I'm too drunk to read the post, but able to catch a bus home. Pittsburgh mini meet-up went well.
People who complain about public transit should try drinking more and living near a bus line that goes to bars.
1: Hey me too! Except I got to play the bus driver in his cups. My family is not proving to be a totally sympathetic audience. Assholes. They probably like Obama. Cosma disgraced us again by being smart and relatively quiet.
Teo: I forget to remind you to take Route 22 tomorrow and try to figure out the historical economic basis of the towns and hamlets you go through. Now their remnants are just left there, not as dramatic as mining boom and bust ghost towns, but within shouting distance.
Oh, this is where we're talking about the Pittsburgh meetup.
We're a simple but confused people. I'd completely be terrified about our government if I wasn't sitting in a recliner wondering hour long it is before I can sleep without waking up really thirsty.
Teo: I forget to remind you to take Route 22 tomorrow and try to figure out the historical economic basis of the towns and hamlets you go through.
Thanks, but looking at the map now it looks like it would make more sense to take a more southerly route to hit all the things I want to see tomorrow.
What I always stumble on, and this is obviously about me, not about the accuracy of this claim, is WHY THE FUCK would Obama want drastic spending cuts? Why? No, really, WHY? Whyyyyyy.
7: Yes, they tend to be concentrated in the more southerly regions.
WHY THE FUCK would Obama want drastic spending cuts?
Apparently because he thinks they play well politically. He may or may not be right about this (I have my doubts), but as far as I can tell it is what he thinks.
I think one of the things we're learning from the record of this administration so far is that it's probably a good thing that senators rarely get elected president.
The final vote count in the House was a disgrace. Karl Rove would've run it through by 2 votes, shared a nice little red with David Broder, and then gone gone home and whacked off to some Orc porn and called it a successful evening. I have no idea whether that's Saruman's dick up my ass (wait, </Crooked Timber>) or I just need to see my proctologist, but I'm actually feeling better about this deal at the moment.
Because I want to see boomers die am an amanuensisist. Read this to see how the pros do it ("The moderate middle wins the day").
13: I don't think there will be any way to know just how bad the deal is until next year. If the Bush tax cuts (including for the middle class) expire, and the Democrats somehow paint that as the Republicans fault, I'm willing to accept that today wasn't an unmitigated disaster. But at the moment, I can't imagine that happening (either the cuts expiring or the Democrats playing it so that voters think Republicans are the reason why).
14 -> 13.1.c? (explains the pseud slip)
8: My apologies if I made you have a serious thought this late in the day.
After all... tomorrow is another day.
Is anyone seriously claiming that Obama didn't want spending cuts, or is this just another Greenwaldian strawman? Obama's been advocating for the necessity of massive spending cuts this year since, what, the 2009 State of the Union?
I don't think he's doing so because he thinks it'll position him well politically, though. I mean, that's probably part of it, but I think he and his economic team really believe that spending cuts are necessary to some kind of economic goodness. Best as I can tell, he's crazy wrong, but I don't think it's just positioning.
Those interested in commissions and super-committees may be interested in this analysis along with the earlier post linked therein.
You yankee imperialist dogs need to consume less of the earth will stop letting us malt barley.
That analysis also brings up (implicitly) the question of why we don't have more base-closing commissions. Or just one, even. Do we really need 160 or so bases around the world? Especially if we're just going to be sending out a bunch of lawless drones when we feel like it.
If I'd gone to Pittsburgh I'd have graduated a year ago. Sometimes I think about this.
I don't think he's doing so because he thinks it'll position him well politically, though. I mean, that's probably part of it, but I think he and his economic team really believe that spending cuts are necessary to some kind of economic goodness. Best as I can tell, he's crazy wrong, but I don't think it's just positioning.
I admit that I don't really understand what he thinks on this issue. The reason that I said above that I think he's driven primarily by political calculations is that it seems pretty clear that his economic team basically recognizes that spending cuts are a terrible idea, and while it's possible that Obama himself disagrees with them, I don't see why he would. On the other hand, there is indeed some evidence that he does actually think spending cuts would be good economically. It may be hard to disentangle his thinking on the substance from his thinking on the politics, but in any case none of it makes a whole lot of sense. In a lot of ways he seems to be stuck in the mindset of centrist Democrats from the mid-nineties (as are a lot of other centrist Democrats today), under which balanced budgets are just sort of inherently good and a good way to signal seriousness and centrism regardless of the objective economic situation, whereas tax increases are very risky politically and can only be carefully broached in the context of overall budget-balancing.
a bunch of lawless drones
"Not to chase after Men; that is the Law. Are we not Drones?"
28: I guess that depends what you mean by "know."
Somewhat serious question, teo: have you considered working in Canada? I have no idea what the immigration rules* are, but even with the Harper government they seem to be building things and seem to be at least plausibly serious about green building and energy conservation**. This may mean more for architects and engineers than planners, though.
*librarians actually have some NAFTA-related path that makes things a little easier provided you can actually get a job, but I don't know about city planners
**on the other hand: Alberta
3.1: I become loquacious when I'm drunk. Until I lose the power of speech altogether, that is.
I have had the "Get disappointed by someone new" bumper sticker on my office door since the 2008 primaries, and often drawn comfort from it.
Yeah, my feeling is that there are two levels on which this whole debacle counts as blundering no matter how much Obama wants drastic spending cuts/to be this generation's Herbert Hoover/etc.
1. Failing to squash such a nasty procedural clusterfuck, even if you love its outcome, doesn't look so suave.
2. Wanting drastic spending cuts is a blunder in itself.
have you considered working in Canada?
I've never seriously looked into it, but it may be a possibility. I don't know much about the immigration issues, but I think it is indeed relatively easy once you have an offer in hand. Canada probably is more fertile ground for planning right now both economically and ideologically than the US, but there's still the issue of it being a much smaller country with several planning schools of its own, so I don't know if there's really enough excess demand for planners to draw people from elsewhere.
For a while there was some talk in planning circles of the immense demand for planners in Australia, but that seems to not get discussed as much lately. I'm not sure if that's because they found all the planners they needed, the economy has soured such that they need fewer planners now, or the demand was never as big as people claimed. Maybe a mix of all three.
stuck in the mindset of centrist Democrats from the mid-nineties (as are a lot of other centrist Democrats today)
I do think he really believes it. Just like most of the national Democratic Party, he isn't on my side of much of anything except social issues, and I don't really trust him there either.
much smaller country with several planning schools of its own
This is essentially the same issue for libraries/archives. British Columbia is especially tough because it's not actually that large and the schools just keep on churning out graduates with no regard for the market. Plus, lots of people want to take refuge from the rest of the Canadian climate. I wish I liked it more.
With planning there's also the additional issue that the legal and regulatory frameworks within which it takes place vary widely from country to country, so the skills you learn in one country aren't necessarily easily transferable. I think Canada's system is fairly similar to the US's (as is Australia's), but the system in the UK is very, very different.
teo: have you considered working in Canada? running for president? You could use your planning skills to, like, not be a disaster.
It's not as if anyone's going to ask to see the birth certificate. Just wear a ranger uniform and get all the votes from the laydeez.
That should be slightly more than half of the votes, which is exactly what I need to win. Excellent.
It's all cuteness and recent-virginity and ranger hats now, but after 25 years in the local planner rat race, Teo will basically be Ron Swanson.
I wonder what the requirements are for Prime Minister (of any English speaking country that has one). I guess I could look it up.
I wonder what the requirements are for Prime Minister (of any English speaking country that has one).
I suspect citizenship of (or at least residence in) said country is probably a requirement.
On the other hand, there are no constitutional requirements at all to be Speaker of the House. The House just has to chuse you.
It's all cuteness and recent-virginity and ranger hats now, but after 25 years in the local planner rat race, Teo will basically be Ron Swanson.
There are several reasons I don't want to pursue a career in the local planner rat race.
So you'll be that guy who left the show after a season or two.
7 6: Ah right, The Mounds.
10 7: Yes, they tend to be concentrated in the more southerly regions.
I don't know what it is teo is seeking out, but from this I'm assuming it's dirty.
Further to 50.3: teo, you should be sure to do the one with the snake, it's an experience not to be missed.
8: he wants a dam named for him.
There may be some nice inspiring dam sites left on the Colorado or Columbia or something, but boy howdy, are the two potential dams that might be built in California small, dusty affairs. He's not gonna get a pretty arch dam out of this, I tell you.
"The Democrats aren't failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there's political hay to be made moving to the right. They're doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I've said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television."
[...]
"The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn't fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time -- as fixed fights go, you don't see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did -- but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive. We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening."
re: 44
Prime Minister isn't an elected office. The election is for MPs and the head of which ever party gets the most seats is (usually) PM.
Full British citizenship isn't a requirement. But you do need to be either a British citizen or a Commonwealth citizen with legal residency in the UK.* You need to be over 18 and not employed as a civil servant, religious official, serving member of the armed forces, in jail or be previously convicted of electoral fraud.
That's about it.
* Commonwealth citizens can vote in the UK. So my Indian workmates can vote in the general election, but my wife cannot (as an EU citizen she can only vote in local elections).
You need to be over 18 and not employed as a civil servant, religious official, serving member of the armed forces, in jail or be previously convicted of electoral fraud.
I momentarily read that as "You need to be over (18 and not employed as a civil servant) OR religious official OR serving member of the armed forces OR in jail OR be previously convicted of electoral fraud." And I thought, "Yay, Cesare Borgia for PM!"
Yeah, Oxford commas. Sometimes they are useful.
Actually under ROPA 1981, you can be in prison, as long as your sentence is less than a year. Previous to 1981 there was nothing to stop you being an MP from your jail cell - they changed the law because of Bobby Sands.
(the 1981 Act also provides that you are still disqualified as an MP if you are on the run when you ought to be in prison serving a sentence of more than a year, so no getting round it that way you sneaky bastards).
45: the requirements for King are rather less onerous, as long as you can persuade Parliament to amend the Act of Union in your favour to remove the bit about having to be descended from the Electress Sophia. Also, no age limit.
But you do need to be either a British citizen or a Commonwealth citizen with legal residency in the UK
British or Irish, I've just realised. You do need to swear an oath of allegiance to HM Queen Elizabeth if you want to take your seat, speak in a debate, vote or receive a salary though.
Youngest female Brit MP ever still Bernadette Devlin, six days off 22 when the lower age-limit was 21.
She also slapped or punched Home Secretary Reggie Maudling in the house when he lied about Bloody Sunday, depending on which account you believe -- which is exactly what the youngest person in the house should be doing. (Though the way I always remember it until I looked it up just now is that she threw ink all over him: it turns out the ink went over Edward Heath that same year, for signing the UK up to Europe I believe.)
(And the ink was not thrown by Devlin, but some unnamed woman protester.)
No, wait, she was called Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski.
(Back to work now.)
How did Devlin get to sit in the house? I'm assuming she didn't take the oath? Although she wasn't Sinn Fein, so maybe she did? [I have no idea]
Although she wasn't Sinn Fein, so maybe she did?
She wasn't and she did. She wasn't even IRSP at that point, though I don't know their position on the oath and they may be more pragmatic than SF. She sat as an independent.
She wasn't Sinn Fein, though, she came out of the student wing of the Civil Rights movement, and -- sez wikipedia -- rejected the "traditional Irish republican tactic of abstentionism". I don't know whether she took the oath.
I don't know but chris does.
8: I don't understand this at all either. He really does seem to want the huge spending cuts. But it's ridiculous as economics, and I don't understand it as politics either. His motivations (short of speculating about literal corruption, which seems silly) are completely opaque to me.
69. Presumably he doesn't think it's ridiculous as economics. There are a surprising number of accredited economic "experts" who don't.
Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but I can't think of an economist (rather than a politician talking economics) saying that we need drastic spending cuts to pull us out of this situation. People recommending austerity in European countries facing default aren't doing it because they think it'll snap their economies back to life, they're doing it because, e.g. Greece won't be able to borrow any more (and there's a good argument that austerity, rather than default, is still the wrong answer. But it's a different situation than ours.)
I can't think of a reputable economist (and I do mean literally "I can't think" of one, rather than "I'm sure none exists") who thinks that drastic budget cuts now are a good idea.
71.2: the economists working for Standard & Poor's seem to think this.
And he may actually believe all this business about how in tough times a family has to tighten its belts, and so the US government should do the same thing. People do. Even quite bright people do. I mean, look at Shearer, the man's no dunce.
They didn't think spending cuts were a good idea, they thought spending cuts were better than default. But politically avoiding default without the spending cuts would have been fine.
73: I don't know that even Shearer thinks that. On past form, the fact that he's sniping at Democrats for poor tactics and intellectual dishonestly, or whatever he's sniping about, doesn't have much connection to what he thinks about the underlying policy.
Black american community politics has always had a strong self-help faction actually quite suspicious of government agencies, and what it considered top-down white paternalism, the small-business wing of cultural nationalism: from Dubois via Garvey to Elijah Muhammad, and beyond. I haven't read any of BHO's books so I don't know if there's early clues in them to his being from this wing of black politics.
(I say wing like those three share a politics, which I don't think they do particularly: and I'm not even starting on the complexities of post Civil Right black local politics. But it does seem an under-discussed aspect of his story, obscured behind all the Ayers/Wright idiocy.)
I don't think there's any way to make all the belt-tightening rhetoric/bullshit fly if there isn't a serious attempt to raise more revenue. If he (Obama) was sincere he'd have made more of an effort.
74: I don't think so, actually. They were calling for $4 trillion in savings as a "good start" to reducing the deficit. They want a stabilised debt-to-GDP ratio and they see massive cuts and/or massive tax increases, starting now, as the way to do it - even with the default avoided, they're still talking about downgrading the US, because for them it's all about long-run stability as evinced by debt-to-GDP.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/28/usa-ratings-sp-idUSN1E76R1E920110728
The rep from South Boston voted for it, one other and Niki Tsongas, but her husband was a super-duper deficit hawk.
The rest didn't. I don't think that they super-progressive except for Capuano who would describe himself as a liberal. My sense though is that my rep Markey would support spending cuts; he just thinks that the current ones attempt to balance the budget on the poor and middle-class.
