Brad De Long writes something condescending

He writes far nastier things about Noam Chomsky. I would say that if social democracy were Brad DeLong…well, no, I’d better not say anything like that. Clearly, though, he has a thing about anyone to the left of Larry Summers. I’d rather not go overboard with my distaste for his antics, given his prominence and my lack of it, but I think I can say this — if his economics weren’t so eminently sensible, he’d probably be Glenn Reynolds.

Oh, and despite my admiration for Xavi, Iniesta and the tiny wizard from the Pampas, I’m cheering for the dour Scot and his scarlet entourage….

The final sentence of Chris’s post:

I’m not a Barca fan either, for that matter, but I will be cheering them on in the Champions League final

I believe this is what the young people call “burying the lede”.

Well so you and De Long are both wrong about Leninism. What else is new?

He actually moderates all comments, due to change in policy some months earlier.

I’m not a Barca fan either, for that matter, but I will be cheering them on in the Champions League final.

Well that doesn’t really work. It’s almost impossible to separate “support Cuba against US embargo” from “support what Castro does.”

I’ll go further and say that in the case of Cuba, the exigent problem is economic mismanagement more than anything else. Which concerns capitalism. And which can’t be separated from democracy, because with a democracy they wouldn’t have half the economic system they do. I’m hardly in the camp that says capitalism necessary begets democracy, but I think it’s pretty obvious that when you give people democracy they generally vote themselves capitalism (with caveats). So the distinction between wanting a democratic and a capitalistic Cuba is, to the extent it exists in any substantive sense, an exceedingly fine one. (This is not to get into the nitty-gritty of precisely what kind of capitalism the U.S. wants for Cuba, but merely that everyone, including the Cubans themselves, wants to be capitalist in some way, shape, or form, social democracy included.)

It’s almost impossible to separate “support Cuba against US embargo” from “support what Castro does.”

As someone pointed out to me years ago in the context of Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb”, ‘almost’ implies ‘not’.

Engels: That 1,000 years from now buyers and sellers of goods/services will seek each out, and strike bargains with prices, seems about as safe a prediction as any you could make about human social institutions.

Chris: I thought your 2008 Castro post was fine, but I’m struck by the fact that it calls Brad out. Nothing wrong with that, but if you take pokes at people, they remember.

And yes, even my totally innocuous comments at his place get moderated.

This:

unless it is yoked to social democracy greenism quickly becomes a form of reactionary nostalgic agrarian conservatism

is profoundly ignorant and stupid. Is this the best he has to offer? Maybe he should read some Marxist critiques of greenism so he can actually understand what he’s talking about…

Engels: That 1,000 years from now buyers and sellers of goods/services will seek each out, and strike bargains with prices, seems about as safe a prediction as any you could make about human social institutions.

Really? I have no idea what social organization will be like in a 1000 years, even if humans are still around by then… If there’s one thing I’d be wary of it’s declaring the historically particular (like “markets”) to be universal. I for one would be surprised if Leninism in any form was still around in a thousand years ;)

So, christian_h, Leninism really is the way forward for the American left?

Sympathies. Delong hates even moderately left thought, for reasons he has never stated. I’ve just got tired of it, personally, and have stopped reading him. I think I can add to the list of reasons which the discipline of economics failed so thoroughly is an intense bias against leftist critiques. This led economists not to consider the possibility of robber-baron capitalism in action, even as it stole the wealth of the world.

Regarding the 1000 years issue, I think it’s helpful to separate exchange from “the market”; I personally prefer Polayni’s definition (“A market economy must comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land, and money…to include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market…”) but there are others.

I don’t know if “the market” will actually exist in 1000 years. Assuming humanity is still around and that there isn’t some general technological collapse, once you’re in the nanomachine stage, we’re getting close to the kind of matter materializer end of scarcity that makes Star Trek appealing to the left of the spectrum.

On the greenism issue, I think DeLong is painting too broadly, but he does have a point – without some sort of social component, greenism can lead to troubling outcomes. However, the “reactionary nostalgic agrarian conservatism” is only one small part of this (and yes, I think it’s in there). What worries me more is eco-hipster-capitalism.

He calls out Chomsky for being “dishonest”, but is Delong being honest when he only allows comments that agree with him?

Reading the comments on this post is a reminder of how far to the left so many CT readers are of the contributors. (This is even more true of DeLong.) It raises an interesting question about the blogosphere, why are there so few genuinely left blogs. Sure, there are some barely-read vanity projects, but nothing with remotely the readership of CT or DeLong.

It’s strange, because after 15 years of bouncing around the worlds of progressive politics in the US, I have the strong impression that a large minority of the staff (and a smaller but nontrivial part of the leadership) of US unions, NGOs, community organizations, liberal media (such as it is), and even certain precincts of Democratic politics have some background in left, not liberal, politics — what we might call nondenominational Marxism. But that current hardly seems to be represented in the blog world at all.

Would be nice to think it’s just that most small-c communists have better priorities than pointing out that Someone is Wrong on the Internet. But I suspect there’s something else at work.

I’ve noticed that when I’m critical of Brad on his site, he knocks me out about half the time. He doesn’t seem to care so much about the substance of the critique as the language. If he takes it as a factual correction, he’s usually happy.

But I do agree with Brad on greenism. Left unchecked, it becomes Rousseauvianism. And left unchecked, Rousseau rhymes with Pol Pot.

One of the big divisions on the left is between those who respect Rousseau and those who loathe him. I don’t know anybody who has engaged with Rousseau and isn’t on one of these extremes. Obviously, I’m one of the loathers. Greenery isn’t Rousseau, but it ain’t that far away.

StevenAttewell:

On the greenism issue, I think DeLong is painting too broadly, but he does have a point – without some sort of social component, greenism can lead to troubling outcomes

Just as well, then that greenism has a huge social component, and bases most of its green politics on a foundation of social justice and equality.

Which would explain why “reactionary nostalgic agrarian conservatism” parties, politicans and “thinkers” generally hate greenism more than any other political force except Leninism – which they usually accuse greens of being driven by (except when they’re accusing greens of being amoral atheists who will bring about the next holocaust).

You know, green politicians and activists have written books, and stuff. It’s not hard to work out what green politics is about. Clearly this is beneath deLong, since he can’t distinguish greenism from the politics of some of its main political opponents.

“It’s almost impossible to separate “support Cuba against US embargo” from “support what Castro does.””

That’s awesome. Especially in the context of markets uber alles.

We have a crap definition of markets, and of capitalism. (Of socialism too, though that’s less relevant here). So anything about how markets are important becomes pretty meaningless pretty quick, unless by markets you mean people spend money for things, and that’s not what the market people are or at least tend to be talking about.

Delong is an extreme case of general hostility to the left from US technocrats who ought to know better. The Iraq war was half a wake up call, the crisis another, but the hostility remains, because who wants to look like the stool for the ruling class.

The hostility to greenism (ooh hippies!) is a particular manifestation of the general trend. Left unchecked, Pol Pot! If only my robot body could help me live long enough to say I told you so…..

Don’t forget- Brad also thinks he refuted Foucault [all of him, maybe- it wasn’t so clear] while still an undergrad at Harvard. (He claimed this in an anthology John Holbo edited, I believe. Good stuff.)

That’s hear said. I need better eyesight, and a spell-checker endowed with a more sophisticated AI.

Even a Rousseau-a-phobe like me agrees that he called for “free human nature that would bring about a new era of freedom in civil society.” I just think it happens to call more from human nature than civil society can tolerate. Which pretty much makes him a reactionary agrarian of romantic discontent. ymmv

@34
I understand that walking the walk is considered overrated, showoffy in certain circles.

Delong moderates his comments now because he got caught a few too many times selectively editing comment threads.

JHA

Nobody but Berube cares that someone’s a Jew-hater, or nobody but Berube cares what Chomsky thinks about anything other than sentence transforms?

Steven, yes, there are those conflicts, and the real world often produces conflicts between competing values. But it goes both ways. It is not, or should not be, only a problem for the greens. If supporting labor means supporting a supermarket that is not environmental as opposed to one that is, that should count as a problem for the labor movement as well. The most serious environmental problems are problems of avoiding massive die-offs or civilizational collapse There is no grievance labor has that can justify shrugging this off.

Less theoretical is the problem law enforcement, prison worker, and related unions have created by pushing three strikes laws and the like, at great cost to civil liberties and certain communities. Labor is hardly innocent from pushing their narrow issues at broad net social costs I’m all for a labor movement, but the unions have not always been stalwart either and accounting for competing values applies to them too.

It’s strange, because after 15 years of bouncing around the worlds of progressive politics in the US, I have the strong impression that a large minority of the staff (and a smaller but nontrivial part of the leadership) of US unions, NGOs, community organizations, liberal media (such as it is), and even certain precincts of Democratic politics have some background in left, not liberal, politics—what we might call nondenominational Marxism.

That’s easy: in the case of the American hard left, they are generally idiots. Not in the sense of “they hold a different political opinion from me,” but in the sense that “this guy has no grip on reality.”

And I’ll point out that the cheap trick of “hey look at the CIA” doesn’t really work: people do generally vote for capitalism, with or without the CIA. What percentage of the vote did Allende get, again? (Don’t tell me he got less of the votes than Bush did in 2000!)

