economic Consequences of the Peace" "owed as much to his homosexuality as to his Germanophilia…" for "there is no question that the attraction Keynes felt for [Carl Melchior] strongly influenced his judgment…"
But that is not what he says today:
My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.
Krugman… concede[s] (somewhat to my surprise)… stunningly disingenuous of Krugman…. Krugman… at the forefront in casting discussion of the stimulus in left vs. right terms… not to make the stimulus bigger but to reverse the Bush high-income tax cuts… higher spending over lower taxes… [placed] divisive value judgements about the size and scope of government at the center… the stimulus debate was as political as it gets… thanks to Krugman.
It's the absence of quotation marks in his columns that is doing it to me.
There are, I am starting to think, three kinds of columnists: those who quote people in order to show that they have properly construed the arguments they are praising or criticizing, those who quote people out of context in order to misconstrue their arguments, and those who don't quote anybody at all.
I see you submitted a comment… It contains three things that are wrong.
You mischaracterize the liquidity trap argument by claiming "Krugman's 'lliquidity trap' means the Fed is completely useless. It can't stimulate demand and it can't raise inflation either." A liquidity trap means that if monetary policy works, it works not through the safe-and-sure channel of reducing short-term safe nominal interest rates but by changing borrowers' assessments of the future by either raising expected inflation or reducing risk spreads by taking risk off of the private sector. That's strike one.
Naive Fiscal Cynicism: Expansionary austerity has been refuted… even the IMF says that short-run multipliers are big… 90 percent red line… was… fuzzy math… bond vigilantes remain invisible… the confidence fairy refuses to make an appearance… austerian economics has imploded…. Yet there remains immense reluctance to draw the obvious policy conclusion, which is not simply that we have too much austerity, but that right now we shouldn’t be having austerity at all.
Keynes, Keynesians, the Long Run, and Fiscal Policy: One dead giveaway that someone pretending to be an authority on economics is in fact faking it is misuse of the famous Keynes line about the long run. Here’s the actual quote:
But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The source appears to be a rather remarkable screed by Gertrude Himmelfarb in a rather McCarthyite vein, that manages to get a lot about Keynes's economics and his family life substantially wrong in a very short space, which in turn appears to be based on the views of Joseph Schumpeter:
The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day': Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history…
What? Who is it who compared Donald Kagan's history of the Peloponnesian War to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Kaminski doesn't say. The Google is of no help…
My view was that Kagan had a big problem with his History of the Peloponnesian War. He wanted to challenge Thoukydides's interpretation. The problem was that Thoukydides was there. Kagan wasn't. Thoukydides knew a lot more about the war and how it went down than he put in his book. And his book was essentially Kagan's only source.
So Kagan's "Aha! The evidence Thoukydides presents in his book doesn't prove his interpretation wrong beyond a reasonable doubt!" very soon got very tiresome, as I found myself thinking over and over again that it takes a very special man indeed to pick a fight with somebody who knows more about a subject than he does.
One correspondent asks if perhaps Douglas Holtz-Eakin isn't an honest Republican worth engaging with--those whom Clive Crook claims are so thick on the ground and that Paul Krugman is so remiss in not engaging, but he can't remember any of their names.
But another correspondent writes, and I agree:
He was an honest and effective CBO director. After he left CBO… he was invited to set up what he called a 'conservative think tank'. That that was the way he decided to go. And then he went downhill: occasionally now he says something informative and interesting, but most of the time he is saying what he calculates all please his right-wing political masters. It's quite sad…
Hey! Clive Crook! Here is one more reason why Paul Krugman is tired of trying to reason with you people
Matthew Yglesias:
Keynesianism today: Start by stating the argument correctly: This Alex Tabarrok post on growth in the face of fiscal austerity annoyed me as did his co-blogger Tyler Cowen chiming in to say Tabarrok had "nailed it"... the line "In the 1990s growth was strong even while 'austerity' was increasing."
That kind of thing is a dead giveaway that the author isn't even stating the argument for expansionary fiscal policy correctly.
