From this quote and the discussion at CT I get the sense Mankiw believes that prior to the late 1970s the entrepreneurial spirit in the US was far less than it currently is.
I was considering commenting about that CT thread, but I didn't want to drag any of the other conversations OT. That thread definitely pushes me towards the Emersonian view of the field of economics.
Come to think of it, why not just officially change the name of the Department of Economics at Harvard to the "Department of Bootlicking"?
Honestly, do they do something besides churn out peans to the 0.01% about how totally awesome they are and how it would totally be the worst thing in the world to raise their taxes because SCIENCE?
Whoops, I should have thought to check CT.
I guess I might have posted it anyway, and I still wouldn't read past the second page, so it's probably a wash.
Now I'm reading the CT thread. On the rest of the article:
The argument goes like this: we might think that it's okay to transfer resources from one person to another, yet we wouldn't kill one person to provide organs to 5 others who will die without them. Resolve this dilemma.
This is making me hyperventilate to read people actually engaging with the trappings of such a fuckhat.
Aside from the fact that he's an asshole, I'm dissuaded from reading this because it's double-spaced, which is completely irrational.
Reading this isn't making me wish no one did economics. It's making me wish I got in on the scam. Despite all available evidence to the contrary, I think I work too hard and am looking for something easier.
Another quote from the CT thread, taken originally from Mankiw:
By contrast, the educational and career opportunities available to children of the top 1 percent are, I believe, not very different from those available to the middle class. My view here is shaped by personal experience. I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.
Someone needs to tell this tweaker (me) to calm down, stat.
Rather, it seems that changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.
Oh, right, that must be what it is. Everyone with a giant income must have correspondingly giant talent, and the reason they make more money now than 40 years ago is... technology?
Someone else at CT links to this which further makes it clear that (a) he's an asshole and (b) he's making way too much money.
8: No selection bias there, surely....
Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.
Wow.
Dude, when the hole is this deep, stop digging.
He wrote my college textbook and even then (almost 20 years ago) I thought the tone was smarmy and oversimplified.
And why the fuck should anyone care if he turns down work because he's plenty rich already? Isn't that the miracle of the free-market? (To the link in 10.)
I wonder which side of the econ building his office is on. Maybe I can shine a laser pointer into his window.
I, too, will write fewer books 20 years ago that now generate me great wealth thanks to random chance and path-dependence, both in the course of my career and the course of book publishing, if someone claims the government needs to waste more money on peasants instead of encouraging them to emigrate.
and the reason they make more money now than 40 years ago is... technology?
To be fair, that argument is almost twenty years old.
Somewhat on-topic, Felix Salmon on Detroit:
If you want to wade through some unutterably depressing reading on this Monday morning, you should spend some time with the official Detroit Proposal for Creditors. It starts by noting that the city's per capita income, averaged over its 684,799 residents, is just $15,261 per year. (That's less than half the income of neighboring Livonia.) Auto insurance alone eats up a good $4,000 of that, for residents with a car.
...
Detroit's infrastructure is crumbling: 40% of its street lights are out of order, and it has 78,000 abandoned and blighted structures, of which 38,000 are considered dangerous buildings. Those buildings account for a large proportion of the 12,000 fires Detroit has every year. At the moment, firefighters are instructed not to use the hydraulic ladders on their firetrucks unless there is an immediate threat to life, because the ladders have not received safety inspections for years. ...
...
[Kevyn Orr] wants to write down some of Detroit's debt, as well -- although far from all of it. Cate Long has a good round-up of how various bondholders will be treated under his proposal; she concludes that he's treating bondholders in good faith, but that he's behaving less fairly towards retirees. (It's a combination you might expect, given that Orr was appointed by a Republican governor; it's basically the opposite of how the Obama administration treated the bankrupt Chrysler and GM.)
Also, Ben Walsh, is snarky towards Matthew Yglesias.
Matt Yglesias, who earned valuable intern-ish experience getting coffee at Rolling Stone, worries that enforcing minimum wage labor laws for internships will just push people into expensive grad schools. "Erecting extremely sharp walls between 'education,' 'training,' and 'work'" doesn't make a ton of sense," he writes. (Though it's much easier to put scare quotes on "work" when you have it.) In the end,Yglesias nods approvingly at arrangements like Germany's vocational training programs, where students do, in fact, get paid.
I never heard the word "propertarian" before, but it seems handy.
In the end,Yglesias nods approvingly at arrangements like Germany's vocational training programs, where students do, in fact, get paid.
I believe the appropriate term here is "headdesk".