78: Eh, they're talking about that now, but no one was talking about downgrading our debt before the completely artificial debt-ceiling crisis. And the article you link to isn't talking about the health of the US economy.
80: Ah, fuck 'em. Anyone who sells US Treasuries for non-legal reasons after an S&P downgrade is too stupid to be listened to.
re: 80
Yes they were. S&P were making noises about it in April:
http://www.tradingnrg.com/us-external-debt-sp-downgrades-us-credit-outlook-for-2012-april-21/
80: Yes, unless it just wasn't getting any coverage the ratings agencies seem to have been rather late to the party. If I thought they were on the up and up, I would say it was due to legitimate concerns about the US's ability to govern itself in the future based on facts massively in evidence. But instead I have suspicions and dark mutterings of bad faith and Shock Doctrine style exploitation of crisis. I await some Supreme Court decision that results in ratings being deemed a special class of speech. Some combination of Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett and Janus Capital v. First Derivative Traders--challenging any ratings or warnings will be viewed as diminishing the free speech of the ratings agencies.
82: You're right, I'm wrong, and I remember the S&P comments now. It was still in the form of "if something doesn't happen to close the deficit in a couple of years" rather than "this is a problem now", and more to my point, wasn't taking a position that the way to close the deficit was by drastic spending cuts rather than by increasing growth in the economy.
"The deficit must be closed, eventually" is not equivalent to "the budget must be drastically cut, now", and Obama's apparent belief that the latter is true is what I find so weird and lacking in economic support.
So, if I'm understanding correctly, in the UK the requirements for PM are the same as those for MP? I knew it isn't a direct election, but wasn't sure if there might be some other legal requirement (as opposed to a party-imposed requirement).
Will the US Ever Get Its Triple-A Back? ...Felix Salmon goes into some of the historical details of what nations have the rating, who lost, how you get it back. A smallish club
I have been watching to see if anyone posts about who would profit from a downgrade, cynical guy that I am...although here only marginally paranoid. Vast historical forces etc.
The list of triple-A sovereigns is very, very white -- Singapore is the only exception to the whites-only rule. (And Hong Kong, if you allow sub-sovereigns: it got its triple-A in December.) It seems inevitable that the future is going to be a story of white countries falling off the list, with non-white countries joining it, led by Taiwan....FS
84: actually, you're wrong: I am wrong. Just noticed this -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/sandp-chief-economist-reducing-the-deficit-and-cutting-taxes-are-contradictory/2011/04/13/AFxA69CE_blog.html
From S&P's chief economist.
"As a firm, we take no stand on whether the deficit should be cut through lower spending or higher taxes. As an individual, I think it has to be a combination of the two. I think you are being self-contradictory in accusing us of supporting lower taxes through calling for deficit cuts. The opposite is closer to the truth."
They didn't think spending cuts were a good idea, they thought spending cuts were better than default.
I read some conservative blogger claiming that S&P called for large deficit reductions, and had exactly your reaction. Surely this wingnut hack was reading something into the S&P statement that wasn't there, and S&P was merely reacting to the possibility of default.
But I was wrong. The S&P did what Reuters claims here:
Standard & Poor's threatened Monday to downgrade the United States' prized AAA credit rating unless the Obama administration and Congress find a way to slash the yawning federal budget deficit within two years.
And here is the actual S&P statement. It doesn't even mention the possibility of default.
85. This is true. Technically you can even be PM from the House of Lords, though it would be scandalous if anybody tried. William Pitt the younger (second son of the guy who gave his name to Pittsburgh) became Prime Minister at 24. But that was in the 18th century. Still, the rules haven't changed.
So, if I'm understanding correctly, in the UK the requirements for PM are the same as those for MP?
Basically, yes. There's an argument that the PM can't be a Catholic because he has to advise the Queen on the appointment of bishops, but this doesn't have the force of law. He could always delegate it to the Home Secretary or simply ignore it.
"The deficit must be closed, eventually" is not equivalent to "the budget must be drastically cut, now", and Obama's apparent belief that the latter is true is what I find so weird and lacking in economic support.
This doesn't really capture Obama's position, though. The spending cuts are mostly (though not entirely) backloaded, out past the election.
71: John Cochrane. Of course, his model is absurd [1, 2], but he does exist.
Semi-OT, the pedia thing reminds me that Pitt had a robust attitude to government deficits.
William Pitt the Younger was a personal friend of Thomas Raikes, (1741-1813), merchant and banker in London and Governor of the Bank of England during the crisis of 1797 when war had so diminished gold reserves that the government prohibited the Bank of England (central bank of Britain) from paying out in gold and ordered it to replace the payment of gold by banknotes. On 26 February 1797 the Bank of England, under the direction of Raikes, issued the first £1 and £2 English banknotes.
92: Depends on your baseline for drastic, I suppose.
73 75
I am kind of agnostic on what should be done. I don't think we understand economics on a macro level very well which makes it hard to know what to do. I agree that analogies to personal finance can be misleading. However I believe government (at all levels) wastes a lot of money and if tough times prompt some of the waste to be eliminated this is useful even if the timing is not ideal from a macroeconomic perspective. And it is my understanding that the "cuts" in the current bill are largely backloaded so even if they actually happen (which seems doubtful) they won't have much immediate impact.
I just reread the bit in Gore Vidal's Lincoln where Honest Abe is (1) taken aback that the secretary of the treasury has to sign every single greenback and (2) embarrassed when told by Salmon P. Chase that no, of course not, it's a printed copy of a signature, and that it would take years to handwrite one's name on the actual number of greenbacks being issued every week. Lincoln has a wtf panic* about fiat paper money and everything that can go wrong. Of course what actually "goes wrong" is the emergence of the US as a very rich proto-imperial power AND the Gilded Age (Jay Cooke is a minro walk-on figure).
Anyway: if you want to get yr Keynes on, start yrself a civil war!
*iirc tis is one of the scenes Vidal got a lot of flak for, for its a-historical reliance on legend.
Also haha Chase put his OWN FACE on the dollar bill, and Lincoln's on the two-dollar bill: there were many less two-dollar bills.
Anyway: if you want to get yr Keynes on, start yrself a civil war!
2013 then...
95: True.
Here's Respectable Economist Eugene Fama explaining how deficit spending can't possibly stimulate the economy:
The problem is simple: bailouts and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt. (The money must come from somewhere!) The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment.
This is the Treasury View, and it goes hand-in-hand with the idea that goverment spending is inappropriate because it diverts funds from the more-efficient private sector.
During the depression caused by the panic of 1873, some people advised Grant to support public works for job creation, but he took the advice of others that cutbacks would be better. I'm not entirely kidding. The idea of public spending for jobs for purchasing power pops up in 1893 and 1907. It may have been a fringe idea at those times; I've just come across the odd reference here and there, but it's not something I'm researching. Maybe someone's done a history of the non-Keynesian or proto-Keynsian idea of this.
71: Pwned by Cosma in 93, but there's also Robert J. Barro, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and probably Robert Lucas somewhere. Tangentially, it's hilarious that Andrei Shleifer is #1 here.
(The money must come from somewhere!)
It comes from China! So it wouldn't have been going into private investment, it would have been going into state investment. (I have no idea if this is correct or true.)
the more-efficient private sector
Everyone who says with a straight face needs a kick in the head.
However I believe government (at all levels) wastes a lot of money and if tough times prompt some of the waste to be eliminated this is useful even if the timing is not ideal from a macroeconomic perspective.
Depends on what you mean by "waste". The Depression lasted until the U.S. engaged in massive government spending on stuff that got blown up. It's counter-intuitive that this should work, but there's a very well-established theoretical framework explaining it. And for explaining Japan in the '90s, and explaining the U.S. and Europe today.
I truly do wonder how Chicago-types explain the end of the depression. I've read George Will and Robert Samuelson both say that government action didn't end the Depression, World War II did. I wonder if Chicago-types are equally incoherent.
I was talking to my brother, who is ostensibly liberal, and he made a tangential comment about "wasteful stimulus spending", and I completely checked out of the conversation for about three minutes while I recoiled and debated whether I wanted to deal with the comment or just barrel through my reaction and continue with the conversation. Which I did.
Also, after seeing the pseud in the sidebar, I was really not expecting 102 to be a real commenter. Welcome, Harry.
I am surprised that Heebie hasnt posted about the bumster aka Andrew McQueen's Highland Rape exhibit at the Met.
Yglesias (linking to the Washington Post, of all places) on how trying to avoid waste in stimulus spending is like trying to avoid wasting water while putting out the fire in your living-room.
105
... but there's a very well-established theoretical framework explaining it. ...
I don't know what this is referring to exactly but I don't think economists have much of clue about macroeconomics. Inventing plausible after the fact narratives isn't the same thing as being able to make useful predictions about the future.
And conditions today are quite different from the 1930s or even the 1950s making historical analogies of limited value. A theory that used to be true may no longer hold. In particular the economic system is much more globally integrated so stimulus spending by a single nation (even the US) may have become futile for the same reason that stimulus spending by a single state within the US is largely useless.
106
I was talking to my brother, who is ostensibly liberal, and he made a tangential comment about "wasteful stimulus spending", and I completely checked out of the conversation for about three minutes while I recoiled and debated whether I wanted to deal with the comment or just barrel through my reaction and continue with the conversation. Which I did.
Nevertheless the fact that people think that a lot of the stimulus spending was wasted is a political problem. For example the money spent on high speed rail (which I think is an utter boondoggle) really annoys me even if it isn't that big of a fraction of the stimulus spending.
Maybe someone's done a history of the non-Keynesian or proto-Keynsian idea of this.
The Great Depression did not strongly affect Japan. The Japanese economy shrank by 8% during 1929-31. However, Japan's Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo was the first to implement what have come to be identified as Keynesian economic policies: first, by large fiscal stimulus involving deficit spending; and second, by devaluing the currency. Takahashi used the Bank of Japan to sterilize the deficit spending and minimize resulting inflationary pressures. Econometric studies have identified the fiscal stimulus as especially effective.[62]
110.3: Ah, but not so different from Japan in the 90s, which is why people who have paid attention to it (notably Krugman) seem to have had a pretty good run prediction-wise in the recent unpleasantness.
107: Thankee!
109
Yglesias (linking to the Washington Post, of all places) on how trying to avoid waste in stimulus spending is like trying to avoid wasting water while putting out the fire in your living-room.
I think trying to avoid wasting water in this situation is in fact a very good idea. Spraying water on the house three doors down the street isn't going to accomplish much.
for the same reason that stimulus spending by a single state within the US is largely useless.
How would we know? Most states require balanced budgets. I would think that deficit spending would be the sine qua non of stimulus spending.
Provinces in Canada can run deficits. Have there been any data on economic results of province stimulus spending.
I think that Canada had a relatively more generous stimulus, and it's economy is doing much better than the U.S.'s. Having said that, it's also heavily dependent on commodities which are priced pretty high right now.
101: William Greider argues in Secrets of the Temple that proto-Keynesian ideas were floating around in the Populist movement.
I want to comment on all the reasons 114 is wrong, but I'm afraid that initiating an extended discussion of why the analogy isn't being used correctly might lead to a blanket analogy ban. And I wouldn't want that.
113
Ah, but not so different from Japan in the 90s, which is why people who have paid attention to it (notably Krugman) seem to have had a pretty good run prediction-wise in the recent unpleasantness.
Yeah but studying Japan in the 90s just tells us what didn't work very well, it doesn't provide much of plan for doing better, if such a plan even exists.
A theory that used to be true may no longer hold. In particular the economic system is much more globally integrated so stimulus spending by a single nation (even the US) may have become futile for the same reason that stimulus spending by a single state within the US is largely useless.
But current, global, examples abound which seem to indicate the theory is still very much in force. Witness China's massive stimulus spending soon after the economic crisis hit, which managed to keep their economy going (if, indeed, a bit overstimulated), as compared to the UKs austerity measures that seem to have sent the economy reeling, as compared to Sweden, managed to have a fairly mild recession largely because it had the sense to debase its currency. And in the case of the US, we had a modest stimulus and saw a modest result.
All of these cases are strongly in line with what would be predicted by Kensian theory. By contrast, I can't think of any current world examples that run counter to it.
88:And here is the actual S&P statement. It doesn't even mention the possibility of default.
Hell, Greece hasn't officially defaulted yer. Hell, I am not sure Iceland has defaulted. Downgrades happen all the time.
I am here today to defend S & P.
The Republican Party has almost open sworn to "drown government in the bathtub" There are two necessary steps to this, one of which has been accomplished, one of which is well on it's way.
1) Make it very difficulty to tax
2) Then make it very difficult to borrow.
...glub glun, cut spending, contraction, again, chaos see Grrece or many banana Republics
3) Loot assets from desperate hungry populace
Since this Republican plan seems to have had little to no effective public opposition, I would downgrade the US rating system in a heartbeat. Starving the economy to pay down debt is an extremely bad sign, and will not work. The US is definitely a bad credit risk until Republicans have no power or influence.
Yeah but studying Japan in the 90s just tells us what didn't work very well, it doesn't provide much of plan for doing better, if such a plan even exists.
Well, our plan could start with "don't do the exact same thing". Which you're right may not be much of a plan, but would nevertheless be an improvement from our current plan.
116
How would we know? Most states require balanced budgets. I would think that deficit spending would be the sine qua non of stimulus spending.
The problem is the state bears all of the costs while the good effects are spread all over the country making the cost benefit ratio (from the state's point of view) much less favorable than in a closed system.
The US is definitely a bad credit risk until Republicans have no power or influence.
Too bad S&P didn't lead with this. They might be getting more respect if they had.
124:I say Republicans, but I obviously am not happy with Democrats today, so let's call it "kleptocracy"
Kleptocracies are not at all new, and are in fact very common. The rating agencies understand them and the "looting" process very well. It also happens in private industry.
122
Well, our plan could start with "don't do the exact same thing". Which you're right may not be much of a plan, but would nevertheless be an improvement from our current plan.
