Z: **Inactive:** Brad DeLong--Economics Only

Ezra Klein on Video, and Health Care too

He thinks things are looking up for that vast fifty-effective-word-a-minute wasteland of an information channel that is modern TV:

Ezra Klein: Logic, Media, Incentives, And Me: I sort of enjoy the double challenge of being questioned on television: You both need to make your point, but also frame your answer in such a way that it retroactively makes the question sensical. That's the real trick.

Increasingly, though, the incentives are changing. Assume that the incentive for going on television is to raise your profile (which is about 75 percent correct). If I went on television five years ago, a large part of my incentive would be to make the host like me. After all, these appearances pass in an instant, and most of you would never see the program. So if I want to reach the maximum number of people with my arguments and do the most to increase my visibility, I want to keep coming back.

Now, however, with YouTube and GoogleVideo and online archiving, a single, contentious appearance can be seen on the internet a million times. Everyone, after all, has seen Stewart berate Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, but very few of us had actually tuned in that day. Similarly, my segment on the Kudlow show, replayed on the internet a few thousand times, did much more for my reputation among the audience relevant to my success than have my more friendly, but bland, appearances on other shows.

Making sense often requires you to be disruptive, and not long ago, being disruptive was probably a bad idea. Now it's a good one. And since the channels are wising up and putting their videos online with advertising before them, they also want widespread online dissemination of appearances, and so their incentives are increasingly aligned with mine. Does this mean more folks will be making sense? Not necessarily. But it means their might be more room for sense-making.

Here's the video:

Ezra Klein on health care

Bad News from Bruce Bartlett

He's quitting the weekly-column business:

Print Article: This is the last of [my] columns. The world has changed a lot since 1995 and I've decided that there are better ways for me to express myself.

The Internet, in particular, has enormously changed the ability to get a message out.... Today, anyone with a computer and a modem can start a blog and, for all intents and purposes, be a columnist.

In the not-too-distant past, this was impossible. If you didn't write for a newspaper, it was very hard to get out timely commentary on topical subjects. But if you were any good, it wasn't too difficult to make a pretty good living as a columnist.... In those days, most major cities had several papers — at least one in the morning and another in the afternoon. Since editorial policies were one way papers competed, if one was liberal the other, usually the afternoon paper, tended to be conservative. But... most cities became one-newspaper towns... eliminating the conservative voice.... For a few years, once the competition was eliminated, newspapers were cash machines.... [But now] newspapers... [are] sharply cutting costs to maintain high profit margins.

One way they cut back is by reducing budgets for columnists.... Now it seems as if every paper is running the same few columnists — like David Broder from The Post and Tom Friedman from the New York Times. Their main attraction is that they mirror the conventional wisdom and seldom upset anyone....

Those who wanted more biting opinion gravitated to the Internet, where vast numbers of people offer commentary along every single point on the political spectrum. It became very easy to find writers expressing exactly one's own personal opinion about everything. Bloggers also have the advantages of no space constraints, an ability to post comments in real time, and to offer links to supporting documents and sources. Now they even have audio and video.

As a result, the demand for traditional column writing has pretty much dried up.... I don't mourn the old system. I am a great fan of bloggers and learn far more from them than I do from the Broders and Friedmans of the world, who have largely become irrelevant to serious political discussion....

However, I think there will always be a market for quality commentary and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it. In the meantime, I have decided to devote myself to writing books, where authors still have control over their output and can make better money. I will still write the occasional column, but this is the last one I plan to write on a weekly basis.

I offer thanks to all my readers and editors for their support.

This is genuinely too bad. Bruce Bartlett is a very smart and articulate person who is trying his best to get it right and who thinks differently from me on important issues. Such people are especially important to read.

Richard Baldwin Praises the Economists of Italy

He writes, on http://voxEU.org/:

Economic policy discussion on the web | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from Europe's leading economists: Economics is more relevant to policy-making than ever before, but you would never know it from the public discourse. The internet is helping bridge the gap, and http://www.laVoce.info has led the change. But how will the internet’s role in the public discourse on economics change in the future?...