The quote in 8 still has me shouty. You mean back when your STYLIZED PORTRAYAL had everyone earning EXACTLY THE SAME, you did fine with two parents without college degrees, and now that You and JK Rowlings and Steve Jobs have contributed so much to society that you are incurring owie taxes, your son is doing exactly as well as you did?
The scary thing about Mankiw is how many folks' only exposure to econ comes through his textbook. Although, given the structure of things, it's probably even worse that half of Harvard graduates get their only exposure to social science through his econ class.
Pretty much everything quoted from that article has made me want to lead a bayonet charge at him.
14 -- if you'd followed my advice and built a death ray laser beam, you could have done the world a solid by firing a death ray laser beam into his window.
I can't actually tell whether the non-Unfogged world of US liberals views mainstream economists as largely clowns, and economics as a failed and dangerous ideological profession, or not. Signs are good, though. That movie which showed Glenn Hubbard squirming, etc.
That movie which showed Glenn Hubbard squirming
Inside Job?
If this is the Heebie's Head Explodes Over Capitalism thread, how about McDonald's issuing a debit card to Chase Bank in lieu of a paycheck?
In my experience the non-Unfogged world of US liberals thinks there is one economist who punctures the sacred cows and/or catechisms and/or dogmas of extremists of both persuastions, and that man's name is either Tyler Cowen or Paul Krugman. The preference for one over the other seems to depend on what type of writing style you enjoy reading rather than anything else.
Basically Tyler Cowen is to economics what "Mythbusters" is to science.
25: I was just thinking of linking to that.
Wait, what? Tyler Cowen is a liberal now?
26--??? I had no idea that anyone other than libertarian fuckwads and fellow George Mason clowns (not mutually exclusive) thought of Tyler Cowen as a non-clown.
22. I think not. Distinguishing between people who provide useful real-life advice on personal finance using terms like "interest rate" and "amortization" and toads like Mankiw or Blankfein requires reading some fine print and thinking. Broken though the market is in the hands of investment banks and austerity-minded politicians, there's not a viable alternative for resource allocation, at least not in public discourse.
What you people fail to understand is that modern hedge fund managers are exactly like Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling.
I have lots of friends who like Tyler Cowen. He writes many bestselling books. He writes a column for the New York Times. His blog is full of stuff about optimizing your Mexican food choice and hacking your Christmas card list. Good lord, you people.
if you'd followed my advice and built a death ray laser beam, you could have done the world a solid by firing a death ray laser beam into his window.
It's like you've never seen Real Genius. Do you want essear's office to be filled with popcorn?
Paying employees via debit card could be, in many ways, superior to issuing paychecks, for both the employer and the employee. But clearly neither McDonald's nor Chase can be trusted to create such a system.
And he had to rob the late Robert Nozick for his thought experiment, anyway, although maybe the High Asperger's style is his very own.
I recognize what Ned is saying. My brother likes Tyler Cowen. I think you get to feel superior by reading that sort of thing.
I don't read his blog anymore, but I do get to pretend I know something about food in DC by using the Tyler Cowen Ethnic Dining Guide.
His blog is full of stuff about optimizing your Mexican food choice and hacking your Christmas card list.
[Sharpens Gurkha kukri.]
Most of what Cowen writes is not about national politics, either is benign or appears to be. It's necessary to look at his political posts in isolation to see him for what he is.
Also, both he and other economists do have a pretty broad scope of action where market principles yield useful insights. Functioning markets really are a good system. But that system doesn't extend to say environmental regulation, or allocating social resources to health care.
I've often thought that the best and most realistic perspective on the economics profession is held by litigators like me, who hire economists as expert witnesses. Basically, economics is a rhetorically powerful and practically useful kind of rhetoric that can be skillfully manipulated to support almost any prior goal one has in mind. And, most economists are whores who will happily dance for money.
NickS, the Detroit story is easily the saddest thing I've read today. My boyfriend's family lives just outside of Detroit (grandmother just outside 8 Mile until recently), so we've been following closely since it's "home" for him. I hope they manage not to sell Belle Isle and their half of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. Glad to see DIA looks safe from plunder. The funny thing is that the downtown actually seemed to be improving last time I was there, but the outlying areas are truly some of the worst places I've seen in terms of city service breakdown. So sad.
40: Like lawyers, but with worse suits?
Basically, economics is a rhetorically powerful and practically useful kind of rhetoric that can be skillfully manipulated to support almost any prior goal one has in mind. And, most economists are whores who will happily dance for money.
Like lawyers!
Actually, I'd think lawyers who hire economists as expert witnesses wouldn't have a particularly good grasp on the profession as a whole. Isn't there basically a specific set of economists who are happy to whore themselves as expert witnesses? (There certainly are in other professions--doctors, psychologists, etc.) Most economists don't deal in that space, and interacting mostly with the ones who do would surely give you a tilted perspective.