@ 48 – The answer to your question is “more than Pinochet.”

Nobody expects the narcissism of small differences.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Myles and Jack Strocchi arguing in a comment thread—forever.

Jim Aune – you’ve already been warned once about insinuating that posters here are anti-Semites. Consider yourself banned – any future comments from you will be deleted on sight. While we certainly do not aspire to BdL’s … vigorous … policies of comment deletion, editing and interpolation, we try to maintain a minimum standard of reasonable debate here.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Myles and Jack Strocchi arguing in a comment thread—forever.

It’s a rare comment that hilarious and terrifying in equal measure.

Change “most of” to “the majority of”

I gave up on DeLong when I realized that not only does he zap comments that disagree with him, he tends to zap good arguments against his position, and leave the bad arguments against his position on his site. I picked this up, btw, from reading right wing blogs who were complaining about critiques against him from the right was disappearing, but I’m sure it applies to criticism from the left.

I’d be happy to be disabused of this impression, but at the moment I have it and it means given my limited time that his site is a little too intellectually sleazy for my tastes.

I dunno, LFC, there’s a lot of competition for ‘single most outrageous foreign policy action the US has taken’, in the lifetime of anyone who can remember 1973. But Myles would always back the right wing dictator, regardless of voting, capitalism or anything else. Damn Chileans deserved the torture, disappearances, looting of their national wealth, huge diaspora, and more, that the US caused. They’d voted for a socialist after all. No penalty too high for that kind of egregious action. 50 years of US embargo, causing untold malnutrition and impoverishment, is too lenient for Cubans after all, and they didn’t even vote for it.

Damn Chileans deserved the torture, disappearances, looting of their national wealth, huge diaspora, and more, that the US caused.

I actually have no position on this, at least not anymore. I am not prepared to make the argument that the coup was justified.

But I think it is perfectly valid to use the 1970 (IIRC) election as an example of people never actually voting for socialism over capitalism, whatever came next.

look at the support for single payer in the US when you take out the dirty-socialism term of “single payer” and call it “Medicare for all” instead.

Again, no position on this. I oppose Obamacare on federalist grounds, but that’s a completely different argument from the one we were having.

work a hell of a lot better for the average person if there were no embargo

Recent Cuban experience seems to demonstrate that insofar as Cuba has improved since the early 90’s economic emergency resulting from the end of massive Soviet subsidies (which, in turn, propped up Cuban communism way past its natural sell-by date), it is because of the hard currency foreign (chiefly European and Canadian) tourists are bringing into Cuba in pursuit of pleasure at the various capitalist enterprises that have been, grudgingly, established in Cuba, such as resorts. So what is killing Cuba, it turns out, isn’t some nonsense about the embargo, but an absence of capitalistic enterprise and resultant hard currency, instead of the current “we’ll-pretend-to-work-and-you’ll-pretend-to-pay-me” equilibrium.

Well StevenAttewell, greenism doesn’t claim a monopoly and I’m not claiming it has one. I’m just responding to your “red line” by pointing out that there are many, and it’s just as easy to cock up your political analysis by obsessing about working people as it is by obsessing about the environment. The labour movement’s record on a whole bunch of social issues is pretty poor, after all.

I do think that greenism has a broader foundation for social justice, and the movement has improved social democracy. If the party of organized labour had listened to greenism, for example, the UK wouldn’t have contributed to the mass murder in Iraq.

And as I said, this stuff has been subject to “serious investigation and assaying.” You wouldn’t know it to read asinine crap like that deLong statement, but there you go. Peter Singer wrote a book about it, maybe deLong could do to study it, if he can bear to read the opinions of a “performance artist.” It’s not hard to find – it’s called The Greens and it was written with the leader of the Australian Greens. Until deLong bothers to study the movement, I think we can safely say he’s not getting at anything remotely sensible, as is clear from every ridiculous word in that ridiculous sentence.

Worth noting that the Greens were very divided on intervention in Libya, with quite a number in favour, and that their party policy, while taking us out of NATO, would maintain a force available “within an international UN-led policing force”. I’d very much in general advise a policy of “please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock’n’roll band” when it comes to trusting any political tendency at all to keep you out of bloody foreign involvements. I kind of fell for Libya myself on the basis of my UNSC obsession.

To conflate political systems (be it capitalism, socialism, whatever) with good or bad things that happen in the world is simply bluster. dont do it or you will relegate yourself to intellectual backwaters.

For example, Allende, a socialist, wins an election and the CIA helps to overthrow him. Pinochet is installed, capitalism reigns supreme, and he kills a bunch of people. Thus, capitalism, foreign intervention by the CIA, and lots of innocent dead bodies are all interwoven into a neat little oppression package that need to be opposed. QED.

first things first. the coup (along with every other coup i can think of) can never be justified. full stop. second, does it really make sense to associate capitalism with the blood on pinochets hands? seriously people, capitalism is about private property and exchange using markets. killing people is about shooting them. I dont see the connection here, but maybe i am missing something. please inform. and if anyone wants to go with the guilt by association argument, you are on very slippery ground.

and i have to ask, whats with the obsession with South America on the left? the world is pretty big and if you have to stick with only one region (really only a portion of this region) to make your theories fit, you should really, really question your theories.

afterall, if people dont vote for capitalism there must be other examples of socialists being voted into power in other parts of the world? did Eastern Europe vote for capitalism or socialism when it finally had the chance to vote? How many countries in Africa are still socialist? what about China and Vietnam, although they dont get to vote, which system do you think they prefer? need i continue?

Alternatively, Myles, you could look at it like this:
Christian democracy is a species of regulated capitalism (as I mentioned social democracy being a form of regulated capitalism). Regulated capitalism isn’t monetarism. To count the Christian Democrat vote, which was pro-capitalist but with caveats, within the monetarist Pinochet vote is disingenuous and dissimulative in the extreme.

Now tell me, how many votes did Pinochet get on his own merits?

Out in the real world, Allende was precisely a social democrat, and faced a lot of opposition from his Left for not being “anti-capitalist”. Painting Allende as some kind of cross between Saint-Just and Pol Pot serves no useful purpose other than delegitimating the Left and conflating the many different varieties of Right. And most people wouldn’t regard that as useful, either.

And back on ‘almost’ and Cuba – you conceded that it is possible to separate “support Cuba against US embargo” from “support what Castro does”, although you strongly implied that it isn’t. Could you commit yourself to one side of that question or the other? (Skip to the end: I think there’s a “those people” argument lurking here – i.e. you may oppose the embargo for good reason, but lots of those people oppose it because they’re crazy and/or evil, and it’s those people I was talking about. Which is fine as long as there are some of “those people” around (so we’re not just mouthing off about people we happen to hate), and as long as you can identify them (and their crazy evilness) by tests entirely distinct from “opposing the embargo”.)

Somehow, the criticisms of DeLong’s schtick remind of the old Woody Allen joke about guests conversing over dinner about the food at a Catskills resort: one guest says, “the food here is terrible” and her companion replies agreeably, “yes, and there’s so little of it”. DeLong is engaged constantly in that sort of cordial and incoherent controversy, where a vague agreement of sentiment or attitude floats over a sharp, but inconsequential logical contradiction. Incoherence of this sort — if “incoherence” is the right word? — characterizes both DeLong’s relationship with his liberal fans and his relationship to conservative-libertarian-Republican economists, with whom he chooses to “debate”.

The liberal fans respond mostly to the pose of righteous attitude — “finally, an economist who validates liberal or partisan-Democrat tribalist points-of-view”! — while DeLong structures his controversies along Catskills lines: agreeing with the general, vague sentiment (“ain’t market economies grand?” — the general neo-liberal pose), while taking note of the logical contradiction. (In the abstract, you can see a contradiction in complaining the restaurant is serving bad food, and too little of the bad food — ha, ha — but really the folks are agreeing that they would prefer the combination of more, good food. Abstract distinctions, popular as they may be with theorists, do not always imply mutually exclusive sets of objects in the real world, eh?)

The truth is that DeLong is pretty far to the Right, describing himself, variously, as an Eisenhower Republican and as a neo-liberal. (For those keeping score, neo-liberals are not actually liberal. Shocking, I know.) He disguises it to a degree, by taking a partisan Democratic line, and projecting a bad attitude, while pointing out the logical contradictions embedded in the carping criticisms emitted on the Right. But, just as Woody Allen’s Catskills diners were in sentimental agreement, despite the logical contradiction embedded in their diverse complaints considered abstractly, so DeLong is in substantive, sentimental agreement with, say, Greg Mankiw or Tyler Cowen, even when he quibbles. He agrees with them that market economies tend to deliver a technologically-determined and presumptively efficient distribution of, and/or growth in income, and that left to its own sponteneous ordering, economies tend to an equilibrium or a growth path, which has certain Panglossian properties (even if the Philistines cannot observe the optimal goodness close up). None of his logical quibbles are motivated by curiousity about whether such a sentiment can be reconciled with either a functional analysis of how economies must operate, or disciplined observation of how the mechanisms of specific and actual economies do operate.

