Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

Republicans in disarray!

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So many bastards, so little time.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute

David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute

Crowd Sourcing Snark: New York Times Economics Fail

by | 47 Comments

This post is in: , ,

The Great Grey Lady (No Longer) of 43rd St. is just trolling us.  After today’s piece, “Hey! Look! Destitution Is Not So Bad,“they’ve given great prominence to this piece by Adam Davidson of Planet Money, somberly explaining why no one, not the government, nor business, can create jobs in a depression.

It’s a particularly irksome read, given that I’ve enjoyed Planet Money, and now must no longer to take anything said there as valid without double or triple checking.  Davidson’s writing is the worst kind of lazy journalism — breezy, unsourced assertions that hide vast unsupported generalizations to pave the way for a prebaked conclusion.  Exhibit A:

The most popular types of jobs programs involve state tax breaks or subsidies that seek to seduce a company from one state to another. While this can mean good news for “business-friendly” states like Texas, such policies don’t add to overall employment so much as they just shuffle jobs around. This helps explain Rick Perry’s claim that more than one million jobs were created under his watch in Texas while the rest of the country lost more than two million.

The federal government does something similar when it decides, for instance, to regulate oil drillers and subsidize windmill makers. Such a policy might help the environment but it just moves jobs from one sector to another without adding any.

This crowd can catch the fail there without my help, I think…though I’d start with the notion that when there are specific jobs bills before Congress, terming state by state races to the bottom “popular types of jobs programs” is heroic misdirection.  But there’s more:

With no new theories, Democrats dusted off the big idea from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s view that government can create jobs by spending a lot of money.

Yumping Yiminy!  I don’t know where to begin, except to suggest Mr. Davidson read an actual Nobel laureate economist who writes for the same paper in which this parody of a thought appears.  He might learn from Paul Krugman that Keynsian ideas have not lain frozen in amber since 1933, and that there is an enormous amount of actual empirical knowledge about neo-Keynsian claims — data that contradicts the paean to Chicago-school economics that follows.

It gets worse, much worse, but actually fisking this is as it deserves would take hours and some actual research and reporting to do properly.

The real burr in my nether regions is that this is exactly the kind of work  Davidson seems to foregone.  There is literally not one single quote from an actual human being, living or dead.  There are no cites of either data or research.  There are plenty of broad, confident, fallacious claims, but nothing resembling actual intellection, nor journalism, anywhere in this piece.

Which, I guess, is what makes this a type specimen of Village received wisdom — wrong, and damaging, and one more cut to bleed dry any hope of civic discourse — but nothing out of the ordinary for all of that. But it is so damn brazen in its failure of the craft I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to master, and which I try to persuade my students to respect.

If any of you night owls want to document your own favorite travesties to be found therein, I’d be glad to learn.  I’m also hoping other, more authoritative econbloggers have a whack at it too (Brad Delong? Whaddayasay?).

Have fun.  I’ll check back after some hours of the dreamless…

Image:  Vincent van Gogh, Street Scene in Montmartre,  1887

Crowd Sourcing Snark: New York Times Economics FailPost + Comments (47)

And I will be satisfied not to read in between the lines

by | 58 Comments

This post is in: ,

A friend of mine who studies Classics sent me a link to a Rush Limbaugh transcript wherein Limbaugh rants against Classical Studies for thousands of words. I was going to write about it, about how strange it is that the Straussians — who love the study of ancient Greece above all else — have cast their lot in with this culture-hating oxycontin addict, but when I read it more carefully, I was unable to figure out what Limbaugh was trying to say. He likes Victor David Hansen, who studies or purports to study Classics, and he applauded a caller for sending her kids to a Catholic school where they are forced to study Latin.

I was overthinking it, Limbaugh was making fun of the study of Classics because he saw a picture of an OWS supporter who was majoring in Classical Studies. But then he likes Victor David Hansen and Catholic schools, so it’s good when they study or teach the same things.

Likewise, Elias Isquith is right that I overthought my recent anti-Bobo screed about whether Red State non-college grads were Burkean patriots or mooching, looting, strapping young bucks:

Contra DougJ’s guess, I don’t think Brooks is trying to take a swing at slothful or stupid Real Americans. He’s just desperate — as it was always evident the GOP would be — to turn Occupy into humdrum representatives of the liberal elite, alighting the fireworks of culture war in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the nation from its ongoing class-based strife. The representatives of “Red Inequality,” then, are merely collateral damage, their struggles are cited by Brooks in a cynical attempt to claim the moral high ground and implicitly damn Occupiers and the like as petty, envious, and above all narcissistic.

Cleek’s definition of conservatism is the best yet written:

today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily.

And a corollary is that today’s conservative rhetoric must oppose whatever liberals want today, updated daily. It’s as simple as that, and persons attempting to find a more complicated motive in the narrative will be prosecuted. I’ll try not to fall into this trap so much anymore.