This assumes a better outcome from doing something different is more likely than a worse outcome. There are a lot of places worse off than today's Japan. Maybe the plan should be not to expect a quick fix.
I have a serious question. What can we do? How can a lot of people spend a little bit of time and make a meaningful difference? People can't be expected to spend hours a week, but if you could have small levels of commitment more people might be able to.
My representative is okay, but if he weren't, he still wouldn't face a primary challenge.
I mean, I read threads like this...
What exactly do you say to Beers at S & P, the Moody guys.
That we are, any day now, any moment, gonna start a great big fiscal stimulus, the Fed will do a huge QE, and taxes are going to get raised to pay for it?
We all know Obama and Bernanke won't do it, and they will be followed by conservatives. So ain't gonna happen (without a Revolution)
BB- okay, not junk yet, but not risk free.
There are several serious steps we must take to preserve regain a risk-free rating (Revolution, civil war, grumble grumble)
This assumes a better outcome from doing something different is more likely than a worse outcome... Maybe the plan should be not to expect a quick fix.
Right. This was also the plan advised by classical economists during the depression.
Before the financial crisis, the US economy had several large, persistent problems (e.g. income distribution and consumer debt, oil dependency and balance of trade). If these are significant contributors to our current problems what good would further stimulus do? And could taking on further debt just make things worse?
Grover Norquist ...is thinking about targetting the gasoline tax, letting states pay for their own roads.
Digby understands Republicans, these people (some of whom used to call themselves Democrats) haven't changed in 300 years.
Understand that ending Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s was only partly about ideology and activism. It also involved America having the resources (broadly, including generosity and security) after 20-30 years of Keynesianism to rejoin the battle with Dixie. Dixie knows that a weak Yankee economy with frightened citizens hasn't the will for civil war III, and will leave the South to itself, as it did for 60 years of classical political economy.
Do they want to return to Jim Crow? Hell, they want chattel slavery back.
130:It's about the fucking taxes.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the New Keynesian tools like Thoma, Krugman, DeLong and Romer that tax cuts, all tax cuts, are counter-cyclical.
They are fighting the Lafferites with one hand tied behind their backs.
When it comes to producing below trend, we really should expect a quick fix. You have a) unemployed workers and b) idle capacity. It requires years of ideological training to be unable to see the solution to these two problems.
Changing the long-run growth rate of the economy is hard, and no one knows how to do it, but what to do about recessions is really one of the few problems that economists know how to solve -- it's just that the solution is politically unpalatable.
This assumes a better outcome from doing something different is more likely than a worse outcome.
Fantastic, let's just cower in fear and never learn anything new.
133.1: This situation would be the result of too little demand, fueled by consumer debt, right? I can see that stimulus could at least temporarily fix this, but that consumer debt had a cause, and if that cause is not addressed why would stimulus help in the long term?
Fantastic, let's just cower in fear and never learn anything new.
This is practically my motto.
I can see that stimulus could at least temporarily fix this, but that consumer debt had a cause, and if that cause is not addressed why would stimulus help in the long term?
You could combine stimulus with redistribution.
132 shouldn't be "countercyclical" Whatever. Hell, tax increases are always good!
"Got that 30s feeling, all the way."
As to what to do? What should a Social Democrat in 1931-32 Germany have done? An abolitionist in 1855 America? A worker in 1918 Russia?
Protect what you love as best you can, prepare and be willing to lose everything, or just leave.
136: You could even have a progressive stimulus, in theory. If we weren't governed by lunatics, I mean.
You could combine stimulus with redistribution.pitchforks.
But recessions are a short-term problem, that require a short-term fix. The long-term fix is "do the short-term fix". Producing below capacity is an unnatural state of being. The solution is "produce at capacity". Outside of the environment, there are very few economic problems that are easier to solve when you produce below capacity rather than at capacity.
As to what to do? What should a Social Democrat in 1931-32 Germany have done? An abolitionist in 1855 America? A worker in 1918 Russia?
Moved to Vancouver?
Honestly, is there any dilemma that can't be solved thus?
there are very few economic problems that are easier to solve when you produce below capacity rather than at capacity
The dread problem of wage pressure being the most significant exception.
But recessions are a short-term problem
What if you're mistaking a cycle for a trend, and we're not in a (definitionally short-term) recession?
Yeah but studying Japan in the 90s just tells us what didn't work very well, it doesn't provide much of plan for doing better, if such a plan even exists.
Well, the first thing it does is it blows up your theory that economics is merely about post-hoc explanations. Of course, Keynes himself refuted your theory by being right about the effects of stimulus spending long before WWII, and even before 1937, when FDR screwed up the economy by abandoning Keynesianism.
I don't know how soon Krugman and others called the Lost Decade in Japan, but I was reading Krugman when he explained it retroactively, and when he drew lessons from it that he applied to the U.S. in the current recession. And he wasn't alone in his predictions, not by a long shot.
The dominant opposing view has been completely discredited by events.
So yeah, sure, you can't know all outcomes. But if your choice is between a discredited view and one that has been borne out by results, what are you going to do?
I know what many will do, because Keynes himself noted that "even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist".
I'm just picturing all the progressive stimulus money (whatever form it takes) being efficiently siphoned off by Wall Street, China, and the oil companies, just as they were doing before the crash.
If it was just a change in trend, you wouldn't see a) so much unemployment, b) so much idle capacity. Unless the unemployed are a bunch of incompetent drunks that have literally nothing of value to offer to the world, there is surely useful work they could be doing, and the government could pay them to do it. Likewise, we have a bunch of productive capacity that we could use to do something useful. Some of it is housing in the middle of the Mohave, but some of it could be doing something useful rather than rusting away.
I'm just picturing all the progressive stimulus money (whatever form it takes) being efficiently siphoned off by Wall Street, China, and the oil companies, just as they were doing before the crash.
"Stimulus" in the shorthand we're using involves putting resources to work. So if you're building highways, you are engaged in economic stimulus. If you're handing money to millionaires and billionaires, not so much.
144: I actually think Keynes was wrong on the last one. Somehow the ethos of capitalism leads to a certain world-view that makes the Treasury View seem common-sensical. In this instance, base determines superstructure, or something like that.
If you're handing money to incentivizing millionaires and billionaires job creators, not so much.
Honestly, is there any dilemma that can't be solved thus?
Not having enough money for the fare?
148: And how can you not have sympathy for the Treasury View? Here's Keynes in General Theory:
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
I mean, let's face it, that's just fucking nuts. It's like saying global war ended the Depression.
General Theory was written in 1935, published in 1936, Google tells me.
151: It is kind of eerie how exactly that analogy fits WW2. I'm not even joking.
Keynes was not unaware of the economic aftermath of WW1: be interesting to know how much the analogy is a well-masked extrapolation from that.
I will interrupt only to say that (i) the most irritating part of the stimulus discussion, for me, was the delusion that many large, thousands-of-pairs-of-eyes-and-hands-employing infrastructure projects, could be "shovel-ready" in contemporary America, which has been postponing for decades the study and development that are necessary prefaces to putting steel and concrete in the ground and across rivers, and (ii) I think I may have lost the chance of a job in D.C. for having brought up in the interview that Keynes buried-bottles anecdote (i.e., the interviewers may have thought I was making fun of their program, when it was quite the opposite; in the event, that program has since withered and died so, you know, presumably we were both better off without one another).
What bothered me about the insistence on "shovel ready" projects was that the country is riddled with infrastructure problems that need fixing whether or not we need stimulus. If we'd started funding projects that weren't shovel ready, they'd have been shovel-ready soon enough, and even if the economy had recovered by then we would still have needed some water mains less than a century old. If there was a danger of the economy getting overstimulated we could have cut something else then.
the most irritating part of the stimulus discussion, for me, was the delusion that many large, thousands-of-pairs-of-eyes-and-hands-employing infrastructure projects, could be "shovel-ready" in contemporary America, which has been postponing for decades the study and development that are necessary prefaces to putting steel and concrete in the ground and across rivers
And yet, if we had started those studies two years ago, just after the stimulus passed, a whole lot of them would be on the cusp of shovel-readiness by now, and we could, in fact, be putting lots of people to work.
The "shovel ready" thing was a fucking disaster. There were all sorts of near term but not immediately ready to go infrastructure projects that could have been funded -- projects take time to get going! -- but that weren't funded because they weren't deemed sufficiently shovel-appropriate. Which of course made sense since the bad economy was only going to last for two months anyway and god forbid that you would want to spend any government money on useful projects after that.
I have to say fuck this administration and I should have voted for Hillary.
The Hillary reference added b/c even if you're going to be a spineless centrist democrat, I think we could do better.
I mean, I have it first hand that in California, at least, all sorts of folks went to Washington and said things like "here's this amazingly good idea that's useful for about 10,000 reasons and will employ lots of people and create add-on private sector jobs, and now's the time to fund it!" and the response was something like "well, you have to do a six month planning process so, nope, we're not giving you a dime and are sending the money to build some roads or maybe we'll just sit on it for a while longer."
If we'd started funding projects that weren't shovel ready, they'd have been shovel-ready soon enough....
But, sadly, not soon enough for the critical constituency of the politicians in office at the time when long-term capital expenditures would have to be allocated. I can perorate at tedious length about the executive and legislative malpractice that have created a New York City that lacks at least two, and possibly three, necessary road-and-rail arteries into Manhattan, but the sad fact is that neither Bloomberg nor Giuliani, mayors exercising what one might call considerable executive discretion and influence, was willing to commit to the decade-plus critical path that someone else would take over and take credit for. Something something Sheldon Silver something something congestion pricing something something.
I don't know if Hillary would do better or not, but Door #2 does indeed a lot better after my disappointment with Door #1.
At the time I though Obama was a lot better the Hillary on economic issues (Hillary was pushing some stupid cut to the gas tax, I remember), but turns out Obama really isn't inclined to show any economic leadership. He could have mentioned that during the election.
"... sending the money to build some roads or maybe we'll just sit on it for a while longer."
The U.S. infrastructure establishment, nutshelled.
he sad fact is that neither Bloomberg nor Giuliani, mayors exercising what one might call considerable executive discretion and influence, was willing to commit to the decade-plus critical path that someone else would take over and take credit for.
Yep. You betcha.
Freddy Ferrer would have at least wanted to hand out the patronage jobs. (This is completely unfair. I have no idea what Ferrer would have done. But just like Hillary's looking good in retrospect as not-Obama, I'm wistful about Ferrer.)
I'm pretty sure that if we had President Hillary right now Obama would look like the great hope, but on the other hand I think that it's reasonable that Clinton would have done better on my #1 policy priority of funnelling shitloads of federal cash to California.
I don't know if Hillary would do better or not
I know it isn't entirely fair to equate a Bill Clinton presidency with a Hillary Clinton presidency, but after Act One gave us NAFTA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, welfare "reform", deregulation of the financial industry through repeal of Glass-Steagall, a ramped up War on Drugs, and a revolving door between the Treasury Department and Gold Mansacks, let's just say I don't have much convincing evidence that we'd be better off.
Oh, I don't either, but I suspect that on the merits of quicly designing programs to get funds into the economy (stimulus, HAMP) and perhaps in taking measures to play hardball on the economy (Bill came out very strongly in favor ofthe 14th Amendment option on the debt crisis) she might well have done better. On the other hand, who knows.
Gold Mansacks
New to me, and I like it.
Really, I just want to hang out with the PUMAs, like 3 years too late. Isn't that what they call hot older ladies these days?
The Prophet ...cometh downeth from the mountaineth.
Yea verily, I have returned unto you to put it straight to yinz: there is no tea party; there are no Democrats; there is no America. There is only global capital. There is no keeping American competitive for the future against the Chinese children of the math-science learning gap to win tomorrow today with the power of innovation. There is a single transnational elite whose allegiance is to itself. They would've fucked you on Saturday; they'll fuck you next Wednesday instead. There was no debt crisis. THERE IS NO DEBT CEILING. You are like prisoners in a concentration camp, tearing each other apart over crusts of bread. The guards check their rifles. The kommandant shtups his mistress. The carrion birds circle against the concrete sky.You must destroy the rich
165: Considering the "quality" of his "campaign," I wouldn't hold out much hope for the parallel-universe Ferrer administration.
Musing a little irresponsibly, one would think that there was some appeal in the chance to be the first non-white mayor of a very large American city to cut the ribbon on a massive infrastructure project, but the lifespan of such projects presumably gives any such executive the same pause that it gives Mayor Whitey, the appeal of being a famous-first notwithstanding.
Also, I don't see race.
165: Considering the "quality" of his "campaign," I wouldn't hold out much hope for the parallel-universe Ferrer administration.
OTOH, the Obama campaign was a miracle of tight organization and fluid response. So who can tell?
167: on the other hand, the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history, a budget surplus, and no war with Iraq.
I'm wistful about Ferrer.
I'm really not. I dealt with a fair number of people from his office and did not find it an impressive operation. Really, though, the Borough Presidencies are not where anybody should be looking to find leadership for the city. They're basically ceremonial offices, designed to be occupied by people like this.
Bill Thompson I'm wistful about.
OTOH, the Obama campaign was a miracle of tight organization and fluid response. So who can tell?
Have I mentioned that I didn't give Obama money because I, irrationally, feared to jinx him as I thought, irrationally, that I had jinxed John Kerry in 2004? At the time I thought I was being stupid, but now I'm glad.
Bill Thompson I'm wistful about.
That was when my mother firmly decided Obama was a bad idea -- when he failed to enthusiastically endorse Thompson. Mom's a bit of a hothead politically, but she does make good calls.
169: How soon they forget, Ms. Disco Balls.
Damn. Better work on Memorizing TFA.
"Shovel ready" is indeed frustrating, although I did get a tour of some fish screens that were pulled off the shelf, dusted, and called "shovel ready" in time to meet the deadline. They are now being installed, and I saw employed people working with my own two eyes. Sadly, because they were using their old "ready" designs, they didn't have time to tweak the design for new predictions about sea level rise, so they're installing the fish screens in the certain knowledge that they'll have to retrofit in two decades. Which is fine, I suppose, but another couple months of design would have prevented that.