I know this is obvious, but, of course, DeLong is far fiercer with his Left, because, if he ever engaged respectfully with anyone even a little bit to his own Left, he, himself, would no longer be Left. And, if he ever departed from abstract quibbling over distinctions without a difference, and took up a functional analysis of how the economy operates, he’d reveal himself to be an exemplar of the Dunning-Krueger effect so pervasive among “orthodox” economists, as idiotically ignorant in his own way as the Chicago clowns (e.g Casey Mulligan of the mass-impulse-to-vacation theory of recessions) he likes to ridicule. DeLong holding Friedman up as an exemplary economist, allegedly embarassing to current Chicago School acolytes — a favorite trope for DeLong — serves many purposes, none of them the least favorable to a humane politics or a rational, evidence-based economics.

It seems to me that the continental divide between Left and Right in economics, at least, ought to lie along a boundary confounding twin concerns: One, being the distribution of income, and its effects on the functioning of the economy, and the other being the tension between allocational and technical efficiency, administrative planning and institutional regulatory controls on the one side and market de-coupling and prices on the other.

I’m not referring to the advocacy for more or less equal distribution of income, or more or less planning and regulatory intervention, which are always proper topics of political controversy. I’m referring to economics, as a “scientific” discipline tasked with a functional analysis of, say, how bureaucratic organization competes with, and complements, “market organization” in a more-or-less de-centralized and loosely-coupled economy; how institutions, as social mechanism can and do structure such an economy, and how the distribution of income actually affects production, growth and output. The orthodoxy of orthodox economics is all about denying that the other half of the continent exists: only allocational efficiency and market organization is considered a proper topic for “professional” economists, and it is magically and abstractly assumed to exist quite apart from any instituional shell of structure and support (absent a canonical catalog of market failures); and the distribution of income is a given outcome of market process, so that any political intervention violates market efficiency and is necessarily a “re”-distribution (and presumptively, a re-distribution downward in the class hierarchy, in which the claims of justice are opposed to efficiency).

Anyway, my hypothesis would be that what arouses Brad DeLong to reject most of the Left so harshly has less to do with the continuum of concerns about income distribution and regulation in the realm of politics, which are, always, practically, matters of degree and local, incremental reform, and more to do with the threat the Left’s concerns pose to professional economic orthodoxy. The Left’s desire for a more egalitarian distribution of income, more social insurance, more regulatory intervention, collective planning, and protection of the commons, creates an implicit demand for an economics capable of rationalizing those desires into a political program, which means an economics, which treats bureaucracy as a more important economic institution, in purely functional terms, than markets (which they are, in fact), treats a shortage of social insurance as a potential impediment to economic growth, and worries that economic relationships (putatively “market” relationships) can be predatory and destructive.

It is not as if the core of economics doesn’t have any ideas, which are relevant — tragedy of the commons, the importance of insurance and risk in the analysis of incentives, externalities, technical ideas about fiscal and monetary policy, etc. — but orthodox economics deliberately parses away in theory and ignores empirically “half the continent” of the economy. The Corporation — giant business bureaucracies that dominate the economy — scarcely exists in the imaginations of orthodox economists like DeLong. The Market is the defining characteristic of their imagined economy, but hardly matters in much of the real, actual economy. Keynesian theory is an elaborate kludge of handwaving, to disguise the central role of the distribution of income in the performance of the macro-economy; yes, Virginia, a predatory concentration of income by financialization can wreck the economy just as surely as too much naive or utopian Marxist idealism.

For DeLong to engage with the Left respectfully and productively would expose DeLong as a professional incompetent and ignoramus, who did not know much of anything relevant. He doesn’t know anything about administrative efficiency — it’s never more than a black box in his imagination. He doesn’t know much that’s useful about the predatory potential of financial institutions, as economic mechanisms; they’re “assumed” to be efficient in some minimal informational sense; beyond that he knows less than the average taxi driver.

As long as he is engaging with shameless hacks, dedicated to Randian eccentricities, DeLong is the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. It is heady stuff. But, engaging with the Left — even with not particularly smart representatives — means exposing his own abject professional incompetence and ignorance, because engaging with the Left on the kinds of issues the Left, almost by definition, is most concerned with — institution-building, administrative efficiency, protection and preservation of the commons, investment in public goods, etc. — tends to carry the conversation into areas about which orthodox economists like Brad DeLong know next to nothing, or know things that are obviously irrelevant or patently untrue.

In a debate with someone to his left, Brad is just another one-eyed chap, suffering under the handicap of not being able to employ stereoscopic vision to maintain perspective.

Engaging to his Left, exposes DeLong to a deep realization of professional inadequacy and feelings of shame, which he tries to trump and banish with the psychological defense of manufactured anger. It’s pathetic, really. We should feel sorry for him.

Scarcity does not necessarily entail markets; see allocation of organs for transplant, for example.

That example sort of undermines your argument, Henri, since it shows that even in areas where a market response to scarcity is explicitly illegal a market will still develop; as it has done with organ transplantation.

Well, at the same token, where market mechanism is explicitly enforced, a non-market response will develop too: people shoplift. And loot, whenever they get a chance. What does it prove?

Thankfully, they don’t.

About $30 billion/year in the US, sez google.

Capitalism is not “markets”. No real shock there, but it gets lost when people go on about how great markets are. Ownership and control etc.

“Thankfully, they don’t. Most people don’t shoplift most of the time, (or loot), despite the fact that most shoplifters get away with it. Those who shoplift (or loot, in the relevant situations) are, thankfully, a small minority.”

But those who procure human organs on the black market are, thankfully, a small minority too.

Capitalism is not “markets”. No real shock there, but it gets lost when people go on about how great markets are. Ownership and control etc.

of course. The two sufficient conditions for the existence of markets (not capitalism) are: (1) private property and (2) people. thats it. I cant think of any society that doesnt meet these two conditions. the problem as I see it is that people use the word ‘market’ as some catchall to describe the things they dont like, when they really should be talking about the implications of markets (for example, the tendency towards oligopoly in many industries, income inequality, child labour, the slave trade, etc) and not their existence.

@tomslee 14. I submit to the Medium Lobster. DeLong’s a dishonest hack who can’t write his way out of a paper bag.

I am totally puzzled by Brad DeLong’s nastiness toward Chris Bertram since they have the same exact politics. Could it be some kind of turf war over who is best qualified to speak for pinkish liberalism? I seem to remember George Packer writing a vicious review of Mark Danner’s latest book in the NY Times. Could it be something like that?

Since the original phrase was “markets are an indispensable part of any complex economy”, I think it’s fair to ask whether markets would not merely exist but continue to be indispensable 1000 years from now.

@88-90: the fact that markets can exist even when they aren’t officially sanctioned seems to me pretty relevant to the question of how sure we can be that they’ll exist in some form in 1000 years. Barring some pretty serious genetic engineering, they’re highly likely to spring up somewhere whether society wants them to or not, and therefore, they will exist. (Provided, I guess, that there is a society of human beings, or some other species capable of market-like behavior, at all.)

Of course, that’s not the same thing as saying society will be market-based in 1000 years in the same senses that it is market-based today — that’s a much more uncertain prediction.

Michael, I would say you are exactly taking the tautological path, defining markets as encompassing every economic transaction. Which is useful for some contexts, but not for others. In this sense, you could describe communism as a monopsonic market for labour combined with a monopolistic market for capital, and call the Soviet Union a market economy. That’s not completely silly, but it’s not what people use the words “market economy” for.

In the same sense, when people want to “introduce the market” in some previously government administrated function, they do not mean that the government should start paying for stuff. That is usually already the case, they mean more than that.

And not even every private transaction is part of a market. A market is an institute, traditionally a geographical place even, where the same or similar transactions take place repeatedly. So buyers and sellers know where to go (literally or more abstract) for a transaction they are considering. And where they can observe the conditions of other transactions, including market prices. It doesn’t to be anything like an economist’s ‘perfect’ market, but it has to be more than just a single one-off transaction.

If you want to buy or sell something (relatively) unique, then there is no market, in some sense of the word market. When my neighbour pays me money in return for extending his shed on my land, then our transaction is purely private and not part of a market. My department “buys” services from our financial and supporting departments, but there is no market for these services within our company, just fixed transactions. When an industrial plant buys spare parts from the original supplier of their equipment, they are not buying on the market.

Of course, in our societies such transactions take place within a larger social framework that does contain markets in any sense of the word, and the possible transactions on those markets influence the tranaction outside of the market and vice versa. And the stronger that interaction, the more a tranaction becomes part of the market. It’s more a gradual thing of “marketness” than a sharp cut-off. But if you define markets widely, as including every kind of transaction, then you’re destroying a lot of the usefulness of the concept.

That wasn’t CB’s original point. Also, what Zamfir said.

I don’t understand what your point is, ajay. Should I insist that iPhones are not allocated by a market mechanism because some of them get stolen from the stores, factories, and during delivery, and because Steve Jobs and other Apple salesmen probably give a lot of then for free, as a gift? What am I missing?

Should I insist that iPhones are not allocated by a market mechanism because some of them get stolen from the stores, factories, and during delivery, and because Steve Jobs and other Apple salesmen probably give a lot of then for free, as a gift?

ISTM that this proves that they are allocated by a combination of market and non-market mechanisms, not by either one alone. Of course in this specific case the market allocations predominate, but both do in fact coexist.

