Tom Levenson gives McMegan’s latest far more time and space than her work deserves. Still, someone has to answer the nonsense, and Tom is an excellent writer. Go read and enjoy.
I don’t read McArdle much because I know she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and the glibness of her ignorance and the infantile quality of her ideology (that brand of libertarianism present in populations that include my nine-year-old and that can be summed up “you can’t tell me what to do”) piss me off. Why read annoying, uninformed –if glibly written — dreck?
But Andrew Sullivan, who is one of the most infuriatingly variable bloggers in the quality of his bullshit detector, pointed me to this post by McArdle, calling it a “must-read.”
Well, if I must, I must, and so I did.
McArdle’s upward trajectory would make less sense if Ross Douthat had not already shown that her mix of casual, right-tilting obliviousness and cheap moralizing has a paying audience in senior news editors. I guess that as long as respectable rags have to keep some sort of conservative on hand, glib and dense sells better than bitter and hateful. These days the rightwing bench isn’t exactly brimming with intellectual honesty.
***Update***
It is worth pointing out that many right-of-center writers exist who should be considered intellectually honest. Greg Djerejian and Daniel Larison come immediately to mind. Andrew Sullivan counts for relentlessly airing every reasonable perspective on an issue. Rick Moran qualifies better than any other rightblogger I can recall. These writers all consistently write ideas worth reading, and more or less to a man movement conservatism has written them off as hopelessly compromised (one could say impure). That’s not an accident.
Zifnab
Tell that shit to the Atlantic.
Downpuppy
The Atlantic can no longer be considered a respectable rag now that Bradley has moved it to the SuperSecret funding model.
And retained McArdle. Also.
Keith G
Douthat was on Charlie Rose, and even under Rose’s genteel chit-chat, betrayed an astounding level of ignorance.
Years ago, I subscribed to The Atlantic. Haven’t cared for it since, oh, 2004-5. Pity.
El Cid
It’s almost like there is an affirmative action program for certain types of ideologies which values the promotion of economic libertarianism & deregulationism, economic regressivism, hawkishness on foreign policy, and general anti-laborism, anti-liberalism and especially anti-leftism.
Except that that sort of thing is impossible because Chuck Todd can detail the fascinating processes he witnesses in his chosen profession which make the news behind the scenes.
So then this is all in my imagination which means I’m a fringe crazy lefty Kucinich coo-coo radical Unserious person.
Warren Terra
Y’know, I subscribe to the Atlantic, and have for most of a decade, because while their short-form articles are almost universally hopelessly Broderist and sometimes aspire to the least interesting forms of Kinsleyist counterintuition, their arts section is a cruel joke (featuring Caitrin Flanagan, the tragic remains of the once-brilliant Sandra Tsing-Loh, the incoherent screeds of Christopher Hitchens that no longer even pretend to address the books being “reviewed”, and all edited by someone who more and more transparently only wants to write about architecture or fashion rather than to edit the back half of a journal of ideas), and their lifestyle pieces are an insult to anyone without hundreds of thousands in disposable income (Corby Kummer would have been very happy writing lifestyle pieces in Versailles, or in the stately homes of the late
Roman Republic) – despite that long list of complaints, their long-form articles are often excellent, they employ the still-great Jim Fallows, and they were the first people to throw money at Matt Yglesias.
But the magazine just keeps on getting worse, its short-format pieces ever less readable, and its employment of the likes of Douthat, McArdle, Reihan Salam, Joshua Green, Marc Ambinder, and of course the late Michael Kelly, and especially the obvious pride the magazine takes in these people, gets harder to ignore. Yglesias is gone, and Sullivan is going crazy (crazier). Maybe it’s time to cancel the subscription.
Zifnab
Two words. First word. Two parts.
First part… Bird? Flap? Air? No.
Your flying. Ok, ok. Your flapping your wing. Wing!
Second part. Squirrel. Hungry squirrel. Hungry squirrel eating a nut? A nut.
Ok. Second word. You’re digging. You’re digging to China. China. Is it China? No. You’re sick. You’re not sick. You’re sick again. I don’t understand. You’re going to have to give me more hints.
Craig
Well I’ll admit that I do read McArdle on a semi-regular basis. Not because I think she has much of value to say about important things (glibertarians are way more annoying than Wingnuts, because they always couch their nonsense in such sensible terms) but because I’m amused by the fact that much of her regular commentariat seems to actively hate her, and only lingers in order to rip her writings to shreds.