It isn't really the problem that ARRA was meant to solve, but designing the plans for infrastructure retrofits and improvements also employs people. It employs the people who aren't hurting most these days, but it does keep a bunch of engineers in work. They might purchase an extra treat or two with that money. A few months later, their designs could be ready for installation.
And another thing!!! I still don't know when the idea that perfect efficiency was the only legitimate goal. I've said before, and Cosma said better, that the economic inefficiency could well be someone's livelihood or quality of life. That is also valuable. It also belongs on the scale, weighing against the notion that efficiency is the only important societal value.
I had somehow not seen the Marty Markowitz Eating tumblr before. That is truly wonderful.
on the other hand, the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history, a budget surplus, and no war with Iraq
That would be "not much war with Iraq" rather than none at all, and "peacetime economic expansion" has at least partly been redefined as "bubble". The question of when the bubble started which the current recession is aiming to correct is a live one in some circles and convincing arguments can be made for dates as early as 1992.
I know it isn't entirely fair to equate a Bill Clinton presidency with a Hillary Clinton presidency, but after Act One gave us NAFTA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, welfare "reform", deregulation of the financial industry through repeal of Glass-Steagall, a ramped up War on Drugs, and a revolving door between the Treasury Department and Gold Mansacks, let's just say I don't have much convincing evidence that we'd be better off.
I don't actually disagree with this at all, but this is at least mild evidence on the other side (recognizing as you say that it's not entirely fair to equte the two Clintons):
"Nobody should assume we're going to have a debt-limit extension," John Boehner warned. "If the vote were held today, it would not pass." Sound familiar? This was Boehner in November of 1995, when he was the House Republican Conference chairman and his party was refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Bill Clinton agreed to a package of sweeping spending cuts.... Unlike Obama, [Clinton] refused to let the threat of default set the national agenda. Because he would not enter into negotiations over the debt ceiling, the issue barely roused the public consciousness. On November 9, 1995, a senior administration official told the Washington Post, "Our position is it does not matter what they put on this legislation, we are not going to accept anything but clean bills because we will not be blackmailed over default. Get it? No extortion. No blackmail. What you hear are their screams of complaint as they realize we are not, not, not budging on this."
Ugh, the drivel that comes out.
186.--So what happened? It surely can't be that Clinton said "no" and the Republicans were all, well, okay then.
188: I actually think that is pretty much what happened. The thing about the debt limit is that everyone sane agrees that failing to raise it is insanely damaging with no upside. So refusing to negotiate at all is a strong position. Once you're negotiating, though, you're screwed.
For James's benefit, here's Niall Ferguson in Financial Times doing a rather revealing victory lap vs. Krugman in 2009.
Krugman predicted interest rates would stay low. Ferguson says Krugman is proven wrong because while 10-year Treasury rates were low, they had risen.
He concludes:
The policy mistake has already been made - to adopt the fiscal policy of a world war to fight a recession. In the absence of credible commitments to end the chronic US structural deficit, there will be further upward pressure on interest rates, despite the glut of global savings.
Ten-year Treasuries, are now at 2.77%.
In addition:
Monetary expansion in the US, where M2 is growing at an annual rate of 9 per cent, well above its post-1960 average, seems likely to lead to inflation if not this year, then next.
Krugman, on the same day, had this in the NYT:
So if prices aren't rising, why the inflation worries? Some claim that the Federal Reserve is printing lots of money, which must be inflationary, while others claim that budget deficits will eventually force the U.S. government to inflate away its debt.
The first story is just wrong. The second could be right, but isn't.
Krugman is essential reading. The world is a lot less confusing to me for having read his work.
Equity markets are not doing well today.
Need to think
Obama blundered -- or showed himself incompetent, to put it in a more sweeping way. He didn't make the Republicans pay for the way they used the debt ceiling, so they're going to do it again. They've shown a path to turning the President into a puppet of a Congressional *minority*, by being willing to hold the economy hostage. That can't possibly be a victory, regardless of your policy goals. The core reason to invoke the 14th amendment was to defuse future hostage-taking by using the debt ceiling.
From Bob Greenstein:
The most terrifying result of the debt ceiling crisis is not the deal itself -- with its tight discretionary caps, its special joint committee that Republicans already are saying they won't allow to raise any revenues, and its potential for arbitrary across-the-board cuts. Instead, it's the precedent that Republican congressional leaders say the crisis has established.Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared on the Senate floor today that this "creates an entirely new template for raising the national debt limit." As he explained on CNBC last night, "In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore."In his Senate floor speech, McConnell noted that Washington will have to raise the debt limit again in early 2013. He promised that he and others will seek to use that event once again to shrink "the size and scope of government."
Ohio's Rob Portman, one of the most influential Republican senators on budget issues, went further, suggesting the new standard should be a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar that the debt ceiling is raised.If maintained over a number of years, such a dollar-for-dollar standard ultimately would decimate much of the federal government.
Consider:
§ Under House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget -- which cuts non-security discretionary programs one-third by 2021 (relative to last year's funding levels adjusted for inflation), slashes Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over ten years, cuts food stamps and Pell Grants by over $100 billion each, and cuts total spending by more than $4 trillion -- the debt ceiling would still have to be raised more than $6 trillion over the coming decade above the increase enacted today.
§ In other words, applying a dollar-for-dollar standard to all future debt limit increases would require trillions of dollars in additional cuts on top of the massive cuts already in the Ryan budget -- and make the Ryan budget look like a piker by comparison.
Policymakers who have engaged in recent months in high-stakes hostage-taking -- threatening the economy and the full faith and credit of the U.S. government -- apparently now feel vindicated, affirmed, and emboldened. The lesson they draw is to threaten default each time Washington must raise the debt ceiling unless their demands for ever deeper budget cuts (with no revenue increases) are met.
186: I agree that the Clintons would not have let themselves get rolled like this. Hilary has a gut-level understanding that you have to be willing to be partisan. This is a conclusive demonstration of the weakness of Obama's "above the fray" strategy.
Also, frankly, the key demographic that swept the tea party into power were older whites, especially the shift among older white women. Hilary could have held onto that demo. Obama gives you the worst of both worlds -- a black guy named Obama will always be seen as a radical, but he actually appears to be a very squishy centrist.
As he explained on CNBC last night, "In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore."
I seriously doubt a Republican president would be subject to this.
Also, frankly, the key demographic that swept the tea party into power were older whites, especially the shift among older white women. Hilary could have held onto that demo.
Nobody shifted parties. The future tea party somewhat stayed home in '08 and showed up in droves in 2010
and the droves of people who had voted Democrat in '08 stayed home in 2010. They would have been just as disenfranchised with Hilary.
Wow the stock market had a shitty weak. Now that the debt ceiling distraction is over, the stock market had time to notice that GDP was revised downwards, and that we're visibly sliding back into recession. Efficient market, baby!
I, for one, welcome our new Romney overlords, and want to remind them that a trusted Unfogged commenter personality like myself can be useful in rounding up other Unfogged commenters to work in their ... their ... I had something for this. Their unacknowledgedly-Masonic-influenced ceremonial garment factories?
194: A republican president would be an interesting experiment. Obama thought that Speaker Boehner would realize that his office came with some responsibility to govern--that didn't work out. Would an R in the White House be any more likely to act like a grown-up, or would he (or she) just join the tantrum the party's throwing in congress? I think McConnell is right--if a republican president asked for a debt ceiling increase without demanding horrible austerity along with it, his party would revolt.
Would an R in the White House be any more likely to act like a grown-up, or would he (or she) just join the tantrum the party's throwing in congress? I think McConnell is right--if a republican president asked for a debt ceiling increase without demanding horrible austerity along with it, his party would revolt.
I don't know about that. Some of the Tea Partiers may be genuinely crazy, but I think the bulk of the Republicans were willing to drive the country off the cliff only because they were sure Obama and the Democrats would get blamed. If the Republicans had the White House and Congress, while they'd do ghastly things like they did under Bush, I doubt you'd get horrible austerity exactly, in any across the board sense.
Game it out, though. Say the President calls for something a little bit sensible, and the Hell No caucus starts to do its thing. Is that the point where Boehner sides with the President and risks losing his Speakership and possibly splintering off the Tea Party for good, leading to long-term dem gains? I'd like to think you're right, but they were pretty frank about how the relevant calculus wasn't just that Obama would save them, it was that Obama would get blamed for the catastrophe. They'll always find a way to blame the democrats.
And this all assumes that the President calls for something sensible! Which one of them do you think is going to do that, ensuring a primary-from-the-right in the next election? I just don't see it.
I agree with LB: Republicans care about cutting spending and austerity if and only if there's a Democrat in the white house. If there's an R in the white house then ipso facto there's no danger of socialism, because america is being run by americans.
Hm. I suppose history is on your side on that one. I still worry that the genie is out of the bottle and they won't be able to go back to their old ways after riling up their base like this. I guess that's what they do, though...
They've shown a path to turning the President into a puppet of a Congressional *minority*, by being willing to hold the economy hostage.
Also true in the context of health care reform, the environment, etc. If the past three years have shown us anything, it's that a determined Congressional minority can block essentially anything it wants to. .
The institutions are fucked, Congress is fucked, and it all makes progressive change (or just basic governance) enormously difficult. The only upside is that it's also harder for a Republican president and Republican congress to enact their agenda in areas that Democrats care about.
The Imperial Presidency exists for a reason; there's just no way to run the country without it.
Yglesias has just outdone himself by misspelling "LBJ". I am in awe.
it's also harder for a Republican president and Republican congress to enact their agenda in areas that Democrats care about.
not if the Democrats won't threaten to destroy the economy to stop him -- which they likely won't. It takes a radical party for that.
If the past three years have shown us anything, it's that a determined Congressional minority can block essentially anything it wants to. ..The institutions are fucked, Congress is fucked
This wasn't blocking, this was passing legislation. Big difference. Blocking change is the normal fucked-ness written into the Constitution. This is really something else. It's enabled by the bullshit debt ceiling law, which gives a blocking minority power over the faith and credit of the U.S. government. That's why the Constitutional/14th amendment option was really the only option here.
Bush did try to gut social security with a Republican Congress, and I wouldn't be too surprised if in the future the debt ceiling would be invoked in a similar situation. The president could simply ask for a lower increase and claim we can't afford a higher one.
Also relevant to the negotiation question, I seem to remember Pelosi say that an alternative Democratic plan would be announced sometime around never, assholes, we're not negotiating on that.
So what say we draft Pelosi to primary Obama?
Yglesias has just outdone himself by misspelling "LBJ". I am in awe.
That's awesome.
For posterity, in case he changes it later, the passage is:
I do, however, firmly believe that the American public likes its Democratic Presidents as philanderers. Clinton, LBK, JFK, FDR, they all cheated. I don't condone it, but the pattern is clear.
Fear (both your cheries ) (1996) showed the promise of this now 40-something geezer.
The critics at yahoo! answers are true auteurs.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100725142255AAmzc0N
Clinton looked better at the end of the primary (when she'd been essentially mathematically eliminated for weeks but the press wasn't really acknowledging that) than at the beginning, but her some of her campaign-stage positions really made her look more centrist than Obama, and Obama didn't look particularly liberal.
She also had a bunch of near-Republicans on her team. This doesn't say much about how she'd govern, but it wouldn't have surprised me to see her pick the whole Summers/Geithner team, for example. She might have smacked them around later though. Plus, she did seem to have a better understanding of the Republican party. That question is more muted in a primary.
210: Well, she did vote for the debt ceiling deal.
This is really something else.
That's probably fair, but it's incredible how much of government is more or less permanently impossible because of the Senate rules, and how capable a determined minority is of blocking just about everything one would want to do. Obama's performance was massively unimpressive in this situation, and the mistake does seem to have been the willingness to play the game at all. In general, however, I'm very skeptical that new personalities and different rhetoric better and "tougher" Democrats can help,* so long as we have a determined minority of crazy Republicans and fucked up institutions. Replacing Obama with Pelosi wouldn't do that much good; Pelosi seems impressive because she's on our side in the one pure majority-rules institution we have.
*except in throwing a monkey wrench into Republican governance if we have a Republican president and Congressional majority.
Anyhow, the debt ceiling law really is completely insane.
have been the willingness to play the game at all.
HOW ABOUT A GAME OF THERMONUCLEAR WAR
I should say "I'm very skeptical that new personalities and different rhetoric better and "tougher" Democrats can help" in any area that requires working with Congress. Personalities mean a lot in the areas the executive branch can actually control.
In general, however, I'm very skeptical that new personalities and different rhetoric better and "tougher" Democrats can help,* so long as we have a determined minority of crazy Republicans and fucked up institutions.
Well, tougher Democrats could fix the institutions when they got a shot. Not that this would have been likely at all, mind you, but Harry Reid and fifty Democrats could have ended the filibuster, and then fifty Senate Democrats and a Democratic house could have eliminated the debt limit completely, back in 2009-10.
218 is absolutely right. On the other hand, it seems right now that there's no way that individual Senators, even pretty liberal ones, are going to abolish the filibuster because it protects their privileges. The Senate is truly a loathsome institution.
On the other hand, it seems right now that there's no way that individual Senators, even pretty liberal ones, are going to abolish the filibuster because it protects their privileges.
I've heard this a bunch, but from a Democratic Senator's point of view I don't understand it. (That is, they seem to think this way, but I don't know why they do.) Wouldn't you rather be a member of a party that could actually do useful things than have a hair more personal influence on the precise way the world went to hell?
I agree with LB: Republicans care about cutting spending and austerity if and only if there's a Democrat in the white house.
This is at the heart of the discussion I was having with DS and VW a few days ago. I was arguing that the Tea Party is so fucking apeshit that they are starting to care about cutting spending and austerity even in Republican regimes, and I was offering a nixed Texan water project as the example. That's why I proposed that we're actually seeing a new development, one that I think will lead to a rift.
220: Can they use those privileges as leverage for contributions and favors?
220: It's insurance, guaranteeing that they'll have similar agenda-blocking powers when they're in the minority. Not sure why they prefer that even when the possibility of achieving something great is right at hand, but the reasoning seems to be near-universal.