It’s in that sense that even if markets may not predominate as a means of allocating goods and services in 1000 years, they will very likely coexist with whatever means does predominate.

dsquared 73: Most people’s memories are so short. The Greens were big supporters of the Kosovo war in 1999, especially the German Green party that was then junior partner of the SPD government. A conservative government probably couldn’t have pulled the stunt of German bombers bombing Belgrade again with impunity. That’s what “progressive” parties are needed for. Depressive stuff.

I can’t help but get the feeling that people like Brad Delong are not on my side. That is the side of the unionized, middle class worker. Then again, who is on the side of the unionized, middle class worker?

i cant believe i dont have anything better to do than debate the definition of markets. but se la vi.

christian_h, you claim to know how language works. then i suppose you are familiar with a dictionary. go there or http://www.dictionary.com and look up the definition of ‘market.’ you will find only one definition relevant to our discussion and its the definition i use.

perhaps i was a bit too generous when i said many people use the term to mean other things. its not many, its only a few, but some of their representatives are here today.
if a few people want to twist its definition, thats their problem, not mine.
and i will repeat my previous part and that is people are conflating the implications of a market with the market itself. if you want to talk about market implications, great, but you will regulate yourself to intellictual sidelines if you try to change the definition of the market.

The dictionary, Michael? Seriously?

this is getting funny. lets keep going.

The dictionary, Michael? Seriously?

a dictionary is where i get my definitions from. apparently not everyone else does. but you can learn a lot about how things are defined if you look in the dictionary. the word ‘market’ for instance can be found there. if you look it up, you will then learn what a market is (and by implication, what it is not).

i still think that the main problem is conflating the outcomes and implications of a market with what the market actually is. these are different just as a car and where it takes you are not the same thing. if someone wants to redefine ‘car’ to mean where it takes you or how fast you drive or if you get in an accident or not, fine, but people will slowly step away from you because they will think you have gone crazy. same goes for people who dont want to admit what a market is.

as for roger, my comment you quote was to a comment by christian_h, not Bruce, but thats a minor point. nevertheless, my point about Bruce’s comment was that economics is quite heterogeneous in terms of the topics they study and some of his concerns (income inequality, etc) are in fact taken up by economists, but the evidence is inconclusive.

#71-74
Don’t get the rock’n’roll band reference though…
It’s from the City half of Manchester. To be honest, you’re better off not knowing.

Joschka Fischer is an interesting guy. Everyone remembers his showdown with Rumsfeld. He sussed out the Bush people as cack-handed nationalists. The liberal internationalists around Blair, tossing themselves off to box sets of The West Wing, chose to make fools of themselves instead.
Outside Germany, however, the fact that Fischer sent German troops across the border for the first time since 1945 gets less attention. At the grass roots, the Green movement is generally pacifist. Once you get to the level Fischer reached, liberal internationalism isn’t a bad summary of the Green approach. Not that this necessarily entails bombing cities. But as we’ve seen, it’s not a bar to it either.

Dictionaries simply reflect empirical use of terms, Michael. In economic sociology, the definition of the market that is most used was devised by Harrison White, who defined markets as ‘self-reproducing social structures among specific cliques of firms and other actors who evolve roles from observing each others behavior.”

Your definition about markets extends the market definition to the breaking point. We, for instance, have just exchanged information. We could easily assign price conditions to this exchange in terms of number of replies. But I don’t think we are engaged in a market transaction. Of course, Gary Becker would beg to differ, but then, as Bruce said, there are a number of definitions – my Webster’s nineth gives me four of them.

I think Zamfir’s right. Sporadic trade between European explorers and Native Americans did not constitute a “market.” Irregularity, low turnover, etc. did not allow for movement of prices towards their centers of attraction (hence the famous beads-for-Manhattan deal, or whatever it was.)

You could make an analogy to the equilibration of a physical system (e.g. two gases when a dividing wall is removed), but this is a little misleading. Markets don’t arise strictly from the isolated actions of individuals. They have an embedding institutional and cultural framework that circumscribes and regulates activity. Historically, most societies with markets (medieval Europe, the Roman Empire) were not capitalist: market exchange did not provide the raison d’etre for most production, nor were markets in land or labor well developed. (SteveAtwell referenced Polayni in the comment that started this tangent)

@ Bruce Wilder 79 The punchline is “and such small portions.” Never let the goyim tell Catskills jokes. Oh hey, look, I’m doing my part to patrol for anti-semitism on the blog!
Assuming, of course, that butchering one of the oldest Jewish jokes in the annals is anti-Semtism. Given what American Jews think about humor and religion, I would say that stepping on the punchline is at least equivalent to burning an old testament or spitting on a Torah. So yeah, defending against anti-Semitisim.

(Insert appropriate movie clip from My Favorite Year here).

All of this tautology about markets essentially boils down to: “it’s a market when it has good effects and a non-market when it doesn’t.” Polanyi (and, I suppose, Wittgenstein) tore this kind of intellectual dishonesty up long, long ago.

I actually think that the ongoing mis-understanding between Bertram and De Long is kind of edifying. Bertram partly associates to the left for tribalist reasons (which I presume is the only reason you can vote Labour after Blair and claim that you are to the left with a straight face) while De Long primarily associates to the left for instrumentalist reasons. Bertram is (rightly, I think) suspicious about instrumentalists ulterior motives – they are the kind of people that may start to support neo-liberal policies if they become convinced that a rising tide can raise all boats, equality be damned , while a true leftist think of equality as a non-negotiable moral position. De Long, on the other hand, think of Bertram as the kind of leftist that can sell out genuine progress for identity politics.

I think that they both may have a point, but would prefer that they debate this explicitly, rather than engaging in this rather undignified sniping.

Myles @118: force him to gradually make recompense for his past wrongs

Myles, you nitwit (I say that affectionately — you’ve given us many entertaining moments here at CT), have you considered how much each citizen of the US and UK would owe to his country’s innumerable historical victims if this principle were applied universally? Have you even considered that perhaps some of that property that nasty old Castro expropriated was acquired wrongly — not unlikely, considering the condition of Cuban society under Batista and long before? (See The Godfather, part 2, for extensive documentation.)

Geo, that was priceless. I’m reminded of something not quite so tongue-in-cheek:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

By all means, Myles, let’s compensate Confederate latifundistas for the loss of property emancipated during the War of Northern Aggression.

Myles:

My argument isn’t actually the “some people” one.

What is it, then? Your comment makes it clear that it is possible to support the lifting of the embargo without being a Castro supporter, since you do and aren’t. In that case, why link opposing the embargo and supporting Castro at all – unless it’s that you’re working on the principle that you have your views for good reasons, whereas some people…

have you considered how much each citizen of the US and UK would owe to his country’s innumerable historical victims if this principle were applied universally?

I’m aware of it, but I would argue that Cuba is an exceptional case where ex factis jus oritur can’t necessarily apply. For here, the U.S. has genuinely pledged, in one way or another, perhaps in an unwritten way, to guarantee the rights and privileges of the Cuban exiles in Miami. It has a duty to see this through, just as Canada has a duty to observe understandings Great Britain, its predecessor state, had with the Native tribes (as it actually does

why link opposing the embargo and supporting Castro at all

I can’t see how one could justifiably support lifting the embargo without making appropriate recompense to the Cuban exiles, whose claims would be physically nullified by the act of ending the embargo. I haven’t see anyone advocating linking the two, and I think lifting the embargo is not worth the bother unless the two are linked. I am not terribly keen on legitimatizing the Castro revolution.

By all means, Myles, let’s compensate Confederate latifundistas for the loss of property emancipated during the War of Northern Aggression.

IIRC Great Britain, when it liberated the slaves in the British Empire (save for a few locations), made appropriate compensation to their former owners. I don’t see why the Union could not have done the same. I am not so much concerned with how much the ex-owners deserve, as I am with the destruction of capital inherent in the absence of compensation, and perhaps more importantly, the instability for financial and capital mechanisms which undergird the economy (and, per Richard Pipes, the society more broadly, the sophistication of the legal system being a function of the sophistication of property ownership).

And in ref. to Godfather II: the concept we are working with here in Cuba is basically seisin. The people whose property Castro took away have seisin.

“I am with the destruction of capital inherent in the absence of compensation”

Myles do you realize that when you refer to freeing slaves as “the destruction of capital” it makes you sound like an awful, awful person?

The Cuban revolution is hardly the only case where someone has lost property. I imagine quite a few people did in China in the late forties, but there is no Chinese embargo.

And opposition to the embargo is also found on the right as well, even in the USA. Realists will point out that it doesn’t work. Libertarians will ask why the government should decide who they can trade with. But I doubt they support Castro.

“I am merely stating the truth. While freeing slaves is commendable, if you don’t make compensation you are going to seriously destabilize the capital structure of the economy, and prevent appropriate future investments, because the people who would have taken the money and invested in more productive activities than slavery wouldn’t have had the capital to do so.”
So basically you ARE an awful, awful person. I mean we can’t let a little something like freedom get in the way of efficient markets can we?

The economic conditions of ex-slaves in the South wasn’t the result of the successful establishment of a white supremacy but rather because the North failed to give the white supremacist the money they needed to created a thriving economy in which the ex-slaves would have benefited because, you know, capitalism abhors racism. Odd argument.