El Cid
@Zifnab: I wish it were limited to that. But a depressing look through the library archives of your various newspapers and newsweeklies for the last 40 or 50 years might disabuse many of the notion that this is a recent proposition in general instead of post-Reagan, when it simply became more extreme and crazy-faced.
Sentient Puddle
I too read McArdle on a semi-regular basis. For me, it’s because every so often, she lets loose a post that’s so unbelievably stupid that it actually makes me feel proud of myself for not being that dumb.
I caught about three or four of those moments in that particular post.
kay
The poll found 66 percent of respondents were concerned that they might eventually lose their insurance if the government does not create a new health care system, and 80 percent said they were concerned the percentage of Americans without health care would continue to increase unless Congress acts.
By a margin of 55 percent to 26 percent, respondents said that Mr. Obama had better ideas about how to change health care than Republicans in Congress.”
I bet they’re happy with that number, although it will be spun as a huge decline. That’s after 9 million in direct ads and a full-court press against meaningful reform by the media, and the standard inability of Congressional Democrats to make a case for anything.
If people actually want reform, and he has 30 points on his opponents on how to do that, I bet he’s pleased with that.
wilfred
Minus the hate, that’s a little bit how it used to be around here.
robertdsc
W I N !
Napoleon
@Warren Terra:
Word.
I am sorry I renewed a month ago.
Megan M. is just a complete joke.
Zifnab
@El Cid: Well, the media has always been corporately owned. The ownership control and the ethics of the owners have waxed and waned with time. But when you’ve got the richest 1% of the richest 1% deciding what everyone else sees on TV, it’s not surprise that they’ll gear things in their own interests.
But back in the 40s and 50s, you had a bunch of plutocrats running the country with a very idealistic world view. Guys like Johnson and the Kennedys stepped to with plans to change the country for the better. Guys like Nixon rose to power on populism and nationalism. It was a very progressive time period.
In the 80s and 90s you had a massive tax revolt among the upper classes and a decline of nationalism in the big corporations. For all the flag waving and the patriotism, the last thirty years have been incredibly selfish. The media has reflected that.
What you’re seeing now is a media institution that doesn’t really give a shit about winning in Iraq or growing the economy or expanding the technological frontier. The special interests have their own agendas, mostly penciled out in red and black ink, and fuck all to everyone else.
It’s just a sign of the times.
Ecks
Ok, I know that article was dumb enough that you don’t have to demolish it, but just for fun, her 2 arguments against health reform were:
1) It might kill drug innovation
2) The government will start controlling everything down to our diets.
Refuted:
1) Of the world’s 10 largest drug companies, four are American, Glaxo (#3) is British, Bayer (#4) is German, Hoffmann-La Roche (#5) is Swiss, Sanofi-Aventis (#6) is French, Novartis (#7) is Swiss, and AstraZeneca (#8) is British / Swedish, and all those countries have far more s-o-c-i-a-l-i-z-e-d (oh noes!) medicine than anything being discussed this side of the Atlantic. Apparently universal health care
doesn’t get rid of drug innovation. So much for that.
2) See the countries listed in part 1 above? Them and every
industrialized country except America have universal health care, and not a single one of those governments have even tried anything nearly as invasive as Megan suggests. Frankly the electorate wouldn’t put up with it. And can you imagine Americans voting to maintain such a regime? Really ever? So much for that too then.
BTW, enormous American companies like Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly don’t even crack the top 10.
Sentient Puddle
@Ecks:
More fundamentally, she wasn’t even arguing against health care reform. Just government-run health care, which nobody in congress is even proposing. Nothing she said has any bearing on a public option, for instance.
Of course, wouldn’t surprise me if she thought she WAS arguing against a public option…
General Winfield Stuck
It’s worse than that for me. I don’t even get to the point of deciding what she is saying is right or wrong. I don’t understand what she is saying. Not different than picking up a tablet with Sansckit to read.
Church Lady
A few questions:
Who the hell is Tom Levenson and what makes him an expert on health care?
As the debate rages on McArdle’s expertise, who here has a Masters in either Business, Finance, or Economics? Please raise your hand if you do.
Marc
You know, I read Sullivan every day, but I have learned to completely ignore him whenever he talks about anything even remotely connected to economics. As for McArdle, she doesn’t understand economics and she mostly writes about economics so I stopped reading her entirely more than a year ago.
Unfortunately, Sullivan’s Thatcher/Reagan-worship seems to have irrevocably stunted his mind’s ability to see beyond the standard nonsensical libertarian dogmas.
There fore I suggest we make some kind of list, some kind of “Guide to Andrew Sullivan’s blog – What to ignore”.