And I will be satisfied not to read in between the linesPost + Comments (58)

Taint necessarily so

by | 114 Comments

This post is in: 

Bobo thinks the real villains in CainGate are the women he harassed:

If you are the victim of sexual harassment, and you agree to remain silent in exchange for a five-figure payoff, should any moral taint attach to you? In the old days, somebody who allowed a predator to continue his hunting in exchange for money would certainly be considered a sinner. I’m reluctant to judge people in these circumstances, but I’m inclined to agree. Am I missing something?

In the old days, the women would have been labeled sluts who were asking for it. They wouldn’t have even dared to make the complaint.

Taint necessarily soPost + Comments (114)

Megan McArdle is Always Wrong™: Occupy Wall St./Income Inequality division

by | 73 Comments

This post is in: ,

I have neither the patience nor the time to wade through the divine Ms. MM’s effusion on the class snobbery at the heart of the Occupy Wall St. movement. (Via Edoroso)

It’s the usual McArdle — self regarding (I was a crappy student who went into the punditing racket because I loved it! And I’m better than you because of that!*); chock full of unsourced or supported claims that, as ever with this writer, are too-good-to-check;** and, frankly too wearisome a barge-load of flabby writing to want to wallow in long enough to do the full fisking that it probably deserves.

So to keep it short (as long as you ignore the footnotes)…let’s just look at one exemplary bit of McArdle drawing on her deep knowledge of the data making sh*t up:

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure), I didn’t hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were–even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.
That would be this income inequality.  Here is a handy chart:
My 53 year old eyes may not be all that acute, but from where I squint at the screen, it sure looks like the share of US income going to the top one percent is higher now than it was in the late nineties.
(Update: Commenter Downpuppy reminds me that McArdle has seized on data from the worst of the financial downturn to show that the unbelievably rich are getting slightly less so in relation to the rest of us.  Given the decades of data on this question showing just such jagged deviations from the upward slope of the plot, this is, as Downpuppy says, a leaf out of the climate denialist’s play book.  Grab just the right slice of a data set and you can prove, for example that Houston is actually habitable (see March and April).)
 If you want to see the data in tabular form, mouse on over here.
In other words — income inequality was piss poor in the 1990s, but it is in fact worse now.
Which means, as ever, recall the Levenson corollary to DeLong’s law:
1.  Megan McArdle is always wrong.
2.  If your analysis leads you to conclude Megan McArdle is right, refer to rule 1.
*Really.  In her own words:
“here’s the difference between me and the outraged lower-upper-middle-class: I chose it.  I decided to have terrible grades and major in English, and then job hop in New York before settling down as an IT consultant. “

**Here’s McCardle on the profile of the archetypal OWS supporter, and the thought process that led him/her to camp out in a manner calculated to offend his/her betters:

Probably they should not have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into acquiring a BFA.¹  But these mistakes didn’t usually used to be crippling.  They were a drag, as you paid off those huge student loans with your tiny little income…²
Unfortunately their choices became utterly, horrifyingly disastrous just at the moment when we had a terrible financial crisis that spiked our unemployment rate up to 10%.  We can argue about exactly who is at fault and to what extent, and how much longer our public sector spending would have been sustainable without the financial crisis.   But whether or not you think their reaction is empirically correct, it certainly isn’t surprising.  To them it looks like a bunch of greedy, stupid bankers stole the jobs that they were entitled to. [Italics added.]
Well, isn’t that special.

