Interesting, perhaps. Really interesting, not so much.

luis, you might want to read the actual post and comments, before posting your comment. Megan had been totally trashed in her first posting, mentioned here – and then dug herself deeper with her latter post.

Heck, just go to her first post on this, and see what her normally right-wing chorus said about it.

Megan McArdle is a propagandist and not an intellectual. But intellectuals tend to engage with her as though she argued in good faith.

Obviously one can be a partisan of a particular view while remaining an intellectual, being genuinely interested in encountering new evidence, including evidence that contradicts one’s view, modifying ideas based on new evidence, and so forth. There are plenty of really interesting libertarian thinkers out there.

Alternatively, you might think she’s really trying to understand your point but is not getting it. In which case one could, I suppose, draw the inference that she’s stupid. Do you think she’s stupid?

Alternatively, you might think that she’s neither stupid nor self-deceived, but just likes getting into arguments with people, and doesn’t particularly care if she’s right or wrong. So do you think she’s just picking a fight?

Finally, the fourth option is that she has lots of stuff to do, and doesn’t have as much time to spend on this point as you have. So perhaps she’s just being lazy, or perhaps she’s rationally deciding not to spend very much time on this point?

Is there a fifth option? I don’t see it, but I didn’t think too hard about it, because I have a couple of other things to do.

Near as I can tell, if either of the first two options obtains, scorn isn’t the proper reaction to take. Certainly if she just can’t get it, you shouldn’t attack her character. When you might people who aren’t as smart as you, do you take this to be a moral defect? Regardless, do you insult them and make fun of them for being less intelligent than you? If so, do you think that’s morally defensible?

As for the third and fourth options, those probably do merit scorn (although the fourth one less so), but I don’t see anything in her behavior that makes me think either one applies to her. I’m guessing that option 1 is what’s going on here. But I think scorn will just give her more reason to maintain her self-deception.

Gee whiz, Luis, you think she’s botched this one, so disagreement is out.

I’d like to point out that (a) she has an MBA from U Chic, meaning that she should actually know something about how to do analyses like this, and how to explain them, (b) she boasts about her MBA, and about taking econ courses form Nobel Laureates, (c) she can be quite scornful in her errors, and (d) she ain’t J. Random Blogger, writing away in her spare time and energy; she’s now a columnist at a major magazine. Either this stuff is her job, and she’s botching it, or being a right-wing hack is her job.

If they had her prominent platform, consistently refused to do their homework, and were as snide and resistant to reflecting on opposing views…well, I personally might not be as derisive if I found their philosophy congenial, but I’d definitely understand if others were.

Oh well.

If we are arguing about whether [most] people would support higher taxes, levied on themselves and others, we just need to get people to put their money where their mouth is, and vote for it. This revealed preference argument is not a knock-down argument on that point, because people may be conditioning on “only if everyone else is paying higher taxes too”* as you and others point out (and I agree), but her revealed preference argument may be more suggestive about people’s true money-where-their-mouth-is-behavior than you want to credit. So there’s some talking at cross purposes going on. Megan thinks that her revealed preference argument suggests that when push comes to shove [most] people would not vote for an increase in their own taxes (as opposed to non-rich voting for tax increases on the rich), and even though you and I might vote for an increase in our own taxes, perhaps she’s right that a majority would not. If you interpret her as trying to ‘prove’ that nobody would vote for such an increase unless they already make voluntary contributions, then of course she’s wrong. [Re-reading her post, she does overstate her own case, and I may have erred by making a too charitable reading]

Regardless, even if she is mistaken or expressing herself poorly I don’t see why people can’t resist pouring scorn. There are plenty of economically illiterate left-wingers – would you suggest that other engage with them with the same level of derision?

• I’m not sure whether that’s a co-ordination problem as such, or just a sense of fairness. That bit of the argument I need to think about more.

Wrong. McMegan missed the entire 50 year history of research on the cross-elasticity between Food Stamps and non-food purchases with “stunning thoroughness”. She, and apparently you, didn’t understand the elementary theoretical point that additional Food Stamps should be essentially a cash equivalent for those families that spend more on food than they receive in Food Stamps (this is usually part 2 of the canonical Econ 101 example on the inefficiency of Food Stamps, and used to divide A from B students on the exam). Most Food Stamp families are in this category, and extra “stimulus” benefits could easily be targeted to them.

She also missed the extensive empirical history of randomized social experiments that address the question of how close Food Stamps are to cash. The latest piece on this estimates they are worth about 82 cents on the dollar to the average recipient, and more to “unconstrained” recipients who spend more on food than they receive in stamps:

http://harris.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/468.pdf

Based on this, I would argue that increasing Food Stamp benefits to the working near poor only (who draw significantly less than the max allotment and therefore are quite likely to be “unconstrained”) would yield more than 90 cents in cash equivalent on the Food Stamp dollar to these recipients. Further, I would argue that there is no easy, quick way to get direct cash to this population with any kind of income verification, so Food Stamps is best.

Now, if Megan was actually interested in thinking about the problem as opposed to making a nasty little pseudo-libertarian slam at poor people and the liberals who loved them, she could have found this stuff out with a bit of googling. Then she could have drawn her own conclusions based on actual evidence. But she’s not in business to think about stuff.

We can turn this one over to Yossarian, who was altogether in favor of the Americans winning WW II, but didn’t want to fly any more missions:

…‘From now on I’m thinking only of me.’

‘But Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’

‘Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’