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You are here: Home / The best and the brightest

The best and the brightest

by DougJ|  September 28, 20116:01 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Our Awesome Meritocracy

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I’m not normally one to hate competent public servants for no reason, but I’ve always hated Peter Orszag. He always seemed liked that sort of faux nice guy geek who would ultimately turn out to be the kind of sociopathic douche who would take millions in dollars of pay-off money from an investment bank, pen establishment-pleasing contrarian op-ed pieces that stabbed his old boss in the back, and advocate turning our entire society over to paid-for think tank hacks. (In short, he reminds me of almost everyone I knew in college.) Kthug:

Catherine Rampell comments skeptically on Peter Orszag’s call for delegating more policy to panels of nonpolitical experts. I’d add that this is an odd time to make such a proposal. Yes, the political world is deeply dysfunctional — but what’s equally remarkable is just how terrible the judgment of the supposed experts has been.

Kthug also, in a different piece, gives a good example of why this is such a bad idea:

I’ve written a lot about the Dark Age of macroeconomics, of the way economists are recapitulating 80-year-old fallacies in the belief that they’re profound insights, because they’re ignorant of the hard-won insights of the past.

What I’d add to that is that at this point it seems to me that many economists aren’t even trying to get at the truth. When I look at a lot of what prominent economists have been writing in response to the ongoing economic crisis, I see no sign of intellectual discomfort, no sense that a disaster their models made no allowance for is troubling them; I see only blithe invention of stories to rationalize the disaster in a way that supports their side of the partisan divide.

I used to believe that reasonable, educated people could all blah blah blah but now I think that nothing could be further from the truth. It’s easy to buy experts off, easier still to confuse sophistry with knowledge, and inevitable that powerful elites will mostly identify with other powerful elites.

The only possible serious check on all of this is democracy. That may suck but it’s how it is. Alan Greenspan and U of Chicago economics largely caused this recession. I don’t have to remind you about the awesome intellectual pedigree of the people who dreamed up the Iraq War. Also too, Bush v. Gore and Citizens United.

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Reader Interactions

43Comments

  1. 1.

    chrismealy

    September 28, 2011 at 6:03 pm

    Anyone want to put a date on when Ezra Klein goes Orszag?

  2. 2.

    DougJ

    September 28, 2011 at 6:05 pm

    @chrismealy:

    I think Yglesias goes first. I have more faith in Ezra.

  3. 3.

    beltane

    September 28, 2011 at 6:14 pm

    They will cling on to their failed ideology until the bitter end because it is always other people who suffer the consequences of their failure. In many ways they remind me of the 19th century proponents of the miasma theory of disease, who stubbornly held on to their theory long after all empirical evidence pointed to the fact that contagious diseases were caused by microbes and not bad smells.

    Just as people needlessly died from the continued belief in the miasma theory, they will suffer unnecessary impoverishment from the continued belief in neo-liberal nonsense.

    Of course, the adherents of both erroneous beliefs profited greatly from their failure.

  4. 4.

    beltane

    September 28, 2011 at 6:15 pm

    @DougJ: Isn’t Yglesias there already?

  5. 5.

    arguingwithsignposts

    September 28, 2011 at 6:15 pm

    @DougJ: At least Ezra can spell.

  6. 6.

    kris

    September 28, 2011 at 6:15 pm

    Yglesias has already taken the first steps. He cites Orszag’s latest bit of sophistry with approval and support:

    http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/26/328579/orsza-arent-less-democracy/

    And, like DougJ, I also detest Orszag.

  7. 7.

    Janus Daniels

    September 28, 2011 at 6:17 pm

    “It’s easy to buy experts off, easier still to confuse sophistry with knowledge…”
    Bribing experts is the easier. IMO.

  8. 8.

    Silver

    September 28, 2011 at 6:18 pm

    Hey, Orszag had to jump. Do you have any idea how hard it is to support multiple families?

    He’s a pale intellectual Shawn Kemp. Still, he’s white, so his atrocious penis management gets a pass from pretty much everyone…

  9. 9.

    arguingwithsignposts

    September 28, 2011 at 6:18 pm

    I’m not going to give Orzag a pageview, but is he arguing for some form of modern-day philosopher-kings?

  10. 10.

    cat48

    September 28, 2011 at 6:20 pm

    Yep, I hear he gave Suskind all kinds of “info” for his book which I’m not going to read. I don’t see him as trustworthy since his old girlfriend had just given birth when he was preparing to marry his new girlfriend. That’s just me though.

    I can see why the Filibuster would make someone want to avoid the Congress; especially in an emergency. The global econ is going to blow up now probably & the GOP won’t budge. It’s just unbelievable to me.