Many here don’t see any merit in what he does at all, and I can understand where they are coming from.
Yes, he was a strident pro-war voice until ’03 (though he owned up to his error much earlier and more thoroughly than many others) and yes, he is very often wrong and very annoying on important issues.
But he has a huge megaphone and on issues like fighting against torture and for civil liberties, gay rights etc… he can be useful.
So my advice would be not to write him off entirely but to handly him… well, with caution, I guess.
Warren Terra
My dear Church Lady,
Some basic Googling could protect you from inflicting such enormous FAIL upon yourself.
Tom Levenson is the proprietor of the “Inverse Square” blog, a blog that has obvious connections to science writing and to MIT.
A Tom Levenson is also:
That’s from the (linked) web page for MIT’s prestigious writing and humanistic studies program.
Now, maybe they’re not the same Tom Levenson. Want to bet on it?
Downpuppy
Well, I do know
& can read a tax table –
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/so_what_about_that_surtax.php
which, as you can see, she can’t.
Trollhattan
Wow, that’s some major league smackdown right there. The job he does articulating how she filters input to fit her prehewn (hewn from dryer lint, but anyway) world view is unmatched. Thanks for introducing me to this bloggy fellow. Also.
Why is it that McMegan keeps surviving these serial smackdowns like some kind of Überhausfly that can be whacked with a newspaper repeatedly, yet keeps returning to life to continue buzzing me and the garbage can? Are they that thin on talent and that loaded with sacks of wingnut welfare that her “career” such as it is even makes sense?
Downpuppy
Where’s my edit button?!!
first link was to Megan mixing patents & copyrights –
http://webinsi.ru/time_to_shorten_patent_terms.php.htm
second was to her unable to distinguish 4 from 10:
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/so_what_about_that_surtax.php
Mnemosyne
@Sentient Puddle:
Of course, wouldn’t surprise me if she thought she WAS arguing against a public option…
Since the WSJ has been claiming that Obama is proposing a British-style single provider system, you’re probably right.
General Winfield Stuck
@Church Lady:
You must be kidding. McArdles expertise . She’s the one who provided a graph that proved since 1980 there are more people and therefore more people with pets that make more visits to the Vet. Apparently to somehow illustrate that the uninsured Humans do not drive up health care costs.
Va Highlander
I’ve enjoyed Larison. I think he dropped the ball on Honduras, recently, but not sure that condemns him.
Church Lady
Warren Terra:
He teaches two Advanced Science Writing Seminars and a course in Science Journalism. Somehow, I am missing the connect between the ability to WRITE about science and being an expert on the economics of health care policy. I guess it must be due to my epic FAIL.
Gosh, I own a business selling components for conveyor systems. Does that make me qualified to design a conveyor system? According to your definition of “expertise”, it would.
slag
Thanks for pointing to this! I saw that “must-read” and found myself wishing that someone with a readership would tear it to pieces. Glad to see it.
kvenlander
I finally got around to telling Atlantic not to bother renewing my subscription next November after trying to decipher their “ideas issue”.
Sorry, but Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Fallows can’t make up for Loh, Flanagan, Hitchens, that art snob whatshisname, and the parade of neocons.
Anne Laurie
McArdle looked at Camille Paglia’s career and realized, “Hey, there’s a market for a woman who’s willing to play court jester to the misogynistic-conservative market! And you don’t have to be a good writer, or have any actual ideas… just throw a bunch of the latest jargon against the wall, and when you’re challenged,
shake your tittiesbat your eyelashes and giggle!”She’s parlayed her trustafarian, Upper-East-Side privilege into getting an expensive but unsaleable undergraduate degree, an expensive but unsaleable certification in a hot-button ‘Web 2.0’ technology that’s since collapsed, and an expensive MBA from a second-tier business school just as the Bush Recession, the dot-com bust, the housing bubble, and the Bush Depression demonstrated the dangerous idiocy behind the whole MBA concept. Her gig at the Atlantic was her last toehold at “legitimacy”, and she got it for being that weirdest of all ideological caricatures, a contrarian cheerleader — someone who loudly supports the conventional wisdom by denigrating boring facts and unexciting reality. Now that she’s finally gotten herself engaged to someone a step higher on the income pyramid, here’s hoping that she gets replaced on the Atlantic website by a less consistently wrong-headed Token Right-Wing Chick (although I’m afraid the suits will just give the pixels to the consistently excrable Caitlin Flanigan, McArdle’s in-print competitor).
Ecks
@Church Lady: I’m half way through a phd in marketing if that helps (it turns out I passed my comps, yaaaay).