1) This was a HUGE study. How can you say otherwise?
According to the paper, 12,229 people responded to the surveys and were analyzed. So, yes, for outcomes that effected everyone (think financial hardship), it’s likely they were super-powered. But for many of the outcomes that were more murky, that’s not the case. Take A1C for instance. Only 5.1% of the control group had an A1C>=6.5. Let’s assume that the starting prevalence was the same in the intervention group. That means that only 624 people (312 in each group) actually had a high A1C in the study. That’s not anywhere near as big. Especially when you’re talking about an indirect intervention like insurance as opposed to actual health care.
I am one of the winners in the Oregon lottery [winners could get Medicaid]. Going from no insurance to insurance is very confusing. When you have no money every health question starts with "would I rather live with this problem and have electricity, or treat this problem and keep my milk in a cooler for a month or so?" Stepping back into healthcare was like hopping on a merry-go-round. The doctor wanted to do test after test to come up with baselines for me, and I had a hard time showing up at the lab.
I would say that we already knew that the Medicaid model is not a terribly productive way to create chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, and that we need to find better condition-management models pronto. But I would also say that the depression and financial security findings are better news than I expected. About what I would have expected (but worse than I might have hoped) on some welfare indicators, better than expected (and as good as I might have hoped) on others--net-net, goods news for the efficacy of Medicaid expansion.
And people who say otherwise aren't reading the study…
On your point #1 on sample sizes, note that the study is effectively even smaller than you’re saying. Thinking of the high A1C sub-sample as containing 624 people is correct for the intent-to-treat analysis (i.e. for estimating the effect of offering insurance). But (net) take-up was only about 25 percent. Thus, for the IV analysis (which provide the estimates of the effect of insurance per se), the point estimates and variance are scaled up by a factor of 4=1/0.25. This means that the “RCT-equivalent” sample size is only 156=624/4. That’s really, really small, even before you get to the fact that insuring people does not automatically get them the appropriate care (your point about direct versus indirect interventions).
I actually haven't read the whole [Baicker et al. NEJM Oregon Medicaid Lottery] paper, but I have read the abstract and a key table cut-and-pasted by Kevin Drum. It shows a more than four-fold increase in diabetes diagnosis due to Medicaid availability. This does not correspond to statistically significant decrease in the fraction of people with high hemoglobin glycosylation. So the paper does not contain proof that current therapy for diabetes is better than nothing.
Having read Katherine Baicker et al. (2013), "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", New England Journal of Medicine, I conclude that the study was--as natural experiments are--significantly underpowered, that the jury is still out on most of the effects, but that the success of the Medicaid expansion in reducing depression and improving financial security are rock-solid and nailed benefits, by themselves worth more than the net cost of the expansion.
Therefore I wish to withdraw my tweet from last night:
@tylercowen @petersuderman the case for Medicaid expansion is *marginally* less strong than I had thought...
According to the New York Times, key Senate Republicans threaten to sink the entire immigration reform initiative if it includes a provision allowing gay American citizens to bring their life partners into the country. “It’s a deal-breaker for most Republicans,” Senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., told the Times. In a radio interview (quoted by the Times), Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is considered reform’s indispensable Republican, was blunt: “If that issue is injected into this bill, this bill will fail. It will not have the support. It will not have my support.”
And, alas! still no sign he is marking his beliefs to market. And he really, really, really, really should never have written "the CPI is losing credibility [because it] is… as economist John Williams tirelessly points out…a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used, the CPI would actually be 10 percent."
That was totally wrong then. That is totally wrong now.
Six months ago David Brooks, Joe Scarborough, and company thought: "Mitt Romney is behind and has an uphill climb. But if we pretend that Romney is actually ahead, maybe he will get momentum and win." And so they launched the War on Nate Silver, seeking themselves and asking others to help them discredit the most prominent aggregator of state polls, Nate Silver.
