The Reinhart-Rogoff Two-Step

I like Wolfgang Munchau’s line on the row —

The Harvard economists’ tragedy is not the misuse of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet but the misuse of Microsoft PowerPoint.

It cannot be said often enough that Steven Pinker’s entire career is based on variations of the Two-Step of Terrific Triviality. Sam Harris’s career, on the other hand, is based on the One Step of Being a Complete Fucking Nutjob, so it just goes to show.

IMHO R&R are going to be like people who got a slap on the wrist for ‘drunkenly shooting up the woods’ when they were actually aiming at somebody and hoping to commit murder. Their excel error is really trivial; it looks like they quite deliberately trimmed data to fit their hypothesis (from http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems):

“Selective Exclusions. Reinhart-Rogoff use 1946-2009 as their period, with the main difference among countries being their starting year. In their data set, there are 110 years of data available for countries that have a debt/GDP over 90 percent, but they only use 96 of those years. The paper didn’t disclose which years they excluded or why.

Herndon-Ash-Pollin find that they exclude Australia (1946-1950), New Zealand (1946-1949), and Canada (1946-1950). This has consequences, as these countries have high-debt and solid growth. Canada had debt-to-GDP over 90 percent during this period and 3 percent growth. New Zealand had a debt/GDP over 90 percent from 1946-1951. If you use the average growth rate across all those years it is 2.58 percent. If you only use the last year, as Reinhart-Rogoff does, it has a growth rate of -7.6 percent. That’s a big difference, especially considering how they weigh the countries.”

The article goes on to discuss weighting, where (for example) 19 years of England’s behavior contrary to their hypothesis averages with one year of New Zealand’s behavior in accordance with their hypothesis to yield an ‘average’ which was in favor of their hypothesis. Without, of course, disclosing that they were weighting or how they were weighting.

IMHO, R&R should at this point be on trial for academic misconduct and fraud.
(To be honest, in their defense they could plead ‘service to the elites’, ‘macroeconomics’, and ‘Harvard’, so their defense would be pretty solid)

Which is a strong causal statement.

I’d like to point out that they are now lying in their explanation (I’m too lazy to chase this down, but I’ve seen links to additional times where they claimed causality).

I don’t want to disrupt the thread, but this is what I mean a few posts ago when I said that Harvard ‘has no floor’ – they have world-level elites, but also peddlers of pure BS.

Both Krugman and R&R support austerity.

Krugman wants to do it “later”, addressing the entitlement and demographic changes that lead a structural imbalance in SS & Medicare and after spending more stimulus today to support the current economy. R&R have not agreed with the latter part of that.

A big fight considering their differences aren’t too big … and I think Krugman is full of it that the US will address structural issues later … “kicking the can” is how governments work, in the US and Europe. It keeps them winning elections.

Look, is this not fraud? They didn’t just make a spreadsheet error, as Barry points out, they cooked the data. We need to state this as bluntly and ubiquitously as possible. We should refer to their results, not as “Reinhart-Rogoff”, nor as the “Reinhart-Rogoff thesis”, “Reinhart-Rogoff paper”, “Reinhart-Rogoff hypothesis”, nor even “Reinhart-Rogoff two-step”, save as an auxiliary offense. It is the “Reinhart-Rogoff Fraud”. Call it that, let others dispute it, and then bring up, not spreadsheet errors that the youth can write off as the technological ineptitude of gramma and grampa, but the cooking of data. Tattoo the word “Fraud” to their foreheads. Let sophomores point them out to Freshmen in the quad, going “yeah, that’s the Fraud guy. Isn’t it amazing that he still teaches here?”

I asked in the other thread on this if there were consequences in academia for this sort of thing. Kind of a rhetorical question, but Bruce gave me an elaborate and informed no. So if the only consequences are reputational, at least let those count. These clowns are still being protected by academic gentility. No need for inflammatory or hostile rhetoric, but the charge of fraud seems to me sustainable as a matter of fact. Does anyone think it is not?

I think this also applies to those who rush to the popular press with politically inflammatory claims supported by private data that has been neither peer-reviewed nor made public. Yes, I’m looking at you, Malhotra.

That should read Economics /= all of academia.

Well, the article by Malhotra and Margalit I referenced wasn’t economics. They had purported to establish that Democrats were more antisemitic than Republicans. Here’s their article, and the discussion on it from this site. Figure there’s going to be any consequences for them? It does seem that their claims are being dismissed by the likes of the ADL, so that’s something.

“Both Krugman and R&R support austerity. ”

As, of course, did Keynes “The boom, not the slump is the time for austerity”.

On Pinker, I made the two-step point avant le nom in this review of The Blank Slate

Even more common in the [nature-nurture] debate is the tendency to put forward a strong version of a theory but, when it comes under attack, to retreat to a version so moderate and reasonable in its claims that no one can seriously object to it. In the case of the nature-nurture debate, the ‘strength’ of a position can be crudely assessed in terms of the percentage weights allocated to nature and nurture. In various defensive passages, Pinker appears to imply that his criticism is directed solely at ‘100 per cent’ nurturists like the behaviorists Watson and Skinner and the most extreme proponents of postmodernism. But it is clear from reading the book as a whole, that Pinker wants to claim a dominant role for genes, at least in relation to issues of real social concern.