Oh, I forgot to mention: also, you could take the same amounts of money and give them away as a lottery. You still have an investor class, it’s just composed of different people. Again, the macroeconomic effect is the same.

Myles: “The people whose property Castro took away have seisin.”

Is there any particular reason you’re using the archaic “seisin” instead of “legal ownership” or some similar term? The Cuban exiles have seisin to exactly the extent they can get such a right enforced, no more and no less. How is the “seisin” of a Cuban exile any different from the “seisin” of a Taiwanese whose property was expropriated by the Chinese Communist Party?

“IIRC Great Britain, when it liberated the slaves in the British Empire (save for a few locations), made appropriate compensation to their former owners. I don’t see why the Union could not have done the same.”

Provided you realize that “appropriate compensation” was an amount unilaterally determined by the UK government, not through any market mechanism, and presented to the slaveowners on the basis of “accept this or get nothing when we free your slaves anyway”, you are correct about the UK case. A significant amount of “capital” was still “destroyed” since the slaveowners did not receive nearly the amount their slaves had been worth in the pre-emancipation slave markets.

The US offered similar compensation to slaveowners in the non-seceding slave states. All those states turned it down, so the owners got nothing. There is no reason to think the slaveowners of the CSA-joining states would have behaved any differently.

But, chris, wouldn’t you be making a moral decision about the people who owned that capital? Surely we don’t want the gov’t making moral judgments? After all, it was just the enslavement of four milli…er, hang on, I’ve got a John Birch meeting to run to.

Michael: there is no connection [between capitalism and the blood on Pinochet’s hands]

What? That is possibly the weirdest thing I’ve read in this thread. The blood was precisely spilled in the defense of capitalist property relations. Beyond Chile in 1973 it is historical fact that capitalism and its inherent tendency to reproduce itself in an ever-expanding geographical space has led to massive amounts of blood on people’s hands. The only way you can claim otherwise is by making another one of your arguments-by-definition and declaring capitalism to merely be an abstract, as opposed to a historical process of societal organization.

Now you might claim that capitalism does not necessarily have to lead to oppression, colonial and imperial warfare, etc. (although I’d say you would be wrong if you argued that) – in the same way I’d argue that revolutionary socialism does not have to use “red terror” and end in the Gulag. Or you could argue that whatever blood has been spilled in the construction and reproduction of capitalism was justified from a historical perspective, or a matter of excesses and misunderstandings associated with any process revolutionizing social and economic relations. (This is what I would argue about the red terror, but not the gulag.)

But claiming that all the spilling of blood was in no way connected to capitalism is quite simply laughable.

@76 Yes, I believe he was called on that in the comments to his Ian Morris post. I, too, could be putting away the books like a dervish if ‘reading a book’ meant ‘reading a fraction of a book, then taking your interpretation of it to be a more authoritative source on what it says than the text itself.’

What I think happened here is he was stung to see his belief system categorised and relativised along these lines, because he likes to think of it not only as ‘the most true’, but somehow ‘the most truthist’, so methodologically incommensurable with all others due to its inherently superior integrity.

Myles, would this solution satisfy you? The slaves are freed and given all the legal rights of others, but privately the former slaveholders decline to do business with them of any kind unless they work off the “debt” imputed to them according to the presumption that they, more or less personally, harmed the former slaveholders by removing their once rightful property from them. Let’s call it . . . Jim Crow. What do you think?

Also, Myles, in today’s world, the punishment for, say, owning and exploiting other human beings may very well result in the expropriation of capital. Are you saying that any form of monetary or property punishment should be totally taken off the books to ensure economic efficiency, even if the expropriated capital could be given to, say, the victims and they could then use it to invest? Your account completely leaves out the notion of punishment, except, of course, for communist pigs like Castro. Let’s say that he can be considered the owner of most Cuban industries – so he acquired it by force, just as slaves are acquired. So when democracy and capitalism come to Cuba, should he be paid the cash value of all that industry. Seriously, dude.

“In every case of decolonization someone lost property.”

Not to mention every case of colonization.

Ah, but, Henry, this

“While freeing slaves is commendable, if you don’t make compensation you are going to seriously destabilize the capital structure of the economy, and prevent appropriate future investments, because the people who would have taken the money and invested in more productive activities than slavery wouldn’t have had the capital to do so.”

pretty much wins the internetz, no? I have to assume “Myles” is taking the piss, and/or constructing a cruel, cruel parody of Austrianism.

btw I though Watson Ladd @38 was smart. More Rousseau blogging, please.

The blood was precisely spilled in the defense of capitalist property relations.

So let me get this straight. Pinochet killed his political opponents (including their famalies (i.e women and children)) because the proletriat were complaining that the bourgeois was sticking it to them? Oh, now I get it.

Its a virtual law that dictators are douchebags and they almost always execute their political opponents after taking power. Their economic ideology and the ideology of their opponents are irrelevant. Just look at the data. pinochet the capitalist kills socialists. Castro and Che the socialists killed the capitalists. China after their revolution killed everybody. Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, Iran, Iraq, idi amin, basically any middle eastern leader. Need i continue? Its pretty easy.

The point is that if some douchdbag murdering dictators are capitalists and others are socialist, their political ideology probably has nothing to do with it. Its because they are douchebags.

I think Delong’s prejudices are because he has internalized the belief system conducive to professional advancement in his field, more than his personal class background. His intellectual training has largely been directed towards this end, after all, particularly in the era he received it. Criticism from the left stings because he professes similar ideals, but holds that realities make stronger leftism than his impossible or counter-productive to implement. Since he does not disavow the general values of the left, he has to hit hard on their grasp of reality and their honesty. To the right, he can grant more on realism or honesty because he can make his case on values.

Phil,

Myles is a troll. You highlight in your bold text a salient structure of troll argumentation. In fact, he’s such a suberb and masterful troll that no one in some 170 some comments has pointed this out. Nor in many of the other threads I’ve seen him infect on this site and elsewhere. I haven’t seen trolling of his quality (and disruptiveness–just note how he dominates every single discussion he enters into) since the glory days of Slashdot in the late 90’s and early 00’s. DNFTT.

The offenses for which Chilean and Argentine dictators killed people were belonging to leftist parties and organizations, so yes, the reason for these political killings was precisely “because the proletriat were complaining that the bourgeois was sticking it to them.” It couldn’t be clearer. Why would that even be controversial. Question mark. Marxism, or advocating the interests of the proletarian, was the explicit, named enemy of those regimes.

My 174 to sg’s 172.

I wonder if the Myles method is in line with this…

…perhaps the most interesting counter-example to the twin virtues of sincerity and accuracy was proposed by the sociologist Steve Fuller, who has been widely condemned for suggesting that intelligent design theory merits a hearing. Many of Fuller’s colleagues know he is a smart guy and can’t understand why he persists with this kind of argument. The answer is perhaps to be found in a piece he wrote in the spring 2008 edition of The Philosopher’s Magazine explaining his modus operandi. The idea that one should always say what one truly believes is narcissistic nonsense, he argued. The role of the intellectual is to say what they think needs saying most at any given time in a debate, not to bear testimony to their deepest convictions.

Without, perhaps, the sense of timing.

I don’t understand 100 percent of B. Wilder’s comment at 79 but I think I follow most of it, and one question I’d have for Wilder, Lemuel Pitkin et al. is: which economists do you consider exemplars of what Wilder calls a “rational, evidence-based economics” (which he contrasts with “orthodox” economics)?

Secondly, ISTM a bit problematic to suggest, as Wilder does, that ‘political’ differences between so-called orthodox economists on questions of, say, regulation or inequality are trivial since all of them adhere to the same basic intellectual framework. I don’t really agree with that. It’s not unlike saying, for example, that liberal Democrats who opposed the Vietnam war before ’68 were just like liberal Democrats who supported the war b/c, after all, they were all liberal Democrats.

I agree with you entirely Barry, except that sometimes I enjoy feeding the troll to see just how outrageously it will act in return for its food. This one is a consummate performer.

If CT had a specified DNFTT policy I would definitely comply, though.

Martin,

I think that is a very thoughtful reply and that in remarkable way you’ve brought it full circle; it seems to me that you could substitute “Brad De Long” for “Myles” in what you wrote.

Lemuel Pitkin @164 It seems that this is a game I can’t win. If (as some have argued is the case with DeLong) I’m harder on those to my left than those to my right, that’s obviously because I’m displaying my true sympathies. And, conversely, if I’m harder on those on the right (as you graciously concede in my case), that’s just covering up the absence of any real differences. Float or sink, witchcraft is proved in either case.

The offenses for which Chilean and Argentine dictators killed people were belonging to leftist parties and organizations, so yes, the reason for these political killings was precisely “because the proletriat were complaining that the bourgeois was sticking it to them.” It couldn’t be clearer.

sorry, i disagree. The innocent victims of his regime (how can children be killed because of their political ideology?) were killed because they were his political opponents and threatened his power. Their political disposition was irrelevant. I can easily imagine pinochet cutting the heads off of anyone who stood in his way. In the case of Chile, those standing in his way were socialists. But its the standing in his way part that is the cause. In other words, correlation does not imply causation. I learned that in the fourth grade.