General Winfield Stuck
Or, as someone once said. technically it’s all true, but collectively it’s nonsense.
Warren Terra
Church Lady,
You asked who the hell Tom Levenson was – a question that’s pretty easily answered. Turns out he’s a successful professor at the graduate level at an elite institution noted for (among others) the very field in which he instructs.
Moreover, Levenson is a person with a great deal of prestige that he could lose if he were to write nonsense – more so than McArdle, given her track record and the different levels of accountability for professors and for opinion bloggers.
Meanwhile, leaving aside the many failings of McArdle’s erudition, some of which have been linked above, the very piece that Levenson wrote and that this blog linked to addresses the question of what training an MBA offers relevant to this sort of question, and comes up with: not much.
In fact, as credentialism is oh-so-tedious, why not leave it aside? What part of Levenson’s skewering of McArdle do you actually disagree with?
In response to your last paragraph: I would expect a prominent science writer to be able to read serious materials and assess their contents thoughtfully, on the provision of health care as on other issues, and in particular to detect glaring defects in others’ descriptions of what they had read. I would not expect them to design a health plan themselves. Similarly, in your capacity as the owner of a company that supplies parts for conveyor systems, I would bet that you are very well informed about the merits and the workings of various conveyor systems. Your question of whether I’d ask you to design one is just absurd.
malraux
Church lady: The point is that MM cannot argue from authority, as she is not an authority. All of her points must be substantiated with evidence. Unfortunately, she seems to neither know that she doesn’t know nor be familiar with those who do know, which means that everything she says is backed only by the voices in her head. Those who criticize her do reference actual experts or are actual experts.
The goal isn’t to limit debate to only those with the correct piece of paper. But MM constantly acts as though she does have the correct piece of paper and shows understanding below that o anyone who has even made a reasonable attempt to understand the subject would have.
malraux
@Ecks:
What really gets me about the whole “drug companies won’t develop drugs anymore” argument is that most of what drug companies spend money on is refining drugs to extend patents, regardless of efficacy (the new purple pill isn’t particularly different from the old one or even the OTC stuff but costs a lot more). Most basic science and development of new classes of drugs comes from government research, who then sell the right to make the drugs. Even if you grant that private R&D will go down, it won’t be a horrid event because most of that private R&D is just rent seeking behavior.
Mark S.
This is why I find McArdle so infuriating. It’s like being condescended to by the village idiot.
slag
Funny thing is that I once had a lengthy conversation with a biotech engineer about this very issue, and he told me all about how Medicare’s standard for insurability already helps determine the direction of our biotech innovations. In fact, having one large central agency actually makes their lives easier because, once they have Medicare’s buyoff, then they know that private insurance agencies will follow. McArdle–in her addled logic–would probably see this situation as an indication that government is already constraining innovation. I know of at least one biotech engineer (and, according to him, a bunch of others) who would say the exact opposite.
Church Lady
@malraux
What I see, both on the left and on the right, is the attitude that if someone doesn’t agree with you on some issue, seemingly any issue, then they are stupid and only worthy of contempt of the keyboard contingent. As one reads the blogs, it is amazing the number of people that offer their opinions on a range of issues, most of which they have absolutely no expertise on yet feel that their opinion is not only worthwhile, but refuse to contemplate that the other side just might have a point.
While you, or I, may disagree with Ms. McArdle’s reasons for being against a public health option, it doesn’t necessarily make her wrong. It just means that she has taken a position contra to those that disagree with her and she is simply expressing that opinion and giving her reasoning behind that opinion. I don’t have any particular expertise on the public health option, or the economics of a public health option, so I am unable to say whether or not what she has written is correct.
All of the front pagers here quite frequently issue their opinions on subjects with which they have no expertise, as do the commenters, myself included. When I do express an opinion, it doesn’t mean I am claiming expertise in the matter. It just means that I have an opinion on the subject. After all, opinions are like assholes – everyone has one.
malraux
How can one even write those two paragraphs one following the other? Its as though she doesn’t even know about how old people get medical insurance and care.
Sentient Puddle
@Church Lady:
Yes it does. If she was arguing against a public option in her post, it was sort of like attempting to prove the quadratic theorem by stating Paul McCartney is dead, QED.
malraux
@Church Lady: Expressing a conservative opinion isn’t necessarily wrong, though pretty much most “conservative” ideas are various rejections of reality.