Now, six months late, Gregg Easterbrook, suffering from trench foot and beri-beri, wanders out of the forest waving his katana, and seeks to join the effort, accusing Nate Silver of "spurious precision."
A Day Late, Several Trillion Dollars Short: I dunno, somehow I prefer Scalia’s belligerent, protesting-too-much defenses of his bad faith in Bush v. Gore to O’Connor’s attempts to disassociate herself:
“Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,” she said. “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.“
And, again, it’s not just that justices notably unsympathetic to broad equal protection claims claimed to accept an innovative equal protection argument. Where Bush v. Gore immediately falls apart and becomes a historic disgrace is that the completely lawless remedy left an election count with all of the alleged equal protection defects of the court-ordered recount (and the “mess up” job of the Florida authorities) in place. Bush v. Gore will always be a massive embarrassment to the five judges that understandably refused to sign their names to it…. I can understand why O’Connor is uncomfortable with that, but she can’t escape it.
Keith Hennessy on Bush and the financial crisis: How Involved Was George W. Bush in the Fall of 2008?: As most of us recall, George W. Bush was president of the United States during the crucial year of 2008 when the economy slid into recession and a series of panics and runs gripped the shadow banking system. As we also recall, Bush did not play a significant public-facing role in the response. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain said a lot, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was visible, America got to know the previously obscure figure of New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was frequently on television. But Bush was president, and one assumes he was doing something. But what, exactly?
It really does seem as if Allan Meltzer does not understand the basic economics of money demand--does not understand that the short-term safe nominal interest rate is the opportunity cost of holding cash balances. And not understanding that makes it impossible to think coherently about nearly any issues in monetary economics…
Paul Krugman:
Trap Denial: OK, probably going on too much about this, but I want to return briefly to the issue of puzzled economists, specifically Allan Meltzer.
Four years ago Meltzer and I effectively had a debate about the effects of the rapidly expanding Fed balance sheet. He (and others) warned of inflation ahead; I (and others) said that we were in a liquidity trap, so that the Fed’s bond purchases would basically just sit there. So here we are four years later, the huge expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has not, in fact, led to inflation. And Meltzer is puzzled by the fact that all those bond purchases just sat there:
Since late 2007, the Fed has pumped more than $2 trillion into the U.S. economy by buying bonds. Economist Allan Meltzer asked: “Why is there such a weak response to such an enormous amount of stimulus, especially monetary stimulus?” The answer, he said, is that the obstacles to faster economic growth are not mainly monetary. Instead, they lie mostly with business decisions to invest and hire; these, he argued, are discouraged by the Obama administration’s policies to raise taxes or, through Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance for workers, to increase the cost of hiring.
He made a monetary prediction; I made a monetary prediction; his prediction was wrong. Therefore, it must be because of Obamacare!
And, of course, if ObamaCare was causing structural problems and reducing aggregate supply, that would make inflation not undershoot but overshoot Meltzer's forecast. What we have here on Meltzer's part is simply badly-prepared word salad.
Hans Hermann-Hoppe thinks Paul Krugman is the Comp Lit major - a serious, sober, do-gooding nerd type - and all he has to do to score a win is make Krugman mad. Actually, it's probably more than that; he probably thinks that because the audience for these debates is (in his mind) mostly ignorant simpletons, that if he acts like an ignorant simpleton, he will resonate with the audience - he will seem to them to be one of their tribe - and Krugman will seem like an alien outsider, with his equations and his thought experiments and his other nerdy nerd stuff. "Go home and play with your slide rule, nerd! We Cool Guys know that printing little pieces of paper can never make a country richer! High five!"
You would think that the past six years would have led Benn Steil to rethink his beliefs that (a) Jacques Rueff decisively refuted Keynesian economics in the 1940s by demonstrating the truth of Say's Law, and (b) that Bernanke's inflationist policies were going to lead in short order to a collapse of the dollar and an explosion of inflation. But no. He doesn't mark his beliefs to reality at all.
Now Eric Rauchway informs me that he has gone the full Pat Buchanan--he is arguing that the U.S. was tricked into World War II.