Also, every single member of the 50 Senators you'd need to vote to abolish the filibuster would have to be convinced that they'll consistently better off with majority rule together with the other 49 than they will be from extracting concessions and getting legislation crafted to their liking and protecting pet programs and the like. That's a lot to ask from a bunch of pompous glahanding windbags with a tradition of protecting their privileges.
a bunch of pompous gladhanding windbags with a tradition of protecting their privileges
I'm still down with the current mouseover, but this one shows promise.
221: at Salon, August 2, on Tea Party demographics. Shorter:Dixie. h/t Marcotte
212 to http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_11482.html , obviously.
'What bothered me about the insistence on "shovel ready" projects was that the country is riddled with infrastructure problems that
need fixing whether or not we need stimulus. If we'd started funding projects that weren't shovel ready, ..."
Why pare planning, permitting, design, impact assessment, hobo-patronage consulting gigs, white collar jobs, not stimulus ?
Also, operating funds for transit to stay open as late as your local Fresh Salt[tm] rarley get the stimulus nod.
I thought "shovel-ready" was more bait and switch (at this point I'm probably using bait and switch inaccurately).
"Oh, sure, stimulus is a good idea, I'm for it. Hmm, I seem to have trouble finding enough programs that would qualify, maybe we should cut the amount of stimulus. Also, tax cuts. Anyway, we can fund infrastructure better in the infrastructure bill (that I'll fight)."
Later: "We tried stimulus and it didn't work very well. Let's try austerity."
I'm tired of this. Jokes and arguments don't move those fuckers from Dixie.
They're are going to kill millions. Obama is exactly like Buchanan.
I don't think this time the Yankees and liberals have the heart to even defend themselves.
And after centuries of letting the Southron fucks kill brown people around the world, nobody will come to save you when apply your peaceful sweet Sharp tactics and Blackwell pours kerosene on you and bayonets your kids.
You don't hate and fear them nearly enough. Fuck, they just almost blew up the world economy and are publicly (McConnell) promising to do it again.
There's been an increasing tendency across the left to frame the current political divide as a North/South thing. While in many ways I agree that it is true, I think emphasizing this too much is counter-productive. The Lind piece is an example of this. Lind hates the south in that way that only a disaffected southerner can. This kind of invective simplifies and alienates too much.
Lind hates the south in that way that only a disaffected southerner can.
No, those people love the South more than Ricky Bobby or Shelby Foote ever could. They "hate" (or, more sophisticatedly, deplore more in sorrow than in anger) the South because they believe that the histrionics of apostasy magnify them. Cough daddy issues cough.
230, 231: Lind makes specific claims. The PR approach in 230 and the psychoanalytic approach in 231 don't address those claims. I don't see any grounds for factual dispute with Lind.
I have no factual dispute with Lind. But I don't like one 3 paragraph embedded quotation making fun of accents and another 5 paragraph one by a neo-Confederate explaining Southern identity.
190
Krugman is essential reading. ...
Maybe, but I am reluctant to spend any of my precious 30 NYT articles a month on his columns. And he appears to have political views. I don't trust economists with political views.
And he appears to have political views. I don't trust economists with political views.
He was driven to those political views by his economic views. Before being confronted with the stupidity and mendacity of the second Bush administration there was more than a little of the technocratic hippie-puncher about him.
but it wouldn't have surprised me to see her pick the whole Summers/Geithner team, for example. She might have smacked them around later though.
Yep. My position always was (and still is, though what's the use of retrospective hypotheticals?): HRC was [still is] way too hawkish on foreign policy, but so too would be [now is] Obama, if/when placed in a position to weigh in (and never mind that 'anti-war candidate' nonsense, which was, sadly, never more than sheer fantasy on the part of O's most ardent supporters); but Hillary, unlike Barack, was at least realistic on domestic policy, and willing and able to be a scrappy fighter against the nutty excesses of the GOP. No way would she have allowed herself to be rolled on a faux 'debt ceiling' debate; she is just too smart and canny for that, and holds no brief (so: she's "divisive," of course) for "bi-partisanship."
I'm tired of this nobody will come to save you pours kerosene on you and bayonets your kids ou don't hate and fear them nearly enough they just almost blew up the world economy
So you're not us and you're not them. Why the FUCK are you even in this conversation?
I don't trust economists with political views.
I am interested in the concept of an economist without political views. Where might I find such a creature?
238
I am interested in the concept of an economist without political views. Where might I find such a creature?
Well of course it would be difficult to find an economist with no political opinions at all. But the more actively involved you are in debating current political controversies (especially from a partisan point of view) the more temptation there is to shade your economic views to promote your political agenda. For example it would be difficult for me to objectively study the economic effects of illegal immigration. Krugman isn't the worst offender in this regard (partly I suspect because his ego makes it difficult for him to conform to a party line) but he does appear to have an undesirable (from the point of view of maintaining proper scientific detachment and objectivity) passion for certain policy positions.
Krugman's policy preferences have changed radically over the last decade, in response to changes in the state of the economy. That is surely as it should be. Also, as a macroeconomist, your analysis is supposed to have policy implications. Pure taxonomy is valuable in botany; in economics it makes no sense.
241
... Also, as a macroeconomist, your analysis is supposed to have policy implications. ...
Sure but it is undesirable for you to care what those implications are.
Your list of acceptable scientists must be quite short.
242: it is undesirable for you to care what those implications are.
I don't think that follows at all. If you're any other sort of scientist (or really any other sort of person) you're supposed to care about the policy implications of your work. If Megan works out that building a certain culvert will lead to erosion of an entire hillside full of vineyards, then the policy implication is "don't build the culvert unless there's some really impressive reason for doing so" and she'd be daft not to realise and care about that.
The difference is, I think, that Krugman is attached a priori to certain outcomes (economic growth is good, unemployment is bad, that kind of thing) and you're attached a priori to certain methods (immigration is bad, etc). The latter skews analysis; the former does not.
Your list of acceptable scientists must be quite short.
It wouldn't include Darwin or Einstein, for a start.
243
Your list of acceptable scientists must be quite short
This is just one criteria among many. And it is more important for fields like economics where experimental validation is difficult.
244
I don't think that follows at all. If you're any other sort of scientist (or really any other sort of person) you're supposed to care about the policy implications of your work. ...
I don't agree. I don't trust climatologists with policy views either.
The difference is, I think, that Krugman is attached a priori to certain outcomes (economic growth is good, unemployment is bad, that kind of thing) and you're attached a priori to certain methods (immigration is bad, etc). The latter skews analysis; the former does not.
Again I don't agree. If for example you really care about lowering the unemployment rate you are tempted to shade your economic views to make your preferred policy positions more attractive politically (by overstating the magnitude and probability of good effects and understating the magnitude and probability of bad results). In particular you want to believe that there is something that can be done. Hence claims (which I think are without foundation) that there is a clearcut way out of our current difficulties.
Hence claims (which I think are without foundation) that there is a clearcut way out of our current difficulties.
I haven't noticed Krugman suggesting anything of the kind. He argues strongly that the policies currently being pursued by the US government and the ECB are not a way out, but he's far from saying that his preferred option is a magic bullet.
248
I haven't noticed Krugman suggesting anything of the kind ...
I wasn't intending to attribute such claims to Krugman in particular. I have read some of Krugman's writing but don't remember enough of it to discuss his views in detail.
I don't trust climatologists with policy views either.
See, this is nuts. A 'policy view', in the sense we're talking about, is an opinion about what outcomes would be desirable. Say, for example, in the context of climatology, that the planet remain a hospitable environment for civilization (to radically oversimplify).
Believing that the continued habitability of the planet would be strongly preferable to the alternative isn't going to have any tendency to distort a scientist's analysis of what actions are likely to bring the desired outcome about; someone who really cares about the habitability of the planet, if they find out that continued burning of fossil fuels is the only way to stave off the oncoming ice age, has more, rather than less, incentive to be honest about it.
Maybe we should have a process for screening researchers to guarantee that they're utterly bored by their work. That'll make sure they produce solid results, right?
Believing that the continued habitability of the planet would be strongly preferable to the alternative isn't going to have any tendency to distort a scientist's analysis of what actions are likely to bring the desired outcome about;
YES. See 244.2 for a less well expressed version of this.
But what if a preferred outcome is also a method? I.e., I think James wasn't referring to someone who would prefer the planet remain a hospitable environment for civilization, but to someone who (for reasons unrelated to climatology) would prefer to see less use of fossil fuels.
I do think that there is a germ of truth in what James says here. The 'science" gets worse the more someone is invested in an outcome. But that is not necessarily "bad" in the larger scheme of things. Science like the law ids an ass. A great tool (probably the greatest) but not something I want to rigorously rely on when there are important decisions to be made in the face of limited information.
I think James wasn't referring to someone who would prefer the planet remain a hospitable environment for civilization, but to someone who (for reasons unrelated to climatology) would prefer to see less use of fossil fuels.
Such people are rare indeed compared to the people who, for reasons unrelated to climatology (normally either profit or hatred) would prefer to see more use of fossil fuels.
Okay, but this is literally everybody in economics except for Gerard Debreu.
At this point, Krugman has a long track record of being right. He was right about the California electricity deregulation, he was right about Japan, he was right about the housing bubble, he was right about the stimulus. He was right about Obama, who he never was impressed by. On the scientific grounds of accuracy in prediction, Krugman looks as good as anybody in economics.
253: Isn't that a problem with someone who's got a concealed policy preference, rather than someone who has a policy preference at all?
250
See, this is nuts. A 'policy view', in the sense we're talking about, is an opinion about what outcomes would be desirable. Say, for example, in the context of climatology, that the planet remain a hospitable environment for civilization (to radically oversimplify).
Policy disputes often concern the best means to reach an agreed upon outcome. And I am not talking about views which are universally (or almost universally) shared. The view that the planet remain a hospitable evironment for humans is near universal, the view that it remain hospitable for all of the currently extant species is less universal. So for example people who strongly believe that species extinctions are bad are apt to fudge the science to exaggerate the potential ill effects of such extinctions on people.
Believing that the continued habitability of the planet would be strongly preferable to the alternative isn't going to have any tendency to distort a scientist's analysis of what actions are likely to bring the desired outcome about; someone who really cares about the habitability of the planet, if they find out that continued burning of fossil fuels is the only way to stave off the oncoming ice age, has more, rather than less, incentive to be honest about it.
The divisions aren't between people who believe it is desirable that the planet remain habitable, they are between for example people who have more faith in markets or in governments. And people on all sides have an incentive to exaggerate their case when debating. So people who think the public is unduly complacent about climate change have a tendency to emphasize the risks while people on the other side have a tendency to minimize them.
And being a strong policy advocate makes it harder for you to change your mind about the underlying science.
256
At this point, Krugman has a long track record of being right. He was right about the California electricity deregulation, he was right about Japan, he was right about the housing bubble, he was right about the stimulus. He was right about Obama, who he never was impressed by. On the scientific grounds of accuracy in prediction, Krugman looks as good as anybody in economics.
But even accepting this as true it is fairly meaningless, there are lots of hedge fund managers and the like who have great records for a while and then don't.
The divisions aren't between people who believe it is desirable that the planet remain habitable
I sometimes wonder whether this is actually true. After all, 40% of americans think that Jesus will return by 2050. So who cares if climate change destroys civilization 150 years down the road? And at any rate, if climate change were going to destroy civilization, then certainly Jesus would come back first.
Combined with psychopathic CEO-types who aren't likely to care about the fate of the world after they're dead.
257
Isn't that a problem with someone who's got a concealed policy preference, rather than someone who has a policy preference at all?
Not really, if for example I know that some of the lawyers on this group have sold their souls to the devil (aka Big Mouse) this doesn't make the problem (that they have sold their souls) go away, it just tells me I shouldn't trust their expressed views on the social value of patents.
What's the conflict of interest supposed to be here for climatologists? Why would you want to believe a priori that burning fossil fuels destroys the planet? It seems pretty clear to me that causality is going the other way here (that is the science is driving people's policy points of view, not the other way around).
The usual conspiracy rant seems to be that it's because the scientists are evil liberals who want One World Government, so they cook up the climate change myth in order to give socialists an excuse to seize power, or something. But James isn't that crazy, so I don't know.
there are lots of hedge fund managers and the like who have great records for a while and then don't.
Great records for riding the wave, and for realizing enormous profits from the creation of a bubble, at least while it lasted, and until the bubble inevitably burst? Well, sure. But that's not to say that they should, or could, ever be deemed to have been "right" (as in, correct, or clear-sighted, or reality-based) upon further, and more candid, investigation.
If "great record" = successful exploitation of the very problem that is under investigation by more sober-minded observers, then yes, a hedge fund manager has a strong claim to our attention as an example of how the system actually works.
Similarly, while physicists have great track records, that is also meaningless because of hedge fund managers. Apparently the only way we can judge predictions is on their virtue, rather than any ability to match reality.
there are lots of hedge fund managers and the like who have great records for a while and then don't.
This is, as walt implies, one of the stupidest things you've ever said, James.
It's also a miscomparison based on ignorance of the fund management industry. Some fund managers have good records in terms of profit. That does not mean that they are good at accurately predicting the future, because that's not how funds (or not how most funds) work. There is more to it than simply saying "I predict steel will rise in six months; buy lots of steel now". That isn't actually how funds work. That's just how funds work in Jimmy Stewart movies and New Yorker cartoons.
262: Of course, if someone has an open conflict of interest, as in a copyright lawyer on the Disney payroll, you can to some extent discount their statements on the subject as biased. But again, that's not a problem with having policy preferences at all, that's a problem specifically with having policy preferences that give you an incentive to make misrepresentations. And even discounting the statements of someone with an interest in the results is a little tricky, because you also have to discount the statements of anyone who disagrees with them who has an opposing interest. If you've got a climatologist who thinks polar bears are adorable and thinks we've got a climate problem on one side, and a climatologist getting a salary from Big Oil who thinks we don't have a problem on the other side, looking at biases doesn't help you, you just have to check their work.