What MM does isn’t just stating an opinion. She states facts. That are wrong. So wrong that it should be clear that she obviously has never recognized an actual fact. Take those two paragraphs I tried to quote above. MM argues that if we let the government have a medical system for the elderly, it will decide to stop covering end of life care and regulate what the elderly eat. But we do have a government run medical system for the elderly and it doesn’t do as she says it will. She is arguing that Medicare doesn’t exist. That’s not an opinion. Its stupidity. And most importantly, its wrong. The more you go into any of her assertions, they all end up like that, as the bit about how drugs are developed.*
*: she also for some reason is ignorant that medical innovation is more than pharmacological. Academic medicine is where a lot of medical innovation comes from. Shockingly, that’s doctors working at mostly government run institutions taking government grant money to study new treatment techniques.
Mayur
Church Lady: I have a masters in econ, and have employed/worked with enough mba grads and taken enough mba-geared finance courses to know that the degree in question is worth Sweet F.A. when it comes to actual economics, esp. public or political econ. I can whip up a host of mba grads who will agree with me. Moreover, it takes a marginal (achievable by the layman, fyi) familiarity with the issues to realize that mcardle is generally full of it.
Tim F.
It’s a lot easier to answer Church Lady by pointing out that appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.
Look, I have a PhD in the field of research where I currently work. It’s safe to say that my co-workers and I worked a hell of a lot harder for our degrees than Megan did. Nonetheless, if one of my colleagues or I says something that makes no sense our pedigree, awards and high-impact papers won’t save us from being laughed at.
Generally ony an authoritarian would answer an argument with a simple appeal to authority. Care to try again?
Eric
While you, or I, may disagree with Ms. McArdle’s reasons for being against a public health option, it doesn’t necessarily make her wrong. It just means that she has taken a position contra to those that disagree with her and she is simply expressing that opinion and giving her reasoning behind that opinion. I don’t have any particular expertise on the public health option, or the economics of a public health option, so I am unable to say whether or not what she has written is correct.
The bulk of her arguments in that piece are juvenile, poorly presented, internally inconsistent and illogical, and many can be proven false with even a cursory examination of widely available information.
And when you consider that she has a long history of showing a weak grasp of economics, health care, politics, statistics and a host of other topics, I don’t find anything wrong with dismissing her opinion on this matter – she’s quite possibly the worst professional blogger on the internet. Why should I respect her opinion?
As far as expertise…who cares? As it happens, I have an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, but that’s irrelevant. You don’t have to be a licensed plumber to notice that a broken pipe is flooding your basement. You don’t need to be a professional mathematician to tell that 2+2 does not equal 5. McArdle is obviously, demonstrably wrong here…and I didn’t need my college education to figure that out.
White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)
Churchlady@
a Masters in either Business, Finance, or Economics?
There’s a world of difference, esp. at U. Chicago, between a MBA, which Megan has, and a MA, Econ.
I have six credit hours of Econ, and have little trouble fisking the obvious flaws in logic, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and out-and-out prevarication in Megan’s work. Not because I’m a syooooper geenius, but because Megan just isn’t serious about anything other than being an attention-whore and a fatuous scold.
I wager that a smart high-schooler who’s read the chapter summaries of an undergrad-level Econ text could teach Megan a thing or two.
And for god’s sake, if we can’t agree that Megan’s a shitty writer and third-rate intellect based on the record, can we at least agree that her choice of nom-de-plume, “Jane Galt,” alone should prevent her from ever being taken seriously about anything. I mean, fuck, she compared waiting on queue for a G-3 iPhone to the plight of Somali refugees.
White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)
The Drug Makers Won’t Make New Drugs If They Can’t Make Obscene Profits argument is absurd. That’s what they do: Make new drugs. For money. Lots of it.
It’s like saying that gamblers will stay away from the casinos if we don’t guarantee that they’ll always win.
I’m still waiting for some drug maker to come up with a pill that will make my erections last LESS than four hours…
b-psycho
@malraux:
Gee, maybe I’m just nuts, but I’m reading this as a perfect reason to dead the drug companies’ patents. And that’s without even getting into how much intellectual property itself is a crock…
malraux
@b-psycho: In fairness, drug companies do a fair amount in the process. Clinical trials, improving the production process, risk involved in selling something that might end up killing people, etc are all things that the government really should stay away from.
That said, the incentives are all wrong with the pharma system. Drug trial results need to be public. Comparative efficacy review needs to be implemented for basically all aspects of medicine, as well as the banning of bribing of doctors.