You know who else said the U.S. was tricked into entering World War II to benefit the Bolsheviks and the Jews?
Bright spring afternoon. Hitch and I spend it in his fave D.C. pub just down the street from his spacious apartment. At the long polished bar, he sips a martini, I swig Tanqueray on ice offset by pints of ale. The pub's TV is flashing golf highlights while the jukebox blasts classic rock. We're chatting about nothing in particular when the juke begins playing "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens. Hitch stops talking. His face tightens. Eyes narrow. I know this look--I saw it on Crossfire when he nearly slugged a Muslim supporter of the Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I saw it during a Gulf War panel discussion at Georgetown when he responded to some pro-war hack with a precision barrage of invective, followed by the slamming down of the mike, causing a brief reverb in the speakers.
Some Thoughts on Michael Kelly - Ta-Nehisi Coates: I didn't really know Michael Kelly…. He does not come off as the sort of guy to opine on TV comforted by the safety of reports from Brookings…. Over at Gawker, Tom Scocca published a very hard--and very fair--assessment of Kelly's role in the Iraq War. I hadn't read much of the work Scocca referenced, so I did myself a favor and looked up some of Kelly's columns in the days leading up to Iraq…. Kelly's columns are not pro-war, they are ferociously pro-Bush, and gleefully contemptuous of liberals who thought otherwise.
It's the glee that burns. There's a kind of writer who gets his kicks writing bad reviews of music and books. You see that same spirit in Kelly's mocking of Paul Krugman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Janeane Garofalo, or in his attacks on the French by evoking the ghost of Pétain. That glee turned Kelly into a thin writer who spurned nuance in favor of hyperbole….
Pretend GOP Urged to Adopt Imaginary Health Plan: You, in the clown makeup -- you seem to have some innovative proposals for state level high risk insurance pools you want to propose. Yuval Levin… and Ramesh Ponnuru have a (paywalled) cover story in National Review urging Republicans to stand fast in their fanatical determination to repeal Obamacare. As a piece of policy analysis, it is not remotely persuasive. What is interesting… the delicate balance… authors… coax the partisan rage of the party faithful toward their desired policy ends… avoiding any engagement with the cruelty and indifference of the actual Republican agenda…. This passage jumps out as especially telling:
The law also vastly expands Medicaid, which is a crummy form of insurance: Researchers who compare the program’s beneficiaries with people who have no insurance at all often have a hard time finding much of a difference in health.
[S]cholars of Greece, Mesopotamia, and Islam, Medievalists, Africanists, historians of Buddhism, and a wide variety of economists... none have noticed any glaring errors... it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right (remember, these are scholars often loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right.)... meticulously researched and has stood up to scholarly review...
I protested that David Graeber's chapter 12, at least, got quite a large number of things wrong.
For one thing, Graeber thinks that the participants in the meetings of the Federal Reserve's decision-making body--the Federal Open Market Committee--are eighteen private bankers and one person, the Chair, appointed by the President. In actual fact the participants in FOMC meetings consist of (a) the seven Governors of the Federal Reserve (of whom one is Chair) all of whom are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, and (b) the twelve heads of the regional Federal Reserve Banks, all of whom must be approved by a majority vote of the Governors and who are not private bankers seeking profits but rather heads of government-sponsored enterprises that do not view maximizing their bottom lines as their goals. Rather than one out of nineteen, all nineteen FOMC participants are either chosen by the President (with the advice and consent of the Senate) or by the President's appointees. Graeber does not get it right. If you want to understand today's economy, it is important to know whether one of nineteen or all of its top decision makers serve because the President and his appointees want them to. It is important to know whether eighteen of them or zero of them are private bankers. It is important to know whether the Federal Reserve is very akin to the American Petroleum Institute or the Federal Trade Commission.