  11. 11.

    EconWatcher

    September 28, 2011 at 6:21 pm

    I don’t see how we fix anything until we have more widespread recognition of a common fate, more acceptance of the need to pull together for the common good.

    Maybe a world war would do the trick. We’re about due for one.

  12. 12.

    PeakVT

    September 28, 2011 at 6:22 pm

    The Beltway Bubble rots the mind. Plus Klein works at the WaPo, and clearly somebody is pumping G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate into the HVAC there.

    ETA: Who knew fictional drugs could put you into moderation?

  13. 13.

    wenchacha

    September 28, 2011 at 6:25 pm

    Holy shit what a depressing afternoon.

  14. 14.

    Josie

    September 28, 2011 at 6:26 pm

    @cat48: I was thinking about the pregnancy/wedding also just before I saw your comment. I feel the same way exactly.

    DougJ.: Where did you go to college? Was it an Ivy League school?

  15. 15.

    Comrade Dread

    September 28, 2011 at 6:27 pm

    You want to solve the problem of Washington intransigence?

    Ending Democracy ain’t the way to do it, unless your sole purpose is to screw American citizens out of their money on behalf of the aristocracy.

    You want to actually fix the bloody problem? Here’s how:

    Get laws or referendums passed in all 50 states that remove redistricting from the hands of state legislatures and into the hands of a panel of judges.

    Pick one, two, or three: Campaign mother****ing finance reform, publicly funded elections, or increasing the size of the House of Representatives so that each Representative has far fewer constituents than they do now and are more accountable to them.

    Reinstitute regulations regarding how many radio, TV, and print media outlets a corporation can own in a single market.

    Start advocating the teaching of economics and logic in schools from grades 1 – 12, so future citizens can realize just how badly their getting screwed by lying weasels.

  16. 16.

    YoohooCthulhu

    September 28, 2011 at 6:34 pm

    @chrismealy:

    Nah, neither Ezra nor Yglesias are going to go Orzag. They can be kind of establishment-minded sometimes, but they’ve both said reasonable things about democracy being an imperfect system but the best we have, etc.

    But Kthug isn’t completely right here. If you extend the argument to have “more unelected people in government”, there are definitely areas where it’s true and false. Like I don’t think turning state treasurer, insurance commissioner, etc into elected offices is terribly great from a policy perspective.

    This is all really about “accountability”, not democracy. There are some important decisions that politicians repeatedly abdicate; in which case it’s probably better to have someone unelected doing it–the “people” clearly aren’t holding them accountable. On the other hand, there are clearly policy choices where the decisionmaker hides behind their unelected office and keeps making poor decisions. Although a lot of the time, these issues can just be solved by giving the person/office more visibility.

    I want to say something about Bernanke, the shadowy FOMC, and the difficulty in Obama getting people confirmed to these offices being related to this issue but can’t come up with anything coherent ATM.

  17. 17.

    B W Smith

    September 28, 2011 at 6:35 pm

    I’m not Orszag fan, but give the sociopathic douche some slack. He’s got a baby, a baby momma(though she is an heiress), and a wife to support. Plus two other kids with his former wife.

    Seriously, I knew the first time I saw him interviewed, this guy was a Wall Street true believer in the Rubin style. I think I cheered when he left the White House.

  18. 18.

    cat48

    September 28, 2011 at 6:35 pm

    @Comrade Dread:

    Put me down for all three.

  19. 19.

    Cat Lady

    September 28, 2011 at 6:36 pm

    @EconWatcher:

    Co-sign. The human brain needs a fundamental re-jiggering and I think it’s happening, but it won’t be as a result of war.

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 28, 2011 at 6:38 pm

    @Comrade Dread: Options one and two ought to do it. Option three could result in a 100+ member House, and I am not sure that is workable.

  21. 21.

    Steve

    September 28, 2011 at 6:39 pm

    It’s easy to bamboozle the public too, in case you haven’t noticed. There’s no reason to think that democracy leads to better solutions. The most important thing about democracy is that it confers legitimacy.

  22. 22.

    Craig

    September 28, 2011 at 6:39 pm

    Never trust a man who wears a fucking hair hat. Never ever ever.

  23. 23.

    ppcli

    September 28, 2011 at 6:40 pm

    The most disillusioning thing about growing middle aged as an academic is the realization of how completely enthralled many, maybe even most, academics are by the prevailing intellectual fashions. In economics it is especially pernicious, because it costs you a lot of money in speaking fees, invitations to testify before congress, CV-plumping jobs in Washington, to step outside the window of accepted conventional wisdom. Four of my best friends at our university are economists – all have been invited to testify to congress about one thing or another multiple times, two have worked in government at places like CBO and the Fed, one was invited to a high position at the Fed but needed to turn it down for family reasons. These are all very smart people, good and honest people who work hard and care about being intellectually honest. But their blind spots are simply astonishing.