If one wants to assert that pinochet was motivated his political disposition and not for pure power reasons, the same has to hold true for castro and che. The victims of that regime were capitalist supported by the US. Does this mean socialism was the cause of the murders? Hardly.

It is morally inept to talk about some victims and not others, dont you think? Why do people on the left talk about the victims of pinochet ad nauseum but leave the discussion of the victims of castro or mao on the sidelines? Now there are some questions political ideology can explain.

‘The innocent victims of his regime (how can children be killed because of their political ideology?) were killed because they were his political opponents and threatened his power. Their political disposition was irrelevant.’

How can someone be a political enemy if their political disposition is irrelevant?

Henri, I’m not saying Myles doesn’t make moralistic arguments; just that his argument on compensating former slaveowners is not. I’m evaluating the argument, not the person.

how can children be killed because of their political ideology?

seems a very naive question.

Oh, and

If one wants to assert that pinochet was motivated his political disposition and not for pure power reasons, the same has to hold true for castro and che. The victims of that regime were capitalist supported by the US. Does this mean soc1alism was the cause of the murders?

Yes, absolutely, in the sense that the errors and crimes of sozialist regimes pose really hard questions for anyone who calls themself a sozialist. This is one of the main reasons why organised Marxists have historically formed so many different groups – alignment to the USSR, alignment to how the USSR used to be, repudiation of the USSR and alignment with Mao’s China, repudiation of Mao’s China and alignment with Cuba, and so on. We on the Left are generally very well aware of the many imperfections of actually-existing sozialist regimes, and we would get on a lot better if the Right would stop belabouring us with them. It’s as if I decide to wear a pair of old but comfortable shoes to the shops, and halfway there I’m stopped in the street and harangued – “Comfortable shoes, are they? Ah, but are they new? Not very new? Isn’t that a bit of an understatement? Quite old, now we’re getting somewhere – so, you admit that they’re quite old? You don’t deny it?”

his absolute cluelessness about what it means to be an object, rather than a subject of history’s attentions.

Being the object of someone’s attention is exactly the same as being the subject of their attention.

Thus: when I put up the DND sign on my hotel room door, the cleaner who’s due to come in the next morning is the subject of my attentions.

‘I’m in favour of as big a tent as possible… Those keen on reading a blog that’s pur et dur can always surf over to Leninology (as I sometimes do myself).’

I’m sure the washed up, marginal, authoritarian and unappealing Left will be flattered!

I was just making a cheap gag. I think the original counterposition was clumsily phrased – the idea seems to be more that DeLong sees himself as being among History’s movers and shakers (subjects) and has little empathy with those of us who are mostly getting moved and shaken.

#200: it’s an Edward Said thing I think – some people being “objects” and some being “subjects” is a big thing in some areas of critical theory.

You know, being on the left means you are surrounded by annoying motherfuckers. I don’t know what it’s like being on the right, so maybe it’s the same way, though I do sometimes wonder if we’d be more successful if we weren’t so goddamn annoying. Every intra-left argument I’ve heard in my entire life proceeds in the exact same way. One tendency, exemplified by Brad on his blog, is to call anyone to your left hopelessly unrealistic and possibly crazy. The other tendency, exemplified by Lemuel on this thread, is to argue that there’s a surprisingly small amount of distance between anyone to your right and Francisco Franco. Apparently the only two historical roles any of us aspire to are either Beatrice Webb visiting the Soviet Union, or Albert Speer. I’m sure these arguments are terribly exciting, and allow everyone involved their Recommended Daily Allowance of self-righteousness, but I’m ready for something new.

Bounded agency certainly: as a subject you have certain rights and liberties, and the king can’t — in law, anyway — just do as he pleases to you. The king’s objects aren’t so lucky.

Meanwhile, you puzzle over the fact that your ideal leftist blogger is either non-existent or unreadably boring, and so you’re stuck with reading CT instead. I have some ideas as to why this is.

Touché. Altho to be fair, the “unreadable vanity project” link was to my own blog.

Anyway, here’s my question: what are your substantive differences, then, with someone like Summers? Not the differences in life course, which are clear enough (and favor you), or the obvious & important fact that you’re here having this conversation. But the points of disagreement in economic theory and policy, or political vision?

Walt:
It is like that old George Carlin bit about how anyone going a mph slower than you on the highway is a moron and anybody going a mph faster is a lunatic.

There is a great deal of valuable land along the USA’s eastern seaboard, once the property of Tories who departed, hurriedly, between 1774 and 1783, whom the American government (under the Articles of Confederation) promised, in the Treaty of Paris, to compensate. Neither that government nor its successor under the US Constitution has followed through on that promise, and the United Empire Loyalists have been keeping track of what the USA owes its exiles (plus interest).

I’ve worked in real estate, did title searches in my home town that began with “Auctioned by the Provincial Congress to Mr. X in 1777”.

There is a point at which declaring ‘a good title through adverse possession’ is the _conservative_ position, at which restoring the property arrangements of the old regime becomes a radical upheaving of society.

Anyway, it has been suggested, by some fairly right-wing economists, that judging the recompense for expropriated property should start at the assessed value, for property tax purposes, under the old regime – if the former owners had undervalued their land in order to evade their share of their tax burden, ’tis just to make them live by that valuation now.

Alright, this is actually absurd (as opposed to just being disingenuous):

because freeing slaves was done to please MPAVictoria’s “delicate moral fee-fees,” not because they were, you know, slaves, or anything…

Somehow, in your mind, “freeing slaves” becomes the same thing as “paying compensation to slaveowners after slaves have been freed by force”; this is all without noticing that the whole question of whether or not to pay compensation is completely dependent on the slaves being freed in the first place. In the case of the Ameircan South, without the freedom of the ex-slaves, the question of compensation wouldn’t exist.

So say this ridiculous smear smacks of bad faith would be a very great understatement. Why don’t do you right out and think that every person who disagrees with you is a pro-slaver? I wouldn’t be half so surprised, given the surfeit of non-sequiturs in your insinuations.

Oh, and Barry Freed and Emma in Sydney are fully encouraged to continue their mutual ego-massage.

Chris (Bertram), I’m not sure what you expect, but if you call people names they might not feel any need to be particularly nice about it. This even more so when the name-calling is merely a collection of tiresome clichees that are fairly obviously disconnected from reality. (It wasn’t your vague “eco-left” that defeated the poll tax, to give just one example – without the organizing work by various “tired, washed-up, authoritarian” revolutionary socialist organizations it would not have happened.) If you dish it out you should me able to take it – anything else is making you look whiny and entitled.

What I wonder is why you are apparently unable to see that you behave exactly like De Long does (disclaimer: this is not to say you share his politics).

Michael, the fact that a revolutionary change in social relations usually goes along with massive violence does not absolve the perpetrators of that violence from guilt, any more than growing up in an abusive household excuses the acts of a rapist. Why would anyone think so? This doesn’t change the fact that the violence is a consequence of political processes.

Phil, simple:

Yes, absolutely, in the sense that the errors and crimes of sozialist regimes pose really hard questions for anyone who calls themself a sozialist. .

If I am reading it wrong, please let me know. I am serious. I do not knowingly try to misrepresent other people’s words.

I guess you mean some of their actions are errors (such as inefficient policies) and some are crimes (such as killing people)? The quote your were using from me to set the context of your comments above only referenced crimes, so I read “errors” to refer to some of those crimes. I think this is a reasonable reading, but I evidently this is incorrect. Fair enough. It wouldnt be the first time a comment wasnt given fair play on a message board.

Michael @ 86: “economics is defined more by its method (optimality, behaviour at the margin, etc) than its subject matter”

Yes, it is. And, that’s a problem, as roger @ 114 explained. The characteristic method of economics is theoretical analysis, and analysis — by its nature — is a priori and content-free. It is as if biologists decided to study evolution, but not nature; or physicists devoted themselves to geometry without measurement. Seeing the world as a functioning mechanism is a prerequisite to an effective curiosity about how it works. Dr. Pangloss does not see the world as a functioning mechanism.

Well Chris, if you think calling people “washed-up”, “marginal”, and “unappealing” is not name-calling, and amounts to being “respectful” then that’s of course your business. Just don’t whine when you’re being addressed in an equally “respectful” manner.

The anti-poll tax movement was 20 years ago, that’s true. Given that this apparently looks like the ancient past to you (as probably does the Stop the War Coalition, etc.) it seems I overestimated your age or possibly your ability to avoid making judgements about the future based on a snapshot of the present. Just out of curiosity, what successes has the “eco left” had recently?

Steve Williams. your post is clear and good. I much prefer it to the ad hominems that get lobbed back and forth here. But I still disagree.

The thing I am trying to get at is the issue of causation. Does X cause Y. In this case, did anti-Marxism cause the killings, or was it something else? There certainly is correlation between anti-Marxism and the killings, as we both pointed out that the killings were not random. But causation? Such a question is actually extremely difficult to answer with certainty and I usually refrain from making such statements without lots of data to back it up. (This is especially true with mono-causal stories such as “it was ideology” or “it was capitalist explotation.”) This is because the number of alternative explanations is huge. However, one way to see if anti-Marxism caused the killings is to see this theory generalizes. Are there other cases we can point to? To see if it does, we need to expand the dataset (which is why I was suggesting looking outside of South America from time to time).