Thomas Levenson
I’m late to the party, and find thanks to the usual vivacity of the Balloon Juice community that there is no real need to try to answer Church Lady’s question. Thanks to all here (a) who said nice (but irrelevant) things about my background and work and (b) made the relevant argument that it is neither my nor McArdle’s formal qualifications that matter — it is whether or not what we write both makes sense and is true…that is based on actual data and knowledge acquired by observation, research and or experience that can be recognized as valid by others.
As for who I am: I’m a guy with a B.A. in a field mostly unrelated to my current work who for the last twenty nine years made a living by looking at a variety of technical fields and producing films, books and articles to bring the ideas of those fields to as wide an audience as wished to pursue them.
And FWIW — while many scientists bemoan the quality of science writing for the public and especially daily and weekly science journalism, both I and my MIT econ colleagues agree that the level of economics journalism is far worse. There are a few really good econ writers out there — David Leonhardt of the Times is one of them, and there are others (Taibi is damn good on the muckraking end of the journalistic enterprise, for example). But there is a lot more cluelessness out there than good stuff.
I’m not sure why except to compare with science journalism, I think most reporters believe they get supply and demand and the notion that markets are better than command economies, so they think they have a sufficient background to just go ahead and write any given story. Your general reporter thrown onto a science story may believe that their reportorial skills are strong enough to carry them through to the essence of a technical issue, but in general they will at least know that they don’t know much about molecular biology, say, or the time dilation effects that need to be corrected for in order to make your GPS work.
It’s not the known unknowns that trip you up, in other words; it’s the unknown ones. I’ve had a couple of conversations with colleagues in the Econ dept. about extending the kinds of things we try to teach in the science writing grad program about covering a technical field to would be econ writers, but we haven’t got very far yet.
inkadu
@Sentient Puddle: Sentient puddle, do you think that hole you are lying in, that fits you so well, was just for you?
So… Adams or Dawkins?
inkadu
@White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob): I learned a new word today: fisking.
–
In an ironic little twist the term was christened against an article by Andrew Sullivan.
And while everyone is talking about their educations, I’d like to mention I am working on my masters in internet traditions.
Sentient Puddle
@inkadu: Of course it was created just for me. It fits me so perfectly, so how could it have been created for anyone else?
Adams for me. I don’t think I’ve heard Dawkins use the term, but I’d imagine it’s gotta be the same idea, no?
inkadu
@Sentient Puddle: Dawkins stole it from Adams… they were quite friendly with each other. You can listen to Dawkins reading the sentient puddle here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-tC9MU852k … although why you would want to I’m not sure. Google finds things.
The puddle’s thoughts are an illustration of the anthropic principle — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-tC9MU852k
Man, I should really go back to school for something.
Mayur
@Tim F.: It’s a lot easier to answer Church Lady by pointing out that appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.
Yeah; probably should have just done that. I just get a cheap thrill out of having someone ask that question pseudo-rhetorically and then getting to dogpile on them when the credentials start rolling out from other participants in the discussion.
And thank you for weighing in, Prof (Mr?) Levenson.
Brian J
Tom Levenson,
I’m curious, are there are journalists out there who are known to be useless when it comes to science or economics or anything else? I always find it interesting to see what the real experts think.
scarshapedstar
Fixed.
Wile E. Quixote
Church Lady’s appeal to authority argument is bullshit, but bullshit is all that conservatives have to offer these days. So standard conservative responses now consist of:
Appeals to authority
The inverse of this. I don’t know what you’d call it but any authority who disagrees with a conservative is seen to be as corrupt and not to be trusted because they have an agenda. Of course conservative authorities are never corrupt and never have agendas, despite all of the money they receive from wealthy individuals and huge corporations. I guess this would be called the “Al Gore lives in a big house and therefore doesn’t care about the environment and you don’t have to listen to him.*
I don’t know what this argument would be called but “appeal to stupidity”. Conservatives, when faced with poll results or statistics they don’t like always say things like “well you can’t trust polls” or “lies, damned lies and statistics” implying that the statistics in question are crap because some polls or statistics are wrong or dishonest and biased.
Fear-mongering against those who could be defined as “the other” (immigrants, muslims, foreigners, teh ghey).