By saying that you disapprove of climatologists with policy preferences, you seem to be assuming that climatologists producing results that would suggest that policy changes are necessary to preserve the climate of the planet in a way that doesn't damage the capacity for humans to live on it are actually motivated by concealed policy preferences that give them an incentive to lie. And sure, someone with concealed policy preferences that give them an incentive to lie is less reliable than someone without, but your grounds for attributing these concealed policy preferences are pretty weak.
267
Similarly, while physicists have great track records, that is also meaningless because of hedge fund managers. Apparently the only way we can judge predictions is on their virtue, rather than any ability to match reality.
My point was you can find economists predicting all sorts of things so some of them are bound to be right. Similarly if you have enough people managing money some of them are bound to amass good records (even if they are basically just picking investments at random). This does not mean they actually have any skill or can be expected to continue to predict well in the future. Physics is different from economics in that if you ask two physicists a physics question you tend to get one opinion instead of three. Which is another way of saying that we understand physics better than we understand economics.
263
What's the conflict of interest supposed to be here for climatologists? Why would you want to believe a priori that burning fossil fuels destroys the planet? It seems pretty clear to me that causality is going the other way here (that is the science is driving people's policy points of view, not the other way around).
There are a couple of conflicts. First the possibility that humans are inadvertently causing (or may cause) destructive climate change gives the field of climatology an importance and status (and corresponding government funding levels) that it would not otherwise have. This gives the field an institutional incentive to promote the idea. Analogously tokamak researchers have an institutional incentive to exaggerate the probability (which is miniscule in my opinion) that tokamak research will lead to economically practical power generation.
The second conflict is that the question of what if anything we should do about climate change has become a partisan political issue in the United States. This might not be too important if climatologist had political views typical of Americans, but in fact their views, like those of most academics, skew far left. This has an obvious risk of biasing the research and how the research findings are presented.
Why are climate scientists the ones with the most profound, culpable conflicts of interest? One should have thought that the hunched, contorted posture and sour expression of the average Republican in Congress suggested a rather more fundamental divide against the text of his or her public pronouncements.
269
By saying that you disapprove of climatologists with policy preferences ...
Disapprove isn't really the right word. I don't trust climatologists (or economists) with strong political views to accurately report what their field says about questions with political implications. So I apply a discount factor.
The problem is quite apparent in economics where economist's professional opinions have an obvious tendency to align with their political alliances. It less obvious in climatology but I suspect this is just because climatology is more of a political monoculture.
I don't trust climatologists (or economists) with strong political views to accurately report what their field says about questions with political implications. So I apply a discount factor.
On the basis of what knowledge of your own of climate science do you decide how big a discount factor to apply? Discounting someone as a liar or self-deceived, and therefore not a useful source of information, can be a reasonable thing to do. Deciding that you can take their lies or self-deception and correct them to find the truth despite a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, on the basis of your intuitive sense of human nature is kind of idiotic.
And again, lumping all 'strong political views' together is similarly idiotic. There's a difference between strong political views pre-existing the formulation of a professional opinion ("I'm a crazed leftist who hates oil companies, so I'm going to major in climatology to have an excuse to screw them over") and strong political views resulting from one's professional opinions ("I used to be a not strongly political climatologist. Now that I have a sense of the dangers of continued greenhouse gas emissions, I've become interested in political means to slow or stop those emissions.")
You may think that all political views are irrationally based and can only distort professional work, but that's your own speculation, and there's no basis for it generally. You want to dismiss a specific climatologist, you need evidence that they, specifically, are irrationally prejudiced by their politics.
I'm not going to argue with James's general heuristic, which I share: People's a priori opinions affect their conclusions.
Okay, but what then?
I've got two other heuristics: Does someone's narrative make sense in its own terms? Look at Ferguson in the link in 190. He explains right up front that interest rates are low in historical terms, and says that this fact refutes Krugman's point that interest rates would remain low. It's gibberish.
The other heuristic: Who is right? Krugman was right. Krugman has a stunning record of being right about stuff.
The California energy case that Walt mentions was the first time I realized that Krugman was operating on a different level. You could read his pieces and see that he had proved that fraud had taken place. Yet his view didn't become conventional wisdom until the perps got caught.
If Krugman looks at the evidence and concludes that we are in a rare circumstance where large-scale stimulus spending is appropriate, you can't dismiss this because stimulus spending is a liberal solution.
As Unfoggetarian says about climate change in 263: "It seems pretty clear to me that causality is going the other way here (that is the science is driving people's policy points of view, not the other way around)."
I don't trust climatologists (or economists) with strong political views to accurately report what their field says about questions with political implications.
Hmm. So the only climate scientists who can be trusted are those who are agnostic on whether public policy should mitigate climate change. By taking that approach, you bias your conclusions in a predictable way.
276 is good as well. If you have the understanding to follow the arguments on the various sides of an issue, you can actually decide who you think is right on that basis, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The fact that someone's biased, or that you think they're biased, doesn't prevent them from being right sometimes -- there can be circumstances where the best thing to do is what lines up with someone's ideological preferences.
The more I read the crankier I get.
This might not be too important if climatologist had political views typical of Americans, but in fact their views, like those of most academics, skew far left.
[citation needed] Far left in what sense? They support the nationalisation of strategic industries? They'd like to see the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or just "far left" in the sense of "disagree with Republicans"?
Remember, in a lot of ways, the average American is far to the left of both Republican and Democratic parties. And the average American is significantly right of the average Westerner.
just "far left" in the sense of "disagree with Republicans"
That's all it means any more. The far left in America barely exists, and I'd bet that academics make up a tiny percentage even of that.
James' oversimplified heuristic reminds me of the "disgruntled former employee" trope. You see it in situations where:
1 - employee witnesses behavior that is allegedly illegal, unethical or otherwise bad.
2 - employee quits and goes public.
The company invariably replies that this person is a disgruntled former employee whose allegations should therefore be discounted. Apparently only happy, current employees can be counted on to be reliable whistleblowers. News flash: Witnessing malfeasance makes a certain type of employee disgruntled.
An opposite error is encouraged by criminal prosecutors who tell juries that yes, their witnesses are all liars or lowlifes of various sorts, but hey, criminal conspiracies often take place among bad people, and we can't control who our witnesses are. No, you can't, but juries also need to take into account the credibility of witnesses.
These heuristics have a very limited utility. If you're only going to rely on happy employees, there are things you're never going to learn about a company; and if you mistake a prosecutor's problem for your problem as a juror, you're going to convict innocent people.
And Krugman, on cue, comes up with a nice explanation of how this all works.
Krugman is fond of asking "what's your model?" when he suspects that economists are doing ad hoc bullshitting. The WSJ, in this case, had a model. Krugman had a mode. Krugman's model described reality.
So James, do you also think we shouldn't trust biologists because they think we should teach evolution in high school?
Just because a large group of crazy people can drum up a "political controversy" over something doesn't mean its *actually controversial*.
It seems reasonable to me to discount beliefs that have large groups with financial stakes behind them. But you seem to be saying that you should also discount beliefs just because they have large groups with strong financial stakes *against them* (who will then start a false political controversy over the matter). That seems really bizarre to me.
Remember that the position of most republicans now is not that "government shouldn't take action against climate change" it's that "anthropogenic climate change isn't happening." The former position is a matter of political controversy, but the latter is just insanity. However, that insanity is the majority opinion of the membership and leadership of your party.
284: Or pathologists who think we should vaccinate people. Or neurochemists who think we should switch to unleaded petrol.
the possibility that humans are inadvertently causing (or may cause) destructive climate change gives the field of climatology an importance and status (and corresponding government funding levels) that it would not otherwise have.
Top tip for anyone interested in getting the big bucks by going into climatology; try another line of work.
Top tip for anyone interested in getting the big bucks by going into climatology; try another line of work: (a) gin up some silly but plausible-sounding (to the uninformed) argument about why it's not real, or not really a problem, or not really caused by human activity, or not worth the cost of preventing, or all of the above, (b) peddle same silly plan to conservative interest groups, (c) cash in on book deal, consulting arrangements, speaking gigs and the like that are sure to follow. If you can punch a few hippies along the way, all the better.
286: Lead removal (in paint as well as gas) is a good one. What a great victory for science and humanity.
Even that is unlikely to get you RICH. If you have the sort of mathematical-modelling intellect and skills that a good climatologist needs, and! you are prepared to - and wish to - spend your career lying about reality in order to make large amounts of money, then the derivatives sector would seem like a much better bet than working for the University of East Anglia. There are not that many climatologists pulling down circa $150,000 a year plus bonus. This is the average for derivatives quants.
I have a friend who's a quant, after spending some time as a particle physicist. I'm pretty sure she's not earning 150KUSD. She is quite amusing on how overblown the quant mystique is, though.
Even that is unlikely to get you RICH.
It is nevertheless my top tip for anyone interested in getting the big bucks by going into climatology.
291: seniority and experience count a lot in these jobs. Once your friend has been doing the job for more than five years, assuming she's in London, she'll be in a cohort earning £168k (pounds not dollars, sorry) average total compensation. Once she hits managing-director rank, it's £310k average total.
This person has been doing it less than 2 years.
Also, a lot of that money is in yearly bonuses, which means that before you've hit your second yearly bonus your average income is going to be artificially low.
Is 293 for all quants? Or only quants with Ph.D.s?
There was a thing the other day which I can't now find, which pointed out that some people studying the Greenland ice shelf were paying their own fares from their salaries to get there. Why would you falsify a field that was costing you money to study?
re: 295
That would make sense. FWIW, my friend has a PhD [good one, top institution, etc].
Why would you falsify a field that was costing you money to study?
Groupies.
some people studying the Greenland ice shelf were paying their own fares from their salaries to get there
I'm not sure that is convincing by itself. People pay their own fares to study Bigfoot, probably in greater numbers.
297: Because they're fucking hippies, that's why. Wasting their father's hard earned oil money is the only way they're able to get any enjoyment out of life anymore, since their ability to feel pleasure has been numbed by years of joyless so-called "free love."
Of course, Bigfoot is at a much less fixed location than Greenland so it is probably cheaper to get there.
Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, argues that science - the good and the bad - is a product of the cultural conditioning of scientists. So basically, arguing that a scientific claim is the result of the scientist's prejudices doesn't really tell you anything about the truth value of the scientist's work.
So for example, human equality, he says, is a contingent fact of human history. Human history might have unfolded in such a way that races with differing intellectual capacities could coexist on the planet. Had that been so, the racists would have discovered it.
Human history might have unfolded in such a way that races with differing intellectual capacities could coexist on the planet.
Bigfeet are smarter than us. That's why we have not found them.
They are also reported to have other advantages. Or is that Bighands?
Wasting their father's hard earned oil money is the only way they're able to get any enjoyment out of life anymore, since their ability to feel pleasure has been numbed by years of joyless so-called "free love."
We've all watched the diner scene in Reservoir Dogs, dude.
275
On the basis of what knowledge of your own of climate science do you decide how big a discount factor to apply? Discounting someone as a liar or self-deceived, and therefore not a useful source of information, can be a reasonable thing to do. Deciding that you can take their lies or self-deception and correct them to find the truth despite a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, on the basis of your intuitive sense of human nature is kind of idiotic.
Actually I believe I have a pretty good layman's knowledge of climatology. For example I believe I can answer the following questions correctly without consulting reference material.
1. What is the lapse rate?
2a. Describe convection in the dry atmosphere.
b. What is necessary for it to occur?
c. How does it constrain the lapse rate?
d. What changes if the air is saturated with water vapor?
3. There is a seasonal variation in measurements of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What causes this?
4. What simplifying assumptions are made in 1-D models of the atmosphere?
5. 1-D radiative models of the atmosphere assume all energy transfer is via the emission and absorption of radiation. These models give unrealistic temperature profiles for the atmosphere.
a. How are the profiles wrong?
b. What are they neglecting?
c. What is a simple improvement?
6a. How does the the total amount of radiation a black body emits vary with temperature?
b. In general terms what happens to the average wavelength emitted as a black body gets hotter?
7a. What property of the atmosphere causes the so called greenhouse effect?
b. What 2 gasses are the most important contributors to this property?
8. Parts of the stratosphere are hotter than the earth's surface. Why is this?
9. Model the earth as a black body surrounded by a black body shell which is transparent to the sun's incoming radiation (which is assumed to be coming from all over the sky so the temperature of the earth and the shell are uniform) but absorbs all of the earth's outgoing radiation (and then reradiates it equally up and down).
a. How does the addition of the shell change the black body temperature of the earth?
b. Suppose we replace the black body shell with a gray body shell which only absorbs a fraction f of the outgoing radiation (letting 1-f through)? What does the answer to a become?
c. Roughly what value of f best models the current earth?
10a. What is the predicted effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere on the temperature of the hot portions of the stratosphere?
b. Explain what causes the effect in 10a.
11. In rough percentage terms what is the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to 250 years ago?
12. Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere. Approximately what fraction stays there in the short run?
I could go on (and on and ...) but you get the idea.
280
Far left in what sense? ...
Any reasonable definition will work. Party membership, self-identification (as extreme liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, extreme conservative), Presidential voting record etc.
284
Just because a large group of crazy people can drum up a "political controversy" over something doesn't mean its *actually controversial*.
There is an actual controversy about what if anything to do about climate change. Opponents prefer to express their indifference to the fate of currently unborn third worlders as doubts about the science but there is an actual underlying difference of opinion.
286
Top tip for anyone interested in getting the big bucks by going into climatology; try another line of work.
People (for the most part) don't go into climatology to become rich but having gone into the field they have a financial incentive to promote the field. Just as with most professions. People don't become public school teachers to become rich but organizations of teachers have an institutional interest in promoting the importance of public schools to society.
310 is obviously wrong, if by "any reasonable definition" you mean to allow definitions that look at the political spectrum in the west outside the USA/Australia. There are plenty of "reasonable definitions" whereby the current democratic party is right of center (that is, it's a center-right/center-left coallition, where the center-right typically has more power).
I actually agree with 313. I mean there are certainly versions of "you should take the claims of scientists which make their field sound important with a healthy grain of salt" which I agree with. However, I think that's a small second-order affect relative to the larger "the republican party is at war with science" affect.