This is a big deal. This stuff matters. It is a glaring error, along the lines of claiming that adolescent females in Samoa speak to no males save their fathers, uncles, and brothers. It is a glaring error, along the lines of claiming that high-status adult males among the Yanomamo behave like the seventeenth-century Quaker followers of William Penn rather than like Akhilleus son of Peleus. (And, yes, I have a very large bone to pick with Napoleon Chagnon for translating the Yanomamo self-description as "fierce" rather than "noble" or "manly"--as in Sigifrith the Atheling, or Arjuna of the Arya, or Horatius Cocles virtus holding the bridge against Lars Porsenna. But that is for another time and place.)
Seriously?... petty stuff…. We can all pick over tiny details in books and engage in hermeneutic readings…. It’s not hard.…. [W]hat’s going to be remembered, David’s book with its intellectually revolutionary message, one that has inspired so many young economists that I meet or DeLong’s pedantic complaints about ambiguous meanings and contentious issues.… Who wins in the contest for etiquette? I don’t know. But who wins the intellectual argument? Again, let history decide. But I’m thinking Graeber.
[F]or all [DeLong's] blustering about how my chapter 12 was full of factual errors, he had never managed to identify more than one--a minor point about the number of reserve board governors who are Presidential appointees (the main point, about the Fed not being part of the government and not operating under Presidential oversight DeLong does not contest)…
But it wasn't one error, David.
It seemed that I had a discourse-situation problem. (I) Graeber's default seemed to be to claim that his book Debt was error-free. (II) If challenged on any point, his mode of operation appeared to be to retreat--admit error--and then counterattack claiming that this error is minor--no matter how glaring it was--and that the fact that people are attacking that error shows how totally right the rest of the book was.
So how to stake out a marker that there are dozens of errors, without wasting a lot of time doing so?
And there are dozens of errors: the Federal Reserve is not a council of eighteen private bankers plus a presidential appointee as their chair; Korean-American shopkeepers do not long to treat everybody else in Brooklyn the way Saul and Samuel treated the people of Amalek; Apple Computer--this was a hilarious one--Apple was not founded by ex-IBM engineers who formed little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages--there were neither laptops nor garages big enough to hold 20 in Silicon Valley in 1978, nor was Apple either Democratic or made up of any ex-IBM employees--the fact that people are as happy to hold the debt of the Swiss government than the debt of the U.S. government shows that it is not fear of being bombed by the US Air Force that makes countries seek to buy U.S. Treasury bonds; the Federal Reserve is perfectly constitutional, as is the FDA, the FCC, the EPA, the FTC, etc.; Nixon did not close the gold window because of the mounting costs of the Vietnam War; there is nothing that makes Iraq more likely than any other corner of the world to be the source of the next forward leap in human society; the Federal Reserve does not lend private banks money at the prime rate--you really don't know whether to laugh or cry at passages like: "For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')". Et cetera.
It was a puzzle that I could not solve.
At the end January I noticed David Graeber was on Twitter tweeting things like:
David Graeber @davidgraeber: considering the misery & devastation DeLong's NAFTA inflicted on Mexico, it's hardly surprising
David Graeber @davidgraeber: @delong author of economic catastrophes arrogantly inflicted only on others (NAFTA), lashes out at such as tried to warn him at the time
David Graeber @davidgraeber: they feel history passing them by. Even the IMF seems to take me more seriously than DeLong these days
Will the GOP’s plan to fight Obamacare in the states backfire?: The question, though, is whether governors who purposefully do a very bad job implementing Obamacare will hurt the law, or just themselves and their states. Call it the California v. Texas question. In 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed into law two bills to establish the online insurance marketplace — “exchanges” — that are at the center of President Obama’s health-care reform…. California promptly accepted the law’s Medicaid expansion. By this time next year… it’s possible that the portion of the state’s uninsured population will have declined from 20 percent to less than five percent.
In Texas… the Lone Star State isn’t lifting a finger to create an exchange, instead leaving the work to the federal government. Texas is refusing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, too. “The idea that we would expand and put more money and more people into a broken system is not unlike putting another 1,000 people on the Titanic,” Republican Gov. Rick Perry told Forbes. “You know how this is going to turn out. And it’s going to be a disaster.” One might observe that the health-care system in Texas, which, has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured residents — 24 percent, or more than six million people — is already a disaster. But the recalcitrance of Perry and Republican state lawmakers has the potential to make it much worse.