Fear-mongering against distorted liberal straw-men (“Psst, did you hear that Obama is a Muslim who is not a US citizen and is going to have the UN take our guns away as foretold in the Book of Revelations™ and then is going to make us all get gay-married to Barney Frank and/or Nancy Pelosi (depending upon gender)”
Facts or anything that has anything that looks like it might resemble something in the real world but contradict conservative claims and/or conservative ideology or which shed unflattering light on prominent conservative are disposed of as inconveniences by today’s conservative. Indeed Church Lady is acting like a Soviet Russian commissar would have reacted in 1934 to someone criticizing the theories of Trofim Lysenko.. Unable to engage the arguments on their merits they fall back to appeal to authority:
* I have to confess that I find Gore’s lifestyle annoying given what he is saying about the environment. It’s like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. advocating that we build windmills everywhere except areas in direct view of das Kennedybunker at Chappaquiddick. On the other hand just because Robert F. Kennedy is a lying, self-righteous dick doesn’t mean that building windmills is a bad idea.
jenniebee
@Church Lady:
While you, or I, may disagree with Ms. McArdle’s reasons for being against a public health option, it doesn’t necessarily make her wrong.
No, it doesn’t. McArdle isn’t wrong because we disagree with her, she’s wrong because she spouts contrafactual nonsense. She thinks that the world behaves in reality the way it does in an Ayn Rand novel and opines on economics based on that fiction rather than on real world examples. You might as well come to me for advice on your Xanax dosage based on my reading of Bleak House as go to McArdle for her thoughts on macroeconomics.
There are some people with whom many of us don’t agree completely whom we wouldn’t snark up like this – Larison comes immediately to mind here – because he argues his case based on something other than fiat and fantasy. We don’t engage McArdle as a rational actor because she isn’t rational.
Mark S.
I think the problem with most economic journalism is that most of them are corporate shills. All you have to do is watch Lawrence Kudlow and the other clowns on CNBC. These assholes have an agenda, which is to make sure that rich people get even richer. McCardle probably doesn’t realize that everything she advocates has the same effect.
Ecks
@malraux: Well that’s the more refined version of the argument yeah :) And well put too.
Some of my colleagues study nifty marketing tricks they pull on this, such as making the “old” (i.e., no longer covered by patent) drug over the counter, while bringing out the “new” (i.e., very slight variant) drug as prescription only, thus increasing the perception that the new drug is stronger and more efficacious, while creating a segment of occasional users with light versions of the problem, who wouldn’t reliably go to their doctors for prescriptions anyway. You can look at this as either an elegant bit of customer service, or as manipulating people to squeeze more money on them based out of their insecurities and not really paying attention. Which way you see it tends to be a give away for your political leanings :)
Napoleon
This bears repeating, Megan M. is transparently wrong about much of what she says. I have a minor in Econ and have informally kept up with it since graduating from collage, and she just is embarrassingly misinformed.
kuvasz
Sorry, Cole. You are dead wrong. In dealing with the Right, even the brightest, and reading their most articulate essays, I’m constantly impressed with their lack of substance.
Conservatives seem to be without principles, and calling what guides them a philosophy seems to be giving them far more distinction than they deserve. Rather, their thought seems to be nothing more than crumbs and shards raked together from various sources– Hobbes, Locke, Smith (invisible hand leading towards utopia), Marx (economic determinism), Freud (where they get their constant urge to play on middle class fear) and numerous others — and shaped together into a formless mass which they mold to the desired situation.
There is no philosophical system on the Right, rather only cynical opportunism masquerading as coherent thought, a fig leaf of virtue to hide their whoring ways.
I have no respect for them because they have no sense of shame. They are more akin to the Bolsheviks of Russia than to anything American. For them everything comes down to attaining and retaining power and cashing in, nothing more.
It is not that the Right, or “Conservatives” are dirty words, rather that they exemplify a position of no coherent philosophy, except pure, unbridled greed.
And stop reading Sullivan, he’ll rot your brain.
Tom Levenson
@Brian J: This is always a dicey question, because, in fact, in any relatively small community (see Village) everyone knows everyone, and I no more like slagging folks I have had drinks with than anyone else does.
But I’ll name a couple of names. Gina Kolata of the NY Times became dead to me with her terribly misguided, cruelly naive, and attempted-corrupt article about Judah Folkman and anti-angiogenesis writing of about a decade ago. She had a prior reputation as a careless reporter but that piece was the first time I really paid attention to her work on a story I’d reported on myself back in the ’80s. Dreadful work, and nothing of hers I’ve read since has altered my basic judgment since.
Gregg Easterbrook is a bad faith science reporter, IMHO, continuously recycling God-of-the-gaps arguments in the thin disguise of discussing the exciting but wide-open state of modern cosmology. Really terrible stuff comes up — to the point that I’ve had Alan Guth come to my graduate seminar a couple of times to fisk one of Easterbrook’s features paragraph by paragraph. It’s excruciating fun.