    One of them – a well regarded tax specialist – could not shut up about the miracle of Ireland until just before its collapse. We should learn from them, should imitate them, etc. One time, post collapse, I asked him what there was to learn from Ireland’s experience and he both suggested that Ireland was an anomaly and, without actually saying so, hinted that he had always been a skeptic about the Irish boom. I couldn’t believe my ears. I don’t think he was being consciously dishonest, just self-deceived. There were things he wasn’t allowing himself to think.

    And they are all dismissive of Krugman (that is, they all agree that the work that got him the Nobel is brilliant, but the NYT column – pffft.) My wife asked two of them at a party why this was, and they both said “Well, he was a fan of the stimulus, and it didn’t do what he said it would do.” I emailed one of them and asked “Hey, Krugman said over and over in print that the stimulus was far too small and poorly designed, and that it would both have an only minimal effect and would discredit further stimulus work. That’s exactly what happened. So how can it be a strike against Krugman that what he predicted actually came true?” No reply.

    I could keep telling illustrative stories for a dozen pages.

    It’s not that economists are unusually cynical or intellectually slavish – you see the same patterns with other humanists and social scientists (physical scientists and engineers are kept a bit more in check by the more direct resistance from the real world). But there’s just more money and influence at stake for economists, and so the patterns are more pronounced.

  24. 24.

    Citizen_X

    September 28, 2011 at 6:46 pm

    Kthug has pretty much had enough.

    (Honestly, I was just waiting for an excuse to link to that.)

  25. 25.

    Comrade Dread

    September 28, 2011 at 6:51 pm

    Of course, if you want to eliminate Democracy and try a crazy reformation, you could also shoot for a Constitutional amendment to change the way Representatives and Senators are chosen.

    For a given district, feed a list of registered voters into a computer or fishbowl, and pick one at random. Upon passing a basic psychological assessment, they become the Representative for that district.

    For the Senator, pick two from the entire pool of registered voters for that State.

    Might not work, but CSPAN would be pretty damn entertaining.

  26. 26.

    srv

    September 28, 2011 at 6:54 pm

    @Josie: DougJ went to Harvard.

    I think he made millions too, but lost it all trolling the web. Slowly turning him into a hippie.

  27. 27.

    Emma

    September 28, 2011 at 6:56 pm

    My beef with Orzag is not his personal life, but his talent for taking a job and then turning around and biting the hand that fed him. George Freakin’ “there ain’t nobody more moral than me” Stephanopoulos bites me the same way.

    And campaign financial reform, campaign financial reform, campaign financial reform.

  28. 28.

    Emma

    September 28, 2011 at 6:57 pm

    And while we’re at it, let’s end the whole “corporations are persons” bs.

  29. 29.

    schrodinger's cat

    September 28, 2011 at 6:57 pm

    @srv: What did he do to become Tunch’s minion?
    I am picturing Tunch as Jabba the Hut and DougJ as Princess Leia,

  30. 30.

    jl

    September 28, 2011 at 7:01 pm

    “Alan Greenspan and U of Chicago economics largely caused this recession.”

    Alan Greenspan is partly responsible. I’ll go with that.

    As for U of Chicago, you would have to add UCLA, University of Minnesota, Carnegie-Mellon, parts of UCSD and Caltech, Northwestern, and Harvard Econ and Business schools, and several more, into the list of the guilty, at least for pushing a macroeconomics that has proved useless.

    So, time to quit picking on poor old U of Chicago.
    Hey, Lester Telser was from U of Chicago, and he is one of most sophisticated advocates for why a functioning economy needs a mix of cooperation and competition (not just ruthless competition) and why sometimes collective cooperative action is the only way to get stuff done (with mathy theories, and historical examples and stuff).
    You can buy his books over the internet (cheap!).

    The neoclassical project of producing an economic theory that provides a master explanation for economic (or all?) of human behavior,

    and has some kind of reliable retrodictive, or predictive, or any kind of “dictive” power,

    and tells us something about how to design societies that provide an environment for human freedom and material welfare is not doing too good at the moment.

    I think a lot well informed people who can think would say the project is smoking ruin, a devastated rubble, a wasteland. I may be neither of those, but I think that is the situation.

    So, plenty of blame to go around.

    Also, important to think about how to persuade people as well as point fingers.

    For mathy types like DougJ, its kind of like the day after Russell’s paradox. Though Frege, at least, was quite a bit more intellectually honest about the situation than some defenders of macroeconomic orthodoxy.