Arguments that looser monetary policy right now would be too risky:
The Jeremy Stein argument: At very low interest rates, banks will gamble not quite for resurrection but for (apparent) profitability, because bank executives who report losses tend to lose their jobs. Thus it is very important that the central bank keep nominal interest rates on loans banks can safely make above 3%/year in order to prevent the impact of the lower bound on deposits from generating unwise reaching for yield, and consequent systemic vulnerability.
The Gavyn Davies argument: Central banks won't dare unwind because politicians won't like it when central banks report losses. Therefore central bankers dare not adopt policies that have a chance of incurring losses because they will not be able to execute such policies.
Arguments that looser fiscal policy right now would be contractionary:
It’s in the order of the hedgerows: Conor Friedersdorf has a good round-up of various principled Burkean arguments in favor of the Iraq war.
Andrew Sullivan:
FABULOUSLY ANTI-WAR: No, I don’t mean Madonna. I mean a group called Glamericans. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form “a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America’s potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans.” Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups.
Jonah Goldberg:
I want to rub it in the anti-war crowd’s face so badly. I want to hear the protesters explain why it’s a bad thing we released more than 100 children from an Iraqi gulag for underage political prisoners.
Some idiot named Brendan O’Neill who opposed the war but hated the protesters more than the war:
Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition. Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out.
He left out my favorite, from Megan McArdle:
I can’t be mad at these little dweebs. I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.
Atrios puts it well:
I know all the ‘liberal hawks’ perceive themselves as having engaged in some sort of high minded intellectual exercise back in the day, but what they were really doing most of the time was punching hippies. The respectable position, then, was to support the war, never mind the details like how many soldiers to send in and how to deal with sectarian strife. Freedom isn’t free! Just as now the respectable position is austerity, never mind the real world effect it might have on the economy. End the debt!
I do wish that just once, someone who supported the war but who isn’t a total asshole would admit that they backed it because that’s just what serious people did at the time, that they had no idea, in practice, how the war might work out, that they’d never thought about it all.
Those of us who tried to deal with Robert Dole's root-and-branch opposition in 1993-1995 to so many of what had been his own policies from 1981-1992 are sardonically amused at (a) his distress at the Washington that he did so much to help make, (b) his apparent lack of self-knowledge of what he did, and (c ) Michael Kranish's gullibility and willingness to butter Dole up.
It really isn't funny, though:
Michael Kranish:
The story of Washington gridlock seen through the eyes of Bob Dole: It had been 16 years since Bob Dole stepped down as Senate Republican leader, ending a legislative career in which he earned a reputation as a master of bipartisanship. Yet there he was at the end of 2012, trying to close a deal.
Why do the Weekly Standard's writers work so hard to persuade me that they lack both intelligence and honor? I mean, they work really hard to do so--and they do so quite effectively.
Let's back up, and start with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos:
If I decide, when the sun rises on my right, that I must be driving north instead of south, it is because I recognize that my belief that I am driving south is inconsistent with that observation [that the sun is rising on my right], together with what I know about the direction of rotation of the earth. I abandon the belief because I recognize that it couldn’t be true…. If I oppose the abolition of the inheritance tax, it is because I recognize that the design of property rights should be sensitive not only to autonomy but also to fairness…. I operate in the space of reasons. The appearance of reason… seems… something radically emergent…. Like consciousness, reason is inseparable from the physical life of organisms that have it…. It was originally a biological evolutionary process…. This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain… the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms… greater and greater functional complexity… consciousness… [and] the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.
I claim that Thomas Nagel's mind is not an instrument of transcendence grasping objective reality and objective value. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective value when he concludes that there should be an inheritance tax, he is wrong. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective reality when he concludes that if he is facing south the rising sun must be on his left, he is wrong.