If we consider a large sample anti-Marxists, it is clear that the vast majority don’t kill people, let along in its name. This fact, whether people in this forum understand it or not, is evidence that ideology may not be an underlying factor here. If anti-Marxist ideology can be said to truly cause killings in any real sense, it must do so regularly. A second test would be to see if those doing lots of killings do so because they are also anti-Marxist. The answer here is clearly no as I said earlier. Dictators of all stripes kill their opponents. The result from these tests is that something else is going on. And very likely there are many things going on simultaneously, not only single factors. This also implies that anti-Marxism could still play a part, but its explanatory power is very low on its own.

And one can’t say that “well, in this case it was his anti-Marxism, but it doesn’t have to work that way all the time.” If this is your (or anyone’s) reaction, this is your bias talking. To have the hope of uncovering plausible causal explanations, looking for patterns is the key. There is no pattern of anti-Marxists killing people in general. There are only a few cases. There is however a pattern of dictators needing to consolidate power killing people, irrespective of the target groups ideology. Because the correlation here is much stronger, it is a more likely explanation for the cause of the killings.

I thought people might not get it. Its simple, but it requires thinking about statistics a little, which I know might be asking a lot from this forum. But I also don’t think my last post was sufficiently clear. Let me try again.

We want to find variable X that can explain pinochets killings. One test I proposed (common in statistics) is to see if X causes similar behaviour in other people. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t disprove X, but it does calls into question the explanatory power of X. In this example, X is pinochets anti-Marxist ideology. My claim is that other people that have X (an anti-marxist ideology), be they capitalists, fascists, whatever, rarely go around killing socialists. The inescapable conclusion is that pinochets anti-Marxism is probably not to blame.

Could there be other X’s that explain pinochets killings? Sure. I submit that to find such a variable, we should look for a variable that has a higher degree of correlation with “killing political opponents” than does an anti-Marxist ideology. I put forth the variable “douchebag who needs to consolidate his power”.

I think the evidence is such that the variable “douchebag who needs to consolidate his power” correlates very highly with dictators who kill their opponents. It is not difficult to find examples, but I don’t need to run through those for this audience. Thus, douchebagness is a better candidate for explaining pinochets killings that his anti-Marxism.

Its simple, but it requires thinking about statistics a little, which I know might be asking a lot from this forum.

Seriously?

So In other words there has never been any anti-black murders because not all racist people murder black people.

For a less trite response, you can see how strong the anti-marxist motivation of pinochet in Naomi Klein’s Shock doctrine.

I have to think that if there were an anti-Marxist gene that gave possessors a 20% chance of committing anti-Marxist violence, as opposed to a 0.03% chance for those without the gene, we would attribute the bulk of anti-Marxist violence to anti-Marxism. But what do I know.

Michael,

We do get it, actually. Your reasoning is pretty rudimentary, after all, and requires no statistical training. The Romans even had a name for the fallacy you’re pompously and laboriously, invoking all the prestige of modern science, accusing us of: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Please climb down from Mount Olympus.

As you have doubtless learned from all the well-deserved criticism directed at orthodox economic theory in recent years, deploying formal reasoning also requires modicum of common sense and uncommon sensibility. For example, when you announce as a valid and significant causal statement that “there is a pattern of dictators needing to consolidate power killing people,” you might have paused to reflect that “using violence to consolidate power” is part of the meaning, as generally understood, of the word “dictator.” (The dictionary says, “autocratic, authoritarian, domineering, high-handed.”) So that your statement is a semi-tautology, and minimally informative. It tells us nothing we couldn’t figure out simply reflecting on the word “dictator.” One wouldn’t, after all, normally say “there is a pattern of constitutional, legitimate, democratically elected leaders needing to consolidate power killing people.”

The question then becomes: what kind of ideology, in what kind of circumstances, leads to dictatorial behavior? One plausible answer is “dogmatic belief in unregulated capitalism, in a country with a moderately but not extremely stable democratic tradition, whose military and business class is encouraged and even pressured into extra-legal violence by a chronically lawless superpower that has shown itself fanatical in demanding access to foreign markets and investment opportunities for its corporate/financial elites.” There is, in fact, a pattern of just this kind of situation leading to violence: in Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Indochina, Indonesia, and many other places at many times in the 20th century.

Do you think there might be a causal relationship here, which you could use your statistical sophistication to help the rest of us refine?

Do we have to pick?

Michael, I think I was disagreeing with you (or at least with what you included in your comments), but it will have to wait til later.

Well if we suppose that under Pinochet there were 2 left killed or tortured for every 1 non-left, a total of 30,000 tortured or killed, a population of 7.6 million evenly split between left and non-left, then a chi-square test for independence between being killed or tortured and being left says that they are unlikely to be independent (prob < 0.0001 according to SAS) .

But of course if those assumptions aren't true…

I don't however think that anti-douchebaggarianism is the next big thing in political theory.

Uh, I got the population wrong, but that doesn’t affect the final result.

LP @211 One way to look at me vs Summers would be to assess his views on the five zombie ideas I discuss in my book.

Great Moderation: Summers was clearly a cheerleader, though I don’t know if he wrote much specific on the topic

Efficient Markets Hypothesis: His academic work has generally been at least mildy critical of EMH, but his policy actions have strongly affirmed it

DSGE: I don’t think he is a DSGE fan, but he was definitely part of the convergence between freshwater and saltwater schools. On the other hand, he supported a strong fiscal stimulus in the crisis

Trickle down: My impression is that (GS notwithstanding) Summers is more or less a mainstream US liberal on issues like this. So he wouldn’t support strong forms of trickle down, but also wouldn’t be anything like as concerned with income distribution as I am (or Krugman is, for that matter).

Privatisation: I assume he’s pro.

To sum up, considered on the basis of his academic work, he’s a fair bit to my right. Considered as a policy actor, he’s a long way to the right of himself as an academic.

Looking at your perception that he and I are very similar, I think it comes down to the fact that I’ve consciously chosen a ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘heterodox’ identity, for reasons I set out here
https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/01/heterodoxy-is-not-my-doxy/

alright one more post.

the statement I stand by most (I stand by all my statements, at least the clear ones) is when i said:
Instead, it is proper to say “conditional on being an anti-Marxist, what are the odds that such a person would kill?” This answer is “low”, and that implies that anti-Marxism isn’t a cause of the killings.

This statement is exactly analogous to what you said, as far as I read it. Saying that there is a 20% chance that someone with an anti-marxism gene will commit violence against marxists is a conditional probability statement. its the same as saying “conditional on having the anti-marx gene, how likely are they to commit violence against marxists.” the answer, as you provided, is 20%. I dont see any difference from this and what I wrote above. Maybe we are disagreeing as to whether or not 20% constitutes the “bulk” of the explanation?

Michael:
One difference between what you said and what I said: You said that statistical correlation between two distributions did not give us a reason to conclude causation. I said that differences in distribution between two groups could give us a reason to infer the possibility of causation.

You referred only to correlation of two evident features. I suggested the possible existence of an underlying, invisible or intermediate cause that changed the distribution of both features.

You stated that all “monocausal” explanations are simplistic. A gene does seem to be a monocausal explanation. I could be wrong, but regardless of whether 20% is a high number, I don’t think that distribution would rule out an monocausal explanation. (For example, if we could predict that the other “causes” were entirely benign and within the normal range, expected to occur about 20% of the time for all people, unavoidable and so on. Or if we found additional genes for additional kinds of violence, all with the same frequency.)

You implied that the inability to predict whether an anti-Marxist would commit anti-Marxist violence, by comparison with the ease with which we can conclude a Marxist was killed because of anti-Marxist violence, should be an argument against using statistical methods that might permit us to infer causation between anti-Marxism and anti-Marxist violence. I offered an explanation that does not involve considering whether it would be possible to predict whether an individual person would commit violence.

And I think what I said suggested the possibility of developing a model that could explain how the causation works. You seemed to suggest (though I could be wrong here too) that this is not expected or, really, wished for.

I’m not an expert on statistics but the layperson’s knowledge I have suggests that my expectations are reasonable. I really don’t see why you keep insisting that “anti-Marxism does not cause anti-Marxist violence,” which seems as simplistic as its opposite, much less offering such a long list of reasons nobody finds convincing.

geo-

In Chile, it wasn’t the entire corporate elite that pressed for CIA subversion but only those with immediate interests: ATT, the copper industry, and their bankers.

Undoubtedly you meant ITT.

I’m not an economist and don’t follow these debates etc, but I found J. Quiggin’s 2007 post on heterodoxy (linked in his comment above), which I read just now, to be interesting. Bruce Wilder might also find it interesting. Incidentally I note that Wilder (and LP) ignored my comment/question at 179 above.

I will post fuller replies (including to 179) soon. But the short answer is that by embracing mainstream economic theory, Quiggin is strengthening the case for neoliberal policy, even tho he himself doesn’t favor it. For example, as I argue here, progressive mainstream economists really have no right to complain about confusion in public discussions of financial constraints on fiscal policy (“invisible bond market vigilantes,” etc.) when graduate macro courses even at “saltwater” places like Berkeley never mention government financial constraints, but only the logically unrelated (and irrelevant) concept of intertemporal budget constraints. Similarly I argue here that someone like Krugman has no right to complain about the neglect of demand-side explanations for the current crisis when his own work on international trade rejects demand-based explanations on, as he himself says, “a priority” grounds.