show full post on front page

Actually, it’s the usual McArdle switcheroo, a bit of clumsy rhetorical sleight of hand she hopes you won’t notice.  It’s not that the bankers — who are demonstrably greedy and stupid (as in, catastrophic failures at the core jobs of managing risk and allocating capital) — hold jobs that might go to others.  It is that their greed and incapacity destroyed the financial underpinnings of the rest of the economy, so that jobs the US used to create at fairly robust levels no longer appear.  IOW, the OWS critique of the finance crowd is that what they did screwed the rest of us — and that critique is correct, however much Mean Girl in Chief McArdle wants to distract us with the idea that the greedy old Social Security and Medicare receipients and the stimulus in response to the bankster-led crisis is actually the problem.  We’ll argue later about who to blame, she says, but for now let’s not fall prey to childish insults to the poor banking sectors.
Working this out is really not that hard — unless one is trying to make sure that no one actually pays attention to what happens and who is to blame when a handful of the most richly compensated members of a society f*ck up their one job, whilst looting the till.  But reality is a stubborn thing, and the greed and incompetence of the bankers is by now well documented, including,  for just one example, this pretty blunt piece from the archives of McArdle’s own employer.
          ¹Number of bachelors degrees awarded in the US in 2008-9: 1,601,368.  Number of such degrees in the fine arts: 89,140 (classified in these statistics as visual and performing arts, but matching the profile of the BFA degree).  Whatever else they are, (talented and monomaniacal, sez one married to a holder of an MFA), fine-arts graduates are unlikely to dominate the revolution, just on the numbers.
McArdle’s sneer at the arts is even sillier, in fact, when you actually look at the difference between a BFA and a BA.  The BFA curriculum, which typically demands studio and/or practice courses as well as more traditional classroom inquiry is classified as a professional rather than a liberal arts curriculum.  The folks who sign up for a painting BFA know they want to paint, and have some idea (usually a pretty good one) as to what that means — and they have an understanding of the working life they will enter.
McArdle might have been rhetorically better off dissing her own chosen undergraduate field of English literature — except that there are plenty of people who actually understand what a literature degree is supposed to do, which is not to guarantee an income, but to give you intellectual resources you can apply in the professional setting of your choice.  But imagining that people she disdains might actually have an autonomous inner life is beyond her vapid inability to grasp the fact that the world is not simply what she thinks it ought to be.
          ²The data here are a bit more complicated than they might at first appear — but a simplified picture is still a pretty good indicator of what’s going on.  And that would be that it’s not that students a generation ago made the same mistakes but were bailed out by the Bush casino economy.
In this study that looked at the period from 1993 to 2006, you see both an increase in the amount of debt and a shift in the mix of students graduating with high debt loads, with the debt burden in constant dollars rising sharply over those years for every quartile in the study.  All of which is to say that it isn’t that recent grads somehow made the same mistake their elders did and got burned; actual changes in the way the US invests in and builds human capital left them more vulnerable than their predecessors.

Megan McArdle is Always Wrong™: Occupy Wall St./Income Inequality divisionPost + Comments (73)

A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad bar

by | 69 Comments

This post is in: ,

Everyone’s been egging me on to tackle Bobo’s latest. I’ll summarize: the librul arts types who are protesting Wall Street excess should instead focus their anger on all the Red State monosyllabic young bucks going back for seconds and thirds at the Applebee’s salad bar.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.

[….] [T]he fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

Dean Baker (via) points out that the college/non-college socioeconomic divide began around 1980 and has not widened much recently (Bobo conveniently quotes stats from 1979), but my point is a different one: what the fuck are OWS supporters like me supposed to do about people whose diets and parenting techniques Bobo dislikes? Go lecture them on his behalf?

Bobo — if I’m reading him right — says that the problem is that there’s too many non-college-educated fly-over country people and that they’re not eating right or raising their kids right. Isn’t this a natural place for government to expand access to education, health-care, and programs like Head Start? And isn’t it reasonable to ask that the wealthiest Americans, who surely make a lot of their money off these oh-so-tragically dumb, fat, poorly raised fucks, help foot the bill for it?

Also too, I can no longer understand who the real heroes and villains are for conservatives anymore. I gave up long ago with foreign policy, I can’t tell who’s Hitler and who’s a brave Churchillian protector of freedom, but I thought I knew a hawk from a handsaw within the confines of Our Republic. I can’t tell anymore. I know that college graduates from “blue states” are lazy, trustafarian slime, but now I know that non-college graduates from “red states” are fat, lazy, chain-smoking slime. Maybe this isn’t so complicated, maybe in Real Murka, a college degree makes you good, in the decadent enclaves on the coasts, it makes you bad.

I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that though.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad barPost + Comments (69)

Layer cake

by | 117 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Kthug touches on one of my favorite topics:

What I found myself thinking about, however, is the way the inequality debate illustrates some typical features of many debates these days: the way the right has a sort of multi-layer defense in depth, which involves not only denying facts but then, in a pinch, denying the fact that you denied those facts.

Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response.

I’m not sure there are three levels (yet) on inequality, but we definitely have (a) right-wingers denying that inequality is rising and (b) denying that anyone is denying the rise in inequality, but attacking any proposal to limit that rise.

I also like the various fall-back positions: “even if global warming is happening, that’s not bad, ask people in Buffalo!”, “income inequality is good because it makes the lucky duckies want more than a gubmint hand-out”. And then “even if liberals are right, do they have to be so shrill about it, Real Murkins don’t like that kind of talk”. Then “liberals only believe this because they hate America/freedom/capitalism/Joos.”

Even the liberal Slate/New Republic say that sure, a five degree increase in world temperature seems like a problem, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you may be surprised to learn that blah blah blah. My new favorite (an Easterbrook special) is that conservatives are poised to fix whatever the problem is (even though they deny its existence at various levels, as above) because only Nixon could go to China.

I defy you to name even one issue where this dynamic — multiple layers of conservative denialism, with a creamy name-calling filling, topped with the icy frosting of neo-liberal contrarianism and general smart-assery — doesn’t effectively dominate the national discourse.

Layer cakePost + Comments (117)