There are others of this ilk, but most bad science reporting is born of more ignorance, not just of the particular field to be covered but of the way science works intellectually and sociologically. McArdle’s claim of a division of labor between academic biologists who look at targets and industry researchers who try to identify compounds to strike those targets is an extreme example of this kind of basic failure.
Economics writing is, I’m convinced, harder than most science writing for a couple of reasons. One is that economics is much less well developed as a discipline than the natural sciences are. There is a body of very abstract mathematical theory with connections to real world experience that are still very tenuous. There is a bunch of natural history still going on — attempts to gather enormous amounts of data just to have a chance to characterize what might be going on. It’s an enormously complicated system under review…and so on.
So anyone trying to cover this field has to deal with an enormous amount of confusion from one’s own sources — disagreements borne of the fact that the field does not yet fully know what it knows.
Then there’s the fact that economics news and business news are quite different beasts (see MBAs and Economists, above) and yet they are often, of newsroom necessity, covered by the same person. Tough job.
And so on. It’s really difficult to cover the economy, the academic field that attempts to study it, political economy, and money/finance on the large or personal level. I’m not surprised that few do it well, and those few are usually (but by no means always) at MSM institutions large enough to allow their economy beat to divide among a few folks. So I’m not going to slag people by name here (other than the shills for hire types at CNBC and their ilk mentioned above, who are not journalists in any sense I understand), just note that its an area where writing/journalism schools and training lags pretty far behind the demands of the story.
Egilsson
Wow, that’s good news for McCain!!
(sorry, I just couldn’t resist. I didn’t see that anyone else had contributed that to this thread, so I figured it was my turn)
Aaron
@Ecks:
Congrats on passing comps, btw. I should be taking mine in two years here.
To the point at hand, I find it unfortunate that both misguided and blatantly dishonest reporting have become so popular. It does not seem like THAT much work to do some research on the topic you are writing about.
However, the one caveat I suppose I should offer to this is in the realm of economic writing. if one starts from the principle that the free market is perfect, it makes writing quite easy. It also makes it quite wrong.
Brian J
@Tom Levenson:
I always wonder why such allegedly bad reporting exists at a major newspaper. I mean, I can understand why a relatively small paper might not have the world class business or political reporters of The Times or The Journal, but what’s the excuse for the national or international powerhouses? There are plenty of people who would work for the papers and who could, in theory, do a good job. That’s probably even more true now, in this recession. It makes you wonder why a paper that’s looking to cut costs, as they all are, doesn’t fire a $100,000 a year reporter who has a poor reputation and hire a new writer with the background in the field to do the job for $75,000. Money is saved, a reputation is increased, and the public gets better information.
Then again, as it’s probably not as easy as it sounds from the way I describe it above. Maybe they do live in more of a bubble than we realize and don’t often hear outside criticism.
I also wonder how often people who criticize the journalism in question are just being nitpicky and/or don’t like reality the way it’s described. Allow me to compare it to the debate over stimulus between economists in the blogosphere. All of the people going back and forth were qualified to comment, yet to an outsider like me, it was pretty difficult deciding what was what. In the same way that a claim over multipliers depends on one’s base views of the economy, does an article over China’s currency get infected with a similar biased view? Bad reporting with erroneous information is what it is, and if it’s undeniable, there’s no use trying to pretend otherwise. But as I said before, I find it hard to believe that organizations with reputations to protect would willingly produce garbage, so either they don’t know something’s garbage, or a non-factual dispute is at hand. A lot of times, I suspect it’s the latter.
Morbo
Oh look, another “must-read” from Sullivan pointing to Jeff Goldberg (funny how many must-reads point to internal traffic). And it’s basically Goldberg pimping his own ten year old story. New rule: anything Sully labels a must-read is horseshit.
Jason
This has got to be one of those rare occasions when somebody posting in a comments section actually makes you want to read their work more than the OP did.
Brian J
The post debunking McArdle earned him a spot in the bookmarks on my iPhone. I’m sure that will let him sleep well tonight.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“As the debate rages on McArdle’s expertise, who here has a Masters in either Business, Finance, or Economics? Please raise your hand if you do.”
Umm, me for one.
And McArdle has struck me as always been an intellectually incurious hack who, because of an Eng.Lit. background, was able to package simplistic wrongheaded drivel with nice pretty words.
KevinD
@Jason:
Seriously, I spent the afternoon today just reading back through his old stuff. Yet another blog to add to the list.
Comrade Kevin
Ezra Klein had his say about McMegan today.
erlking
Late to the party, I know, but that beatdown was so good I felt like having a cigarette after reading it.