Major advances in theoretical and empirical economics now allow economists to address policy issues with much more realistic tools... economics and psychology... behavioural economics, experimental economics... the new institutional economics... contract theory... enormous new data sets... powerful statistical tools... ‘panel data’.... With all these excellent tools at hand, one might have expected the newspapers and Parliamentary debates to be filled with new insights, new results and new approaches. Alas, with few exceptions, the public debate has not moved much beyond the simplistic pro- vs anti-market exchanges that have dominated Europe since the post-war rise of welfare states. Case in point? The 2007 French Presidential election debate.

In the 1980s, brilliant young economists like Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Jeff Sachs and Joe Stiglitz felt obliged to write Brookings or Economic Policy articles, to sit on government panels, to write policy reports, and to send Op-Ed pieces to the Financial Times.... Today’s brilliant young economists are much less interested in participating in the public debate in these ways....

Medical journals address the problem in a very different way – each article includes the hard science, but it also includes a less formal discussion of what the results mean for medicine and how they fit into the bigger picture – the “Discussion Section.” The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has called this the “IMRAD” structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and state that the structure is “not simply an arbitrary publication format, but rather a direct reflection of the process of scientific discovery.”[3] In the top economic journals, “Policy Implication” sections have fallen out of favour. Including such conjectures in a manuscript is unlikely to raise the probability of publication....

On the bright side, the internet has two features that make it an excellent vehicle for bridging the research-reality gap. Feature No.1: its technology makes publishing very cheap. Feature No.2: its global span makes it possible to find an audience.... One can spend some pleasant hours browsing the various blogs – and even learn a lot from the big blogs, like “Economist’s View”, “New Economist”, ”Marginal Revolution”, and the sites of Brad DeLong, Greg Mankiw, and Nouriel Roubini. But this is not the profession’s response to the Discussion Sections of medical journals. It is more like the collegial coffee-room discussions we used to have when there was time for such things.

What Tito Boeri, the founder of http://www.laVoce.info, discovered 5 years ago, was that there is a large demand for high-level public discussion of economic policy, higher than the level in newspapers or blogs. Something much more like the Discussion Section of the British Journal of Medicine: discussion of real-world, policy-relevant issues by researchers that is screened by researchers. Tito also found that there was a large supply of researchers willing to devote time – for free – to such discussion. We would probably need psychology-and-economics experts to understand the motives, but whatever they are, these economists are doing Italy a pubic service.

Historical Scholarship and the New Media UC Davis British and English History

Courtesy of Eric Rauchway and the U.C. Davis History Department:

Historical Scholarship and the New Media: A History Colloquium event sponsored by the UC Davis Department of History, the Institute of Governmental Affairs, and the Center for History, Society and Culture, with Brad DeLong, Scott Eric Kaufman, Tedra Osell, and Ari Kelman, held May 23, 2007, at 12:10 in the Andrews Room of the Social Sciences and Humanities Building.

Downloadable .mp4 podcast (82.2M, slightly over 50 minutes of video): http://history.ucdavis.edu/podd.php

Hoisted from Comments: What If Your Reaction Is: "I Pity the Poor Fool!"

Alex Tabarrok wrote a handy guide for distinguishing Tyler Cowen's writings on http://marginalrevolution.com/ from his, and I quoted it:

Distinguishing Tyler Cowen from Alex Tabarrok: Marginal Revolution: Tyler v. Alex: Guide to the Perplexed: Lately I’ve noticed that people are confusing posts from Tyler with posts from me.  Here is a simple guide for the perplexed....

You have no idea what the post means.  Tyler.
You know exactly what the post means and it makes you mad as hell.  Alex...

And now Andres asks:

What if you know exactly what the [Marginal Revolution] post means but it only makes you pity the fool, Mr. T-style? Which one then?

Distinguishing Tyler Cowen from Alex Tabarrok

This is directed at me. Alex--no, Tyler--no, Alex writes:

Marginal Revolution: Tyler v. Alex: Guide to the Perplexed: Lately I’ve noticed that people are confusing posts from Tyler with posts from me.  Here is a simple guide for the perplexed:

• References to a cymbalist/Dadaist/expressionist that you have never heard of.  Tyler.
• References to Dog/Rush/Hayek (Salma).  Alex
• A simple question with ten answers.  Tyler.
• A complex question with one answer.  Alex.
• You have no idea what the post means.  Tyler.
• You know exactly what the post means and it makes you mad as hell.  Alex.