If you don’t want to end up like Summers, you really need to start somewhere else.

It must be requiring a lot of editing.

LP, you seem to be lumbering me with responsibility for what’s taught at Berkeley and for (alleged) inconsistencies (and, apparently, typos) in Krugman’s writing. How does this work? Am I also responsible for what’s taught at Chicago, and for the silliness of Casey Mulligan? Is it the pointy hat?

LP, you’re conflating “theory” with curricular choices.

One more time: there is no one-to-one mapping between fundamental theoretical priors and people’s politics. You’re simplistically collapsing a whole lot of links. I write as a heterodox economist, and it would be rhetorically convenient for me to dismiss the orthodox as witless tools of whatever … but it’s mistaken. Heterodoxers can be just as wrong.

LFC @ 261 and 179

I apologize for not replying. I’ve been travelling, and jet-lagged. I actually did write a comment, during a bout of insomnia, but deleted it, when I read it, and realized that I had been hallucinating.

Here’s a link to a Greg Mankiw review of a book by Robert Shiller that illustrates, I think, the conversation that ensues between someone, who exemplifies mainstream orthodoxy, and someone, who takes the study of economic institutions and facts, seriously. Pay attention to the date.

Shiller is not my hero, and I’m not a fan of “behavioral economics” and its intellectual conceits, but Shiller has done what I am suggesting economists do too little of, which is to study actual economic institutions, as social mechanisms, and actual economic facts, as if they matter. He’s studied markets and market prices, over time, with a view toward making a critical assessment of how, and how well they function.

Mankiw looks at Shiller’s work respectfully, but basically says, “How can we really know anything? Who are we to judge?” Mankiw, literally (as textbook author) embodies Econ 101 and you can see how he, for lack of a better term, resists economic facts, or more accurately, a critical assessment of the functioning of the actual economy. Now, Mankiw deploys his rhetorical pose of Socratic wisdom (“I know little, but, better than others, I know how little I know”) quite frequently, to partisan political advantage, but I’m arguing that this ignorance is genuine, and it is the psychological manifestation of the epistemological limitations of the methods of Econ 101 and its derivatives (e.g. pretty much all of macro-economics).

(Zombie ideas like the EMH are used to justify the superiority of not-knowing and not-criticizing the functioning of actual markets. EMH has been used to criticize Shiller for pointing out the multi-trillion-dollar housing bubble, while it was forming; even on its own dubious terms, EMH does not apply to the market in houses, but it doesn’t matter — not-knowing, not-criticizing-reality has become part of the intuition of economists.)

What’s “the method” of Econ 101 to which I refer? Well, it is building simple little analytical models and then waving your hands a lot in the general direction of the world, to establish what they “mean”, as if they are maps of the world, which they are not. And, in doing that, economists seem to lose the distinction between analytical modeling to develop concepts and ideal types, and operational modeling to understand actual mechanisms of the economy and catalog the variety and imperfections of the world. There are economists doing the latter, but the mainstream of the profession has a lot of difficulty digesting it. (I just read this book review by Krugman, where he notes how blind economics is to reality, when it can not readily build an analytical model of it.)

The one-sided of economics has some very serious consequences, I think, not the least of which is the severity of the current Global Financial Crisis. Without discounting the role of power politics and greed, I don’t think the technocratic management of the Federal Reserve and its regulatory functions could be as bad as it has been, without the determined blindness of the economists, who staff its policy and research positions, as well as fill many of its seats of power. The economists, who laboriously model control of interest rates, as if that were the end-all and be-all of Fed functions, simply do not appreciate the critical importance of the bureaucracies in banks, which regulate lending (and the consequent creation of credit and money in the form of financial securities).
To give a more prosaic example of reality-based economics, I can give no better example than the Calculated Risk blog, where Bill McBride, day-by-day, monitors the macroeconomy, in a way that very few academic economists, qualified as macro-economists, are capable of doing. He quietly and routinely does what a critical empiricist must do: he proposes an analysis to explain the statistical charts, and makes predictions, based on his analysis, judgment and experience.
But, the real gem at Calculated Risk is in the archives of his late, co-blogger, the estimable Tanta, who, several years back, explained in detail how a bank administratively manages the creation of mortgages and financial securities derived from mortgages, and how those practices had evolved and gone wrong, resulting in a predictable catastrophe.
Economics systematically abstracts away from that kind of bureaucratic control, in its obsessive focus on the alleged “markets” of the “market economy”. Oh sure, they gave a faux Nobel to someone, who wrote a book, titled, Markets and Hierarchies, and who spent his whole working life, trying to revive interest in institutionalism, but they didn’t actually read the book (which book was actually pretty bad, anyway, but never mind).
If only Ben Bernanke had been trained to appreciate what Tanta knew. If only Greenspan had been.

Interesting. Had never thought to think of Tanta as the anti-economists’ economist, but there she was, calling out structure and power and being in the world. Still very sad.

Hello LP:

To take the 2nd question first: we have economic theory in order to understand the world — or at least those aspects of the world connected to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods & services. That may not be all, but it’s more than enough: it’s a bit like asking why we have biology. The rapid leap to policy seems to assume that the world is a lot more transparent than it is.

On your first question (is there any connection): everything is connected to everything else, no? So I’m not claiming that there’s no link, only that there is no simple or necessary mapping. I’ve known neoclassicals of every conceivable political stripe.

I’m very sympathetic to Bruce Wilder’s argument, but note that it’s not so much about choosing one or another set of priors as about an inductive rather than deductive approach.

“which economists do you consider exemplars of what Wilder calls a ‘rational, evidence-based economics’ (which he contrasts with ‘orthodox’ economics)?”

My list includes Samir Amin, Paul Davidson, both James K. and John Kenneth Galbraith, Wynn Godley, David Harvey, Keynes, Nicky Kaldor, Hyman Minsky, Luigi Pasinetti, Joan Robinson, Anwar Shaikh, and Sidney Weintraub.

In discussing highly visible mainstream economists who supposedly lean left, nobody has brought up Joseph Stiglitz. I don’t know what I think of him. He has told Geoff Harcourt, I think, that he found Kaldor most useful when he was filling his policy-making roles. But I am not sure that he does not treat information asymmetry as another imperfection without which neoclassical theory would be correct – a viewpoint I find uncongenial.

At least as relevant, aren’t most of them dead?

David Harvey’s alive. But he’s a geographer.

… and just to make it clear I’m not arguing with a strawman, consider this post of John’s form a couple years ago. He starts his discussion of the effect of information technology on distribution from a “neoclassical model of competitive markets, [where] all factors of production will earn their marginal product.” And when various commenters point out that in fact there is no coherent neoclassical model of distribution, he brushes that off as irrelevant. In other words, he engages in exactly the behavior he rightly criticizes in the Zombie quote above.

ejh, hilarious.

Krugman is more interesting, having started his career with dynamic change, but it is Brad DeLong who is at the heart of bourgeois economics, and why this post was written. Brad is terrified of instability and radicalism of any kind, because it inevitably leads to the Gulag and Cultural Revolution. Thus he loooved Greenspan and the Great Moderation.

“Why don’t we have it” and “How can we get it” precede “what do we want.” Power precedes policy. Yes, it’s scary, but that’s the human condition. I love economics, but y’all need to start asking the first two more important questions to be good economists.

There is surely though a reasonable critique of liberal-left economists that their strategy for change essentially consists of making an appeal to institutions that show few signs of listening to them and hardly more of even caring about the problems that they raise.

I don’t claim to have an obviously better idea, and I wouldn’t phrase it as it’s phrased above, but there is a point there, trying to be made.

I don’t claim to have an obviously better idea, and I wouldn’t phrase it as it’s phrased above, but there is a point there, trying to be made.

The point is trivial: those who pay the piper call the tune.

bob at 288 – where has “Revolutionary Leninism based on Marxist analysis” resulted in progressive income taxes, precisely?

Progressive income taxation is a self-consciously reformist policy. Give the heirs of Eduard Bernstein their due – they got sh*t done.

And of course, the New Keynesians also fully understood that if women, blacks, and minorities really achieved political and economic equality in all classes the Bismarckian welfare state would collapse. But that’s another story.

LP, I think there is a question of comparative advantage here, if you don’t object to this classical econ concept.

I have an excellent training in mainstream economics, gained with some pain from hardline Chicago School teachers. I’m very familiar with both the strengths and weaknesses of neoclassical econ, and can point out that many rightwing arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny on their own terms. Immodestly perhaps, I think that very few people on the left could do what I do as well as I do it.

By contrast, I don’t really think I have anything special to offer in terms of building a heterodox economics movements, at least nothing I can’t do just as well using a “behavioral” label. If there existed a well-developed alternative to what is now called mainstream economics, I expect I would be on that side of the fence. But, as far as I can see, there’s nothing like this out there.

If there existed a well-developed alternative to what is now called mainstream economics, I expect I would be on that side of the fence. But, as far as I can see, there’s nothing like this out there.

Yup. That is the problem.