  31. 31.

    aisce

    September 28, 2011 at 7:03 pm

    @ chris mealy & dougj

    whichever one gets married and has kids first.

    you watch, once mommy and daddy start to worry about which primo preschool little ezra or matty jr. need to get into, and which cocktail circuit is most beneficial to tap into to make it happen, that’s where they getcha.

  32. 32.

    slightly-peeved

    September 28, 2011 at 7:12 pm

    You do know that the rest of the world’s democracies rely more on unelected public servants than the U.S. does, right? There’s a reason that ‘Yes, Minister’ is considered almost a documentary in the U.K. And if there’s one place where the US should use more unelected officials, it’s in handling your elections. That one elected official makes decisions regarding other elections is part of what lets things like the 2000 election happen.

  33. 33.

    srv

    September 28, 2011 at 7:21 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: I think you need to find a troll character.

    DougJ was apparently unemployed or a grad student for much of the middle-oughts. BJ was probably his original troll-hunting ground because of John’s unique toleration of left vs. right. After awhile it became his home base for reporting on his social engineering studies:

    https://balloon-juice.com/2005/12/08/dougj-busted/

    https://balloon-juice.com/2005/11/13/dougj-takes-center-stage/

  34. 34.

    jron

    September 28, 2011 at 7:32 pm

    Kthug is tired of trying to reason with you people.

    (you guys have probably all seen this already…)

    I never pictured him being played by Clooney, but it works for that shot.

  35. 35.

    Calouste

    September 28, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    @slightly-peeved:

    Not just that they have far fewer elected public servants, they also have far fewer politically appointed public servants. It’s pretty much the cabinet ministers and a few undersecretaries who are MPs by definition and that’s it. The whole US set up with the president as head of state and government with a large direct influence on the departments is pretty much how monarchies were run in the 18th century. The rest of the world has moved on, the US hasn’t.

  36. 36.

    Josie

    September 28, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    @srv: Thanks for the information. That explains a lot. I didn’t understand the comment references to DougJ’s sockpuppets before. Obviously a man of many talents.

  37. 37.

    Mnemosyne

    September 28, 2011 at 8:03 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Option three could result in a 100+ member House, and I am not sure that is workable.

    I think you misread what Comrade was saying — he’s saying we have too few Representatives in the House right now. We have 435 people representing 350 million Americans, which seems more than a bit low. Given our population size, we probably should have at least 1,000+ members in the House.

    (Or did you leave off a zero? I think 1,000+ members is workable, personally.)

  38. 38.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 28, 2011 at 8:17 pm

    @Mnemosyne: Yeah, I left off a zero. If it get us us more John Lewises and Nancy Pelosis, cool. I just have a fear of excess Cantorim.

  39. 39.

    virag

    September 28, 2011 at 8:22 pm

    orszag was obama’s pissboy and advisor up until recently. only now some people discover that he’s a reprehensible, bald-headed, bastard-siring dicknozzle?

  40. 40.

    piratedan

    September 28, 2011 at 10:12 pm

    well holy sheet, haven’t the richies already invested in buying 90% of the corporate media and 95% of the best PR, now they gotta drop the dime on pithy pseudo intellectuals too? I mean where does it end? In the long run, can’t they just throw a bone to 85% of the country and let us not have to put grandma in a box under the overpass? after all, what’s it too them, they’ll still be rich and won’t have to have all of these enormous expenditures keeping us proles in their place.

  41. 41.

    Stillwater

    September 28, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    The only possible serious check on all of this is democracy.

    Ain’t that the truth.

  42. 42.

    kris

    September 29, 2011 at 1:49 am

    virag @39, personally I always thought he was a crook (like Mr. Geithner), even when he was in government. I also have been in academia long enough to know that technocrats can be sociopaths too, and they are also often good sophists. This rather gives the lie to the platonic ideal of philosopher kings that many like Orszag appear to believe in.

    Also, the british and more generally parliamentary systems of governance are a bit different, with executive authority more directly accountable to parliament. Also, while the bureaucracies are not elected, they do not have policy making authority but only implement policy.The authority to set and make policy is the preserve of their political masters. Furthermore, if an appointed public servant like Mr. Orszag was ever gained the kind of independent public profile he had, the individual would have lost their jobs in these countries.

    What Orszag is suggesting at some level is to devolve aspects of policy making onto an unelected bureaucracy, which is one of the reasons why it is a spectacularly bad idea.

  43. 43.

    Robert Waldmann

    September 29, 2011 at 4:10 am

    Frankly, I don’t believe that Krugman just recently noticed that many prominent economists don’t care about the truth. I think that he was restraining himself, being diplomatic, and placing good manners above frankness.

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