Very interesting, James. It's a shame you have political opinions, otherwise your view on this subject might be credible.
314
is obviously wrong, if by "any reasonable definition" you mean to allow definitions that look at the political spectrum in the west outside the USA/Australia. ...
Why would I allow such definitions when my original claim was relative to typical Americans?
However, I think that's a small second-order affect relative to the larger "the republican party is at war with science" affect.
And an aspect of that war is the massive amount of effort expended to circumvent actual peer-review science to convince suckers that climate change either isn't happening, or doesn't require any sacrifice by C02 producers. It always amazes me when climate skeptics talk about money as though the money incentives lie on the side of climate scientists.
(Or what urple said in 287.)
James, teachers generally chose the profession because they want to do it more than they want to do other things. What could make climate scientists want to go into that field other than an interest in studying climate science?
Why would I allow such definitions when my original claim was relative to typical Americans?
Well that's an exciting relativistic claim. Even if we accept that the views of Norwegian climate scientists should be judged based on their political views, why should their political views be judged relative to typical Americans?
Yes, yes, I know why: Because if you judge these things according to other metrics, you might come up with unacceptable answers.
317
James, teachers generally chose the profession because they want to do it more than they want to do other things. What could make climate scientists want to go into that field other than an interest in studying climate science?
I am not sure what this question has to do with anything I posted. That said they are many other reasons someone could end up in the field. People could choose to study climatology because they think this is a way to do something socially worthwhile, because they think the job prospects are better than alternative fields (like astronomy), because they washed out of a harder program like physics, because they were pushed into it by a relative or advisor, etc.
318
Well that's an exciting relativistic claim. Even if we accept that the views of Norwegian climate scientists should be judged based on their political views, why should their political views be judged relative to typical Americans?
I meant to limit the claim to American climatologists. I am not that familiar with the opinions or politics of foreign climatologists.
Quants don't make $150k? Huh. I always assumed that when they talked about how they're paid much better than academics they meant they were starting out at at least that level. If I were to decide to sell out and go to Wall Street, I would want to get paid at least as well as a starting lawyer.
319 because they washed out of a harder program like physics
Harder? Really? I mean, to really understand the climate you need to know physics and chemistry and earth science and biology and economics and....
309: if you have such great knowledge of climatology you ought to be able to make some specific critique of the mountain of proof for human-caused global warming, instead of making the vague, silly, circular claims you're making about the politicization of climatology. (Circular because they take the fact that the liberal agenda has been influenced by the findings of climatology as proof that climatology was liberal in the first place).
321: Graduates of our master's program in "computational finance" report a median salary of 85k last year, but I believe this is just base salary, not including near-inevitable bonuses. Anecdotally, I know of someone who dropped out of the CMU statistics program to become a quant starting at 150k.
259, 265, 267: The argument against fund managers having any predictive ability depends (implicitly) on the idea that no matter what happened, you could always fund some fund-wallah whose predictions, examined in retrospect, all panned out. On of the nice things about Krugman, by contrast, is that he actually has and uses models, and those models are not so flexible that they could match anything by tweaking the knobs. Statistical learning theory is all about formalizing this distinction, and quantifying how limiting capacity does let us turn past performance into an indicator of future results. It would be hard to quantify Krugman's fitting-capacity (though perhaps not impossible); it's clearly limited, though, unlike the monkeys-or-Chets-at-keyboards picture of fund-managers.
I think that people with math/physics/CS Ph.D.s working as quants at good places in New York City are starting at at least 150K (counting bonuses). Either ttaM was misinformed, or this is a how bonuses count issue, or a bonuses shrinking during recession, or a London vs. New York issue. As you say, people don't want to "sell out" unless they're really getting paid.
322
Harder? Really? I mean, to really understand the climate you need to know physics and chemistry and earth science and biology and economics and....
Harder in than physics attracts brighter students. See here (assuming climatology is typical of "Earth/Atmos./Marine Scs") for example. And in my personal experience climatologists aren't that bright.
323
My layman's take on climate change can be found here .
327: Given the attrition rate between starting graduate school and getting a TT job, I'm not convinced that entering graduate student quality is at all relevant to quality of experts in the field. (Aside from the issue of whether GREs are good indicators or student strength.)
In my personal experience, for almost all X "in my personal experience Xs aren't that bright" is true.
The climatologists I know at USGS are sharp cookies. Our department's climatologist, otoh...
328 sounds totally reasonable to me, with two important caveats. First, you've completely ignored methane issues around beef/lamb/milk consumption. Second, my (uninformed) impression is that there's a nontrivial chance that in the next 20-50 years or so we'll develop genuinely economical renewable energy. (Decent chance for solar, smaller chance for some sort of microbial engineering, and even smaller chance for fusion.) This seems to me to change the situation significantly, as it means that if you can just mitigate emissions for a brief time then people will stop wanting to burn fossil fuels.
There is a very loud amusement park cricket right in front of my present lodgings.
325
Lots of investment managers have and use models as well (there are many to choose from). Sometimes these models work great until one day they don't .
The issue is not just how much room Krugman had to tweak the particular models he selected but also how many other models he could have chosen.
328 also reminds me of a question I've been vaguely curious about for a while. What happens if you literally burn all the fossil fuels on the earth? For example, is that enough to affect oxygen levels?
I mean, if you burned all the fossil fuels and all the living plants, you should end up with low oxygen like in the silurian. By I have no idea how the amount of fossil fuel compares to living biomass.
332
... Second, my (uninformed) impression is that there's a nontrivial chance that in the next 20-50 years or so we'll develop genuinely economical renewable energy. (Decent chance for solar, smaller chance for some sort of microbial engineering, and even smaller chance for fusion.) This seems to me to change the situation significantly, as it means that if you can just mitigate emissions for a brief time then people will stop wanting to burn fossil fuels.
I think the odds of renewable energy displacing all of the major usages of fossil fuels on economical grounds (while fossil fuels remain cheap to extract and are not subjected to punitive taxes) are pretty small. Solar is currently completely uncompetitive except for a few niche markets. I don't expect solar powered cars to be widespread anytime soon. And one thing to remember is that fossil fuel prices have some room to fall if demand drops. So you don't just have to beat $100 a barrel oil you may have to beat $30 a barrel oil (or whatever the actual marginal cost of production is).
336: It seems quite likely to me that cars in the developed world are going to move to electric over the next few decades (internal combustion is inefficient, and gas is more expensive than coal), at which point "solar car" isn't relevant just "solar power plant." (As you say they're not currently competitive, but their price has decreased significantly.)
You have a good point about their being a lot of room for oil prices to drop. Though, the cost of oil production is increasing as the easily accessible reserves are running out.
Once you're talking about the "all the oil runs out" long run, there's lots and lots of other stuff that's going to run out. It seems to me that if we can't come up with some way of pricing the consumption of materials, civilization is going to be in bigger trouble than just climate change.
335
also reminds me of a question I've been vaguely curious about for a while. What happens if you literally burn all the fossil fuels on the earth? For example, is that enough to affect oxygen levels?
CO2 levels are measured in parts per million (currently a bit over 400 if I recall correctly) while O2 is about 20% of the atmosphere so you can raise CO2 a lot without affecting O2 much. There is some question as to what all the fossil fuels amounts to (are you counting deep ocean methane clathates for example) but as I recall peak CO2 levels in the atmosphere for burn it all scenarios are in the 1000-2000 ppm range.
337
It seems quite likely to me that cars in the developed world are going to move to electric over the next few decades (internal combustion is inefficient, and gas is more expensive than coal), at which point "solar car" isn't relevant just "solar power plant." (As you say they're not currently competitive, but their price has decreased significantly.)
Cars won't move away from gasoline (in large numbers) as long as it remains cheap. Gasoline is actually an excellent store of energy even given engine inefficiency (and remember you don't have to haul the O2 along). Gasoline cars can easily have a range of 500 miles (with quick refill times) while electric cars will struggle to achieve 50-100 (and then require hours to recharge).
As for solar power plants I don't expect them to be competitive any time soon. Wind power is much cheaper and still requires subsidies to be competitive. And this is for low penetration rates. Once wind or solar power starts to exceed 10-20% of total production the effective cost increases because of problems matching supply and demand (a cheap way of storing electricity would help here of course but that doesn't seem to be on the horizon).
338
Once you're talking about the "all the oil runs out" long run, there's lots and lots of other stuff that's going to run out. It seems to me that if we can't come up with some way of pricing the consumption of materials, civilization is going to be in bigger trouble than just climate change.
Yes, I find peak oil scaremongering more plausible that climate change scaremongering (although of course if we had an infinite amount of oil then climate change would be a real threat).
So it is plausible that burning fossil fuels has warmed the earth and will continue to do so.
... Still there are real reasons for concern even if it is not absolutely certain that major problems will result.
Request for clarification here. Given that you hold the views quoted above, what are the views that you take to constitute climate-change scaremongering?
341: So what's the argument for *not* pricing limited resources (through taxes or cap-and-trade schemes)? (Which is the point of policy disagreement, right?)
Very interesting, James. It's a shame you have political opinions, otherwise your view on this subject might be credible.
Ha!
Actually I believe I have a pretty good layman's knowledge of climatology. For example I believe I can answer the following questions correctly blah blah blah
Omitted from the list are these questions:
13. a) In the absence of measures to control GHG emissions, what will be the CO2 content of the atmosphere in 2050? In 2100?
b) What is the most likely rise in global average temperature as a result?
c) What will be the most salient consequences of this increase for human civilisation and wellbeing?
But, seriously, I think this argument is going nowhere. If you've got someone who rejects logic, evidence and expertise as techniques of proof because he thinks they're politically tainted, how on earth are you going to persuade him he's wrong using logic, evidence and expertise? It's like trying to open a tin of sardines when the key's on the inside of the tin.
Ajay is right. James clearly thinks all humans other than himself suffer from cognitive biases, which is why he always writes in this oracular "only I can be objective" tone. What's the point? James obviously hates liberals and academics, so he'll go out of his way to avoid ever admitting liberals and academics are right, even in cases, such as climatology and macroeconomics, where the evidence is clear that they are right. He admitted on this very thread (with his "hedge fund manager" analogy) that he is impervious to empirical evidence. Who cares what he thinks about anything? It's a waste of time, even by the loose standards of the Internet.
311 is really neat. We're talking about whether climatologists that think global climate change would be a disaster are dishonest, and then Shearer pops in with:
There is an actual controversy about what if anything to do about climate change. Opponents prefer to express their indifference to the fate of currently unborn third worlders as doubts about the science but there is an actual underlying difference of opinion.
If I understand what you're saying correctly there, you mean that people criticizing the validity of the science leading to predictions of global climate change that may lead to significant loss of human life are justified, not because they actually have valid criticisms of the science, but because mainstream climatologists have dishonestly dodged the question ofwhether maybe climate change is only going to kill unimportant people?
(Also, what PGD said in 323. If you have the knowledge to criticize mainstream climatology on the substance, you can do that without needing to psychoanalyze climatologists. If you have such knowledge and don't have substantive criticisms, doesn't that speak for itself?)
James clearly thinks all humans other than himself suffer from cognitive biases....
Not to defend climate-change naïfs, but, paraphrasing the Big J, precious few of us ought to be casting that particular stone.
Flippanter, you are the most neurotic person in the most neurotic comment section of the Internet.
Lots of investment managers have and use models as well (there are many to choose from). Sometimes these models work great until one day they don't .
You keep saying this, but I'm not seeing your point. My claim is not that models are inherently perfect, or even that successful models will continue to succeed. But if you're talking coherently about these economic issues, you need to have a model. And models that resemble reality and have predictive success are preferable to those that do not. What could be more obvious?
The issue is not just how much room Krugman had to tweak the particular models he selected but also how many other models he could have chosen.
In this particular debate, regarding the causes and cures of the recession, there are basically two models. The Krugman-saltwater model has been broadly borne out by reality. The Barro-Cochrane-Ferguson-Fama-freshwater model has not.
I get the sense, James, that you're really not intentionally trolling me here, but in what other context would you reject the use of models? Climate change?
Oops, no, in fact, in the link in 328, you seem to realize that it's impossible to talk coherently about climate change without some sort of model. How is economics different?
342
Request for clarification here. Given that you hold the views quoted above, what are the views that you take to constitute climate-change scaremongering?
"Scaremongering" was perhaps an unduly pejorative choice of words. Given a potential problem of uncertain scope and effects there will be a spectrum of opinion on how serious it is. Some people will fall towards the big deal end of the spectrum others towards the not such a big deal end. I was just saying that I fall more towards the big deal end of the spectrum regarding peak oil than regarding climite change.
"Scaremongering" with regards to a problem of collective action (especially one with commons & control-system limitations like global climate change) is probably the rational response.
350: A lifetime of boundless joy, starting now, which you will be unable to enjoy fully because you'll always know you don't really deserve it.
346
Ajay is right. James clearly thinks all humans other than himself suffer from cognitive biases, ...
This is silly, of course I suffer from the same biases as everyone else and have never said otherwise. I even gave an example upthread where I conceded I might not be the most objective person in the world regarding the economic effects of immigration.
... He admitted on this very thread (with his "hedge fund manager" analogy) that he is impervious to empirical evidence. ...
I admitted no such thing, I was just pointing out that empirical evidence has to be interpreted correctly. In the case of investment managers there is considerable evidence that variations in performance are mostly due to luck. (For example performance over one time period does not predict performance over a different time period very well).
So before I give too much weight to the track record of economists I would like to see an objective way of measuring such performance and evidence that variation is not mostly luck but reflects real differences in skill. People who actually deal with making predictions from empirical data, like Nate Silver, are well aware of this particular issue.
A lifetime of boundless joy, starting now, which you will be unable to enjoy fully because you'll always know you don't really deserve it.
I am already familiar with the tenets of Protestantism.
351
I get the sense, James, that you're really not intentionally trolling me here, but in what other context would you reject the use of models? Climate change?
I don't reject the use of models, I am just saying one has to cautious in assessing how well they are likely to predict the future.
I don't reject the use of models, I am just saying one has to cautious in assessing how well they are likely to predict the future.