And, most economists are whores who will happily dance for money respond to market incentives.
Gregory Mankiw is actually a great professor, if you look past all the mendacity.
Speaking of lawyers and incentives and paying people by debit cards with high fees, maybe I should send the link in 25 to my brother. He's apparently taken to suing companies over compensation issues.
I mean, he's very good at capturing and holding the attention of 600 undergradutates for an hour at a time. I don't know if he's good at anything beyond that.
We don't get the macroeconomists so much, but they are clearly just result-driven whores in a different sense. Obviously the baseline difference between Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman is that Mankiw prefers a world in which wealth accrues to a very few top-level supermen, and Krugman prefers a world that looks more like the America of 1963, with more broadly-based prosperity and a strong technocratic class. Once you understand that difference, the rest is (while real and technically difficult and complicated and even interesting) basically so much noise, as far as the bottom line.
I take back 44 after a quick read of the first two pages of MR. The malign stuff really is in a minority, and most of it is as CN describes. I guess when I read it I just glossed over the rest.
Also, I should tell him his photo on the firm web page makes his head look absurdly small.
mendacity
That's the name of one of those new MOOC websites, right?
What strikes me is how shameless the toadying and flattery have become:
"Hey, CEO's! I just wrote a paper about how Science(tm) proves that you're totally the most awesomest guys EVER!!!"
||
Trying to plan an event at work, some of us had an extended discussion of what the best date would be. One person offered no input, but after hearing the date everyone else decided on, complained that it wouldn't work. So I made a Doodle poll and asked everyone, including the complainer, to select the dates that did work. The complainer did not reply after multiple reminders. So the rest of us went ahead with the chosen date and started inviting people. On finding out, the complainer says that "no one ever communicates with" [the complainer] and that [the complainer] couldn't have been expected to fill out the poll or reply to any emails since those things aren't important enough, but that it's everyone else's responsibility not to "exclude" the complainer from the discussion.
Charming, isn't it? Maybe Mankiw isn't so bad after all.
|>
Apologies for 55. My incessant complaining must be getting really tiresome. I really should just work up the guts to tell someone off, or just stop interacting with some of my coworkers, or start looking for a different job, instead of stewing.
Note that THIS VERY THREAD contained a recommendation of another potential option for cutting down on your complaining (ray builder), Essear.
We just got a debit card in lieu of a check for a rebate on some appliances we bought. So I guess it's a trend.
55 -- The tragedy of our age is that the complainer doesn't have an assistant with whom these communications could have been had.
59: Oh, there's an assistant, who tries to do his job but mostly just gets screamed at a lot.
59: Oh, there's an assistant, who tries to do his job but mostly just gets screamed at a lot.
That's just depressing, for multiple reasons.
You should gaslight him, fill out the poll for him and tell him he agreed to those days and is he having memory issues, he should really get that checked out.
Did McDonalds get a kickback from Chase for using the cards? If so that's totally illegal bullshit, they're basically getting a piece of the fees back in their pocket which is the same as cutting the worker's pay. I'm surprised they didn't offer the old fashioned option of a check, for an appropriate "convenience fee" but I guess that would have been too obvious. Back to the days of the company store- you can just spend your paycheck at McDonalds and avoid all those nasty fees involved in getting real currency.
My uninformed guess would be that the payroll service used by the franchisee started charging less for the debit card deposits than for paper checks.
Ah, getting an actual kickback vs. paying a reduced payroll processing cost or even avoiding a payroll processing cost increase is exactly the kind of distinction that certain SCOTUS justices love to balance on the head of a pin.
60: Bribe the assistant to drug the complainer's coffee. I'm not sure with what, but it sounds like anything might be an improvement for both of you.
McDonalds could double its starting wages and pay in McDonalds gift certificates.
Could also be a misguided do-gooder scheme to force people away from check-cashing specialists and into banks. But probably the cost savings thing is right.
67: If it was paired with the option for direct deposit, it very could be. But it certainly isn't.
Is this Mankiw sucking up to CEOs, or Mankiw praising himself, and mistaking CEOs for himself?
Economists are generally smart people that are where they are because they worked hard - it's competitive. They are teaching. Etc. Economists might often be in the 1% but probably not the .1%.
That .1% is mostly rentiers, but often they got in that position by doing technically skilled professional work. If you talk to investment bankers without spitting on them you'll find them culturally recognisable to middle class academics.
And if you exclude the rentier .1%, from which the most radical wealth disparities come, you'll still find this divergence in incomes Mankiw describes - you still need to explain and address it, even if you make Paul Krugman President and he spends the first hundred days implementing a maximum wage and asset taxes on income millionaires.