Should that be "cymbalist" or "symbolist," Alex... Tyler... Altyexler?

George Borjas Has a Weblog

George Borjas writes:

The Borjas Blog: Hello everyone. I've been thinking about doing a blog for some time now. Some of my colleagues, particularly Dani Rodrik, have started one. If Dani, who has a brand new baby, can somehow manage to find the time to write some first-rate commentary on trade issues, I figure I can at least try to express some of my thoughts on matters that interest me. Plus--there's no time like now to comment on immigration issues...

Don't Let Jonathan Chait Draw Your Bathwater!

Here's something I wrote last November:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Economist hopes for a grand bargain on Social Security reform:

So Washington is full of rumours that 2007 will bring a Grand Bargain on social security reform.... Nancy Pelosi and her friends may be loath to touch social security but they are worried that poorer Americans don't have enough of a retirement nest egg.... Democratic wonks have all kinds of ideas for getting ordinary Americans to save more.... If Mr Bush wants to sort out social security and the Democrats want to revamp the government's role in the rest of retirement security, there is clearly room for a compromise... combine the Gale/Gruber/Orszag ideas for restructuring retirement tax subsidies with the Liebman/MacGuineas/Samwick social security reform plan... [which] is probably the best bipartisan plan around and, importantly, includes a mandatory individual contribution to a personal retirement account. By restructuring tax subsidies for retirement saving so that poorer Americans got a hefty top up to their mandatory contributions from Uncle Sam and you might convince enough Democrats that a system which includes personal accounts makes sense...

Back in 1998, 1999, and 2000 there was a deal to be struck: bring the existing Social Security system back into balance with a combination of (small) tax increases and (moderate) future benefit cuts, and supercharge it with add-on private but regulated and insured personal accounts. But neither Gingrich, Hastert, Armey, Delay, or Lott were interested in such a deal--it would give another substantive public-policy victory to Bill Clinton, you see.... But the deal... is still there to be struck, if program design and decision-making can be moved out of the White House to locations with credibility.

And here's what Duncan Black--"Atrios"--of Eschaton said about me:

Eschaton: No!: Look, people who advocate adding "personal accounts" to Social Security are just stupid people. Really, just morons. There's no reason to do it.... If you think some Social Security contributions should be invested in the stock market (I don't) to raise returns overall, then... an index fund.... I still think that's a bad idea, but there's a rationale for it. There's no rationale for dividing that up into millions of individual accounts....

Social Security is a lovely program which works just fine and really needs no changes other than extraordinarily nonurgent tweaks to the tax formula at some point.... There's no need to strike a "grand bargain" which combines some stupid things with some smart things because there's no need to do so. Leave it alone.... People who continue to argue that there is [a problem] - and that the problem can be "solved" with the magic private accounts fairy - either have broken brains or are attempting to push an agenda for ideological reasons or for personal enrichment for themselves and their kind...

Here's what Jonathan Chait says about the relationship between people like Duncan Black and people like me:

Matthew Yglesias: [A]s Chait puts it in his conspiracy-minded phrasing, "the two groups [the activist liberal netroots and the 'wonkosphere' of more journalism-oriented bloggers] generally regard one another as allies and criticize one another tepidly if at all..."

Tepidly.

"Stupid people... morons... broken brains... push[ing] an agenda for ideological reasons or for personal enrichment..."

Tepidly.

Don't let Jonathan Chait draw your bathwater. I'm just sayin'.

Matthew Yglesias points out what is really going on:

A less conspiratorial way of putting it would be that we in the wonkosphere don't criticize netroots activists all that frequently or vehemently because we tend not to disagree with them on the merits all that frequently about matters of fundamental importance. And, after all, why should it be otherwise? I'm a liberal journalist, liberal activists are liberal activists, and the reason the adjective "liberal" fits in both cases is that we subscribe to similar worldviews. When we disagree, we disagree--but it's not extremely frequent...

Dani Rodrik Has a Weblog

Dani Rodrik has a weblog: http://rodrik.typepad.com/