If that's your point, why bring it up repeatedly in a conversation where nobody has asserted otherwise?
358: why? Because he's distorting the truth in order to promote his own pre-existing political beliefs. People do that, apparently.
And James, I have to add, you chose to bring up your model-skepticism in response to my insistence that models must be evaluated critically. How am I supposed to interpret that, except as a claim that models aren't useful at all?
This one's really not going anywhere -- Shearer's just coming out with non-sequiturs and denying that he's arguing anything at all. So he's not arguing anything other than sensible caution about the difficulty of predicting the future and the necessity of, in all cases across the ideological spectrum, noting the possibility of bias.
Noted.
347
If I understand what you're saying correctly there, you mean that people criticizing the validity of the science leading to predictions of global climate change that may lead to significant loss of human life are justified, not because they actually have valid criticisms of the science, but because mainstream climatologists have dishonestly dodged the question ofwhether maybe climate change is only going to kill unimportant people?
You are not understanding me correctly. This subthread started when I stated in 234 that "I don't trust economists with political views.". This was badly stated in as much as it implied that trust is a 0-1 quality. What I meant was that I am wary that people with strong political views will allow them to affect their professional analysis. Part of this is a matter of tone, Krugman mixes economic analysis and political views in a way that I find grating. I imagine Nate Silver has political views also but he mostly keeps them out of his analysis which I prefer.
My point with regard to climatology is just that climatologists with strong policy preferences have an incentive to shade their science to favor their preferred policies. (See 353). This also applies of course to people with strong policy preferences in the other direction, hence the conservative downplaying of the science. This isn't seen so much within climatology because the spectrum of political opinions is narrow compared to society as a whole. It is more apparent within economics where there is a spectactular lack of concensus about macroeconomic questions.
And this isn't (mostly) a question of honesty as the cognitive biases in question don't operate on the conscious level. Democrats didn't defend Weiner although they knew he was guilty, they defended Weiner because their cognitive biases led them to believe he was innocent.
362: So, how does what you said there apply to: "Opponents prefer to express their indifference to the fate of currently unborn third worlders as doubts about the science but there is an actual underlying difference of opinion."
What I meant was that I am wary that people with strong political views will allow them to affect their professional analysis. Part of this is a matter of tone, Krugman mixes economic analysis and political views in a way that I find grating. I imagine Nate Silver has political views also but he mostly keeps them out of his analysis which I prefer.
This, other than as a matter of esthetic preference, is really fairly dimwitted. "I accept that pretty much everyone has ideological positions that may bias them. Knowing that, I systematically distrust people who openly disclose their ideological positions more than people who conceal them."
363
So, how does what you said there apply to: "Opponents prefer to express their indifference to the fate of currently unborn third worlders as doubts about the science but there is an actual underlying difference of opinion."
This is not (for the most part) a conscious process.
364
This, other than as a matter of esthetic preference, is really fairly dimwitted. "I accept that pretty much everyone has ideological positions that may bias them. Knowing that, I systematically distrust people who openly disclose their ideological positions more than people who conceal them."
I am not claiming that Silver conceals his political views just that he doesn't emphasize them. Part of this is a matter of preference but I also believe that attempting to keep your political biases out of your writing encourages you to keep them out of your thinking as well.
It is more apparent within economics where there is a spectactular lack of concensus about macroeconomic questions.
This seems wildly overstated. There's broad consensus among professional economists about certain basic macroeconomic questions. They use different models (all of which are acknowledged by everyone to be imperfect) that have different policy prescriptions at the margins, but there's enough empirical evidence on certain basic matters that they're no longer really in dispute. You won't find economists claiming that short-term austerity is a good idea right now, for example. (Except for a few obvious hacks--and I say "obvious" not because I disagree with them, but because their reasoning isn't even internally consistent (to borrow the useful heuristic from 276).)
Part of this is a matter of tone, Krugman mixes economic analysis and political views in a way that I find grating.
Of course, that's an expression of your cognitive bias. (I'm not trying to be all "gotcha" here. I realize you made that admission knowingly.)
I can only say that you're missing a lot by not reading Krugman. Leaving aside the polemics (which I admit exist, but which I, as a result of my own cognitive bias, barely notice), Krugman has the two key virtues one wants to see in public intellectuals:
-he's right all the time and
-he's able to explain complex stuff in simple terms
My point with regard to climatology is just that climatologists with strong policy preferences have an incentive to shade their science to favor their preferred policies. (See 353). ... It is more apparent within economics where there is a spectactular lack of concensus about macroeconomic questions.
If all we're doing here is making appeals to authority, then I see your point: Economists don't have a unified view, and if we've got no way to assess the success of different models, then we're left trying to assess the biases of the modellers.
Fortunately, economics plays out in an easily observable world, and we can know who is right and wrong.
Frankly, when I'm assessing climatology, I'm in the place you are with economics: I'm not anywhere near able to assess the arguments, so I'm stuck with appeals to authority. "There's an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists about the basic nature of global warming," I say.
Also: I note that the primary impetus behind anti-climatology comes from people with an economic and/or ideological interest in denialism.
So as I said above, I'm entirely sympathetic to the basic heuristic you propose, and I confidently apply it to climatology, but I think you err in applying it to economics where, despite the "controversy," some answers are clearly better than others.
This isn't seen so much within climatology because the spectrum of political opinions is narrow compared to society as a whole. It is more apparent within economics where there is a spectactular lack of concensus about macroeconomic questions.
Wait, you are seriously arguing that climatologists all agree on climate change because they are all members of the political far left? God have mercy.
And let's not forget that your assertion of the leftiness of climate scientists is based on no actual evidence at all, other than their unity of opinion on climate change and their unified support for policies also supported by some left-of-centre politicians.
This is almost identical to the example of circular reasoning that Wikipedia gives. Did you copy it?
Part of this is a matter of preference but I also believe that attempting to keep your political biases out of your writing encourages you to keep them out of your thinking as well.
By that token, your antipathy to the works of most climate-change scientists is ill-founded, given that few of the scientific studies comprise much of the political-position-taking that one sees in the secondary sources.
In addition to tracking Crooked Timber, Krugman is clearly following the conversation on Unfogged, because he makes the relevant point about appeals to authority here.
The first comment on the post in 371 is parody, right?
Right?
368
I can only say that you're missing a lot by not reading Krugman. ...
I actually have read a fair amount by Krugman. See here and here . I also sporadically read his column and blog when they were free. I do prefer him to DeLong who I also read occasionally. But I am not enamored enough to read him behind a paywall as I mentioned before.
371: It is well known that when Ogged went into occultation, he appointed Krugman his temporal deputy.
351
In this particular debate, regarding the causes and cures of the recession, there are basically two models. The Krugman-saltwater model has been broadly borne out by reality. The Barro-Cochrane-Ferguson-Fama-freshwater model has not
I am not that familiar with contemporary macroeconomic debates. Are the freshwater guys the ones that claim that bubbles don't exist in the real world because their models don't allow for them? If so I would agree that they are demented.
368
Frankly, when I'm assessing climatology, I'm in the place you are with economics: I'm not anywhere near able to assess the arguments, so I'm stuck with appeals to authority. "There's an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists about the basic nature of global warming," I say.
The basic mechanism of the so called "greenhouse effect" is easy to understand and is not in serious dispute. It is not understood in detail what adding CO2 to the atmosphere will do and in this case the details matter quite a bit. As they make the difference between big deal and not such a big deal.
I am not that familiar with contemporary macroeconomic debates.
I would suggest John Quiggin's recent book as a clear explanation, but he writes with an overt anti-zombie political bias that you might find troubling.
Are the freshwater guys the ones that claim that bubbles don't exist in the real world because their models don't allow for them?
Yeah, Fama is freshwater, and this is his schtick.
I'm more interested in the ongoing freshwater vs. saltwater discussion of Keynesianism and the recession. While there is, as you note, considerable controversy about these matters (and about Fama's strong version of the efficient markets hypothesis), one side is decisively winning the policy debate, while the other side is winning the factual debate. It's both depressing and fascinating to watch, and it accounts for a lot of Krugman's bile.
Krugman is clearly following the conversation on Unfogged
This is true. In fact, he's a frequent commentator. Under an alias, of course. He could be any one of you.
We have just lost cabin pressure.
Have I been going to sleep earlier? And waking up later? Have I been Krugman more and more?
I would suggest John Quiggin's recent book as a clear explanation, but he writes with an overt anti-zombie political bias that you might find troubling.
If you replace "zombie" with "Negro", Quiggin's true nature becomes apparent.
And people on all sides have an incentive to exaggerate their case when debating. So people who think the public is unduly complacent about climate change have a tendency to emphasize the risks while people on the other side have a tendency to minimize them.
The basic mechanism of the so called "greenhouse effect" is easy to understand and is not in serious dispute. It is not understood in detail what adding CO2 to the atmosphere will do and in this case the details matter quite a bit. As they make the difference between big deal and not such a big deal.
James, there's exaggeration and exaggeration. If I say that someone is exaggerating the size of a certain concrete effect, I might mean that they fall considerably further to one side of a spectrum of reasonable opinion than my own position. Or I might mean that they are going beyond any reasonable differences of opinion into the realms of (conscious or unconscious) misrepresentation. (There is also the possibility of agreement on the size of the concrete effect but disagreement in their scale of values as to how bad a thing that is, but assume we've allowed for that.) The usual right-winger accuses climate scientists of exaggeration in the second sense (cf. 'Climategate'), and that's where I was originally assuming you were coming from. That's what I think people are really taking exception to. If you're only claiming that climate scientists exaggerate in the first sense, then there's far less to disagree with.
I think there's a legitimate debate about the costs and benefits of intervening in climate change, that neither climatology nor economics is precise enough to answer scientifically. That is, to conclusively settle this debate one would need climatological predictions about the more-or-less magnitude of the effect on temperature of a given CO2 increase (as opposed to the general direction of the effect) and economic predictions about the more-or-less exact effect of an economic intervention on CO2 emissions. From my vague knowledge of climatology it doesn't seem like they are there yet, and from my deeper familiarity with economics I KNOW they aren't there.
With that said, the "insurance" benefits of pushing harder in the direction of clean energy seem pretty decisive to me -- if you're facing very uncertain but potentially enormous costs of inaction, and the costs of action are fairly limited (particularly once one adds in the other benefits of developing certain areas of cleaner energy technologies), then you should go ahead. But I wouldn't say that's a scientific truth exactly. Also, I am not at all enamored of cost-benefit analysis, we simply know too little about the consequences of our actions. In this case, I think the technological benefits of a focused push for different energy sources are highly unpredictable and might be very large if it is designed in a smart way.
Sorry, should have been "more-or-less exact magnitude" in the second sentence above.
People, click through the link. James is just trolling here. He's already admitted to having left of center views (by american standards) on climate change (that the best evidence is it's happening and it's caused by CO2 emissions).
Can someone take this thread out the back and shoot it?
I think that's right -- the climatology is really quite solid in establishing that there has already been a significant effect on global climate from greenhouse gases, but there aren't exact predictions of what will happen in the future. (Although as far as I understand it, the consensus models do seem to establish "There will be no further climate effects regardless of whether we continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere" as a very unlikely outcome.)
At which point we've got a policy, rather than exactly a scientific, question of what to do about it.
383: My position is that it can't be said often enough...
386: Yeah, it's annoying. Usually he's actually arguing something, which can be fun, but this doesn't seem to be one of those times.
379: We go in and change all of Krugman's comments to "Pauly Shore".
391: It's really for his own protection given how often he comments about his mom.
Occasionally Pauly Shore actually comments. We change those comments to "Meekins".
Re:Arguments from authority.
Tractatus.
All we have is "facts" whatever they are, and feelings/values/poetry/art. You cannot develop valid logical arguments about the world from either facts or art. All you can create is more facts or more art.
Art is social, either judged/enjoyed communally or enjoyed in reference to other art.
If you are engaged if the art of "argument", I guarantee someone somewhere has said it better, more artfully than you. Your claim to an interesting originality is a madness of ignorance, a desperate attempt to escape from the weight of history and the mountains of genius that surround you.
Therefore all good conversation is based on appeals to authority. Either cites and quotes from scientific research others have done, your own should be suspect even to you, or quotes from the millions of minds better than your own.
The only real invalid argument from authority is the one that claims the rules of logic and language in themselves prove your point.
Whole generations have apparently been ruined by "critical thinking" courses. It was better when it was called "rhetoric."
If you are engaged if the art of "argument", I guarantee someone somewhere has said it better, more artfully than you.
This doesn't make any sense. I agree about me, specifically, but the "be[st], mo[st] art[ful]" statement was not always already uttered.
396:Seems that if we agree about ourselves, but believe that, say Paul Krugman may find a way to say it better, that this is a classic argument from authority.
There is also I think great value in the otherness of distant or ancient sources, even if the language or context is not a perfect fit. If an argument/feeling/value (not a fact) is completely contingent and particular, it is not worth very much at all.
I would rather quote Japan's Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo from 1931 on the need for deficit spending than Krugman. This I admit may be idiosyncratic.
all good conversation is based on appeals to authority.
I like this. I'm not entirely sure I understand it, but I like it.
In this thread, I've been thinking about this epigram, whose origin I've forgotten: "All arguments are about epistemology."
How could you possibly know that?
397: I don't follow, sorry.
I would rather quote Japan's Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo from 1931 on the need for deficit spending than Krugman. This I admit may be idiosyncratic.
Wow, you are very, very impressive.
Oh, sure, you think Bob's impressive now. But you should have seen Subhas Chandra Bose expressing the same ideas in a speech in Delhi in 1943.
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kazuko and ie
Nevertheless, it is remarkable that out of 485 households, 247, or 50.9 percent, have adopted three, four, five,or all six successor sons. Over six generations of 2,910 men, moreover, 1,207 (41 percent) were adopted. Even in view of the likely underrepresentation of the actual frequency, the figures signify remarkable proportions.
Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds 1995
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388
At which point we've got a policy, rather than exactly a scientific, question of what to do about it.
But the unresolved scientific questions make it difficult to answer the policy question.