Here let me remark that the best way to insure against unemployment is to have no unemployment.
There is another point: unemployables, rich or poor, will have to be toned up. We cannot afford to have idle people. Idlers at the top make idlers at the bottom. No one must stand aside in his working prime to pursue a life of selfish pleasure.
There are wasters in all classes. Happily they are only a small minority in every class, but anyhow we cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy, or the ordinary type of pub crawler.
Nick Clegg should end this farce, let the Wookie win, and allow a party with Balls take over the government. He has no future as a politician. Why doesn't he try being a patriot?
Ryan Avent:
Britain's budget: Not the result they'd hoped for: GEORGE OSBORNE, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, is out with the government's new budget. The Spectator, which live-blogged the proceedings, posted this interesting chart. Not exactly what the government had in mind when it rolled out its austerity plans, I'm sure. And the sort of thing that should make it difficult for the chancellor to continue arguing that it is confidence in the government's commitment to fiscal prudence that is responsible for Britain's low interest rates. Stephanie Flanders does the explaining:
Whitehall departments have stuck to the chancellor's budget plans since then. In fact, they have spent rather less than he first asked them to. That is why he has again felt able to take a few billion more pounds out of their budgets for the next two years, to increase infrastructure spending and perhaps deliver other minor goodies later today. No, it's not Whitehall, but the UK economy that's wildly departed from the chancellor's original script.Britain's national output has risen by just over 1% since the election, instead of the 7% George Osborne was hoping for in his first Budget.
Noah Smith plays Three-Card Monte, and wins! Taylor has a model in which (a) interest rates can go negative, (b) the Federal Reserve is successfully stabilizing GDP, and (c) the damaging effects of taxation on work effort are so large that western Europe ought to be an impoverished hellhole.
Noahpinion: John Taylor's austerity model: [Y]our friendly neighborhood Noah is here to read and explain where Taylor is getting his arguments…. The "1970s" reference is pure conservative herp-derpery. People weren't trying to fight stagflation with fiscal policy in the 70s; deficits were quite low. "The 70s" is just a word that conservative writers throw into their pieces so that conservative old men who read the article will nod their snowy heads in sage agreement and mumble "Yes, the 70s. Carter. Stagflation. Mmm-hmm!"…
Why does Taylor think austerity will produce growth?… This is NOT the "Treasury View."… This is NOT the "Confidence Fairy."… Taylor's model has distortionary taxation in it, and the distortions are large…. [T]he GDP boost in Taylor's model doesn't come from reducing the deficit, it comes from cutting taxes…. Taylor assumes that the Fed… cancels out… positive demand shocks from stimulus. So it's hardly surprising that Taylor is not going to see government spending doing much good for the economy; he's assumed that 1) the Fed is… managing aggregate demand, and 2) the Fed will tighten to… counteract stimulus…. There is no Zero Lower Bound…. The "New Old Keynesians" such as Paul Krugman and Gauti Eggertsson, who advocate fiscal stimulus, explicitly make reference to the ZLB as the reason stimulus works. Taylor just ignores that idea…. In Taylor's model, if you cut government purchases, it throws the economy into a recession. Taylor's suggested austerity plan makes big spending cuts, but the cuts are almost entirely cuts in transfers…. Now as you should remember from Econ 102, government purchases make much more effective stimulus than transfers…. The reason he gets short-run benefits from spending cuts has everything to do with the fact that it's almost all transfers being cut….
Upshot: If you have no Zero Lower Bound, and if the Fed partially counteracts the demand-side effects of fiscal policy, and if people have forward-looking expectations, and if you don't cut government purchases much, and if taxes are very distortionary, then austerity works…. [T]he result… ignores the real Keynesian critique that… the Zero Lower Bound matters a lot… assumes… taxes are… more distortionary than they really are… overestimates the Republicans' real willingness to cut transfers… underestimates their willingness to cut government purchases… ignores distributional concerns, but that's pretty much par for the course…