Henry,
I believe what you (and Holbo) describe is referred to as the fallacy of equivocation (http://www.lsat-center.com/lsatc4s3a.htm).

Thank you for the Aeon article. Also, after reading it I ordered Crouch’s 2005 book.

Ciao..Frank

subdoxastic @ 10 It’s an incredible echo chamber and hall of mirrors.
Thomas J. Kane’s curriculum vitae shows that he was a fellow of the Hoover Institution and a Deputy Director, U.S. Education 11/2008-5/2012 at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has a BA from Notre Dame and an MA in Economics from U Mich. He started out as a teaching fellow at the Kennedy School of Government in 1986 and has a PhD in Public Policy from the Kennedy School:

http://www.nber.org/vitae/vita294.pdf
Employment:
Professor of Education and Economics 7/2005-Present
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Faculty Director of Harvard Center for Education Policy Research [at the Kennedy School of Government] 7/2005-Present
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Deputy Director, U.S. Education 11/2008-5/2012
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Professor of Policy Studies and Economics 7/2001-6/2005
University of California- Los Angeles
Vice Chair of the Department of Policy Studies 7/2002-6/2004
University of California- Los Angeles
Non-Resident Senior Fellow 6/2001-6/2003
Brookings Institution
National Fellow 9/2000-7/2001
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Associate Professor of Public Policy 7/1997-6/2001
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityAssistant Professor of Public Policy 7/1991-6/1997
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Senior Economist for Labor, Education and Welfare 8/1995-6/1996
Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President of the United States
Visiting Fellow 9/1994-7/1995, 6/1996-8/1996
Brookings Institution
Faculty Research Fellow 1/1992-Present
National Bureau of Economic Research
Research Assistant, Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow 1986-1991
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

The Excel ‘error’ (not really that easy an error to make, under any plausible scenario of how the spreadsheet was constructed) did perform a clear function – it dropped ‘average’ growth to below zero in the debt>90%GDP column. This clearly provides – and would be expected to provide – the basis for spawning eye-catching and rhetorically effective propaganda factoids.

So in that respect it was not entirely trivial, and I don’t think in the circs one can presume it to have been a cock-up either, in which case it obviously becomes non-trivial from an ethical standpoint.

The fact that the country names are sorted in reverse alpha order may have been part of an attempt to try and make the error look more plausibly accidental, excluded figures being at the bottom might be thought somehow more likely to be done by mistake – I think psychologically it looks less glaring, but also the formulae are less obviously disparate, so might be thought more likely to have been missed when these simple calculations were double and triple checked.

This last point does not necessarily increase the probability that R&R made the error deliberately – if the hypothesis is accepted (as on balance and in the circs I think it should be) it only establishes a post-hoc coverup, since there’s no reason as far as I know to suppose that the spreadsheet that was eventually released to show R&R’s working was not prepared for the purpose.

Though incidentally this engages a further point, which is that when they did release the spreadsheet, being on notice that it was going to be scrutinised to find out why no-one else could replicate the findings, they would surely have looked closely at it at that point – supposing that they did not already know about the supposed error – and yet they supposedly didn’t spot it even then, or if they did they didn’t come clean about it and admit that they’d discovered it. There are three reason why they might have chosen not to mention it – 1. they hoped it would go undiscovered (this seems implausible). 2. they thought that even though it would be discovered, it would be better from a headline-management/information dynamics point of view not to put an open admission on the record to be quoted, 3. allowing someone else to find it helps – in a nebulous way – to make it look accidental and might also be taken to suggest that it was difficult to spot. In eth circumstances, my own opinion, at maybe around 80% confidence, would be that it was a combination of 2 and 3, and that the initial ‘error’ wasn’t done by mistake, but for the reason suggested above.

Still, it is perhaps better to focus on the other aspects of the fraud, which perhaps can’t so easily be passed off as cock-up or coverup. (Though they can of course pretend that they chose their bizarre methodology arbitrarily, without regard to the results that it generated. That may even be true, in a sense; who knows how many other times they might have had a little fiddle around with a spreadsheet but not encountered an ‘interesting’ result that they ‘needed to get out there’ (cf. Malhotra & Margalit).

In general, when studies and their methodologies, null hypotheses etc. aren’t required to be pre-registered before being conducted, this meta level of selection bias – sumbission bias, by analogy with publication bias – is likely to be happening all the time, and since the academic profession seems incapable of regulating itself by detecting and ejecting its bent practioners, the outlook is not good. I’m reminded of the rather endearingfly but still worryingly ingenuous report by Mark Thoma in his comments about the very R&R hoax currently under discussion:

when I was a new assistant professor Milton Friedman presented some work at a conference that impressed me quite a bit. He resurrected a theoretical paper he had written 25 years earlier (it was his plucking model of aggregate fluctuations), and tested it against the data that had accumulated in the time since he had published his work.

vacillation, I mean

R&R should not be judged on their interpretation of past data but on their ability to make data move in the future. The game works this way: given R&R’s prestige and credentials, quants incorporate their 90% debt/GDP ratio into their algorithms and, when a country hits it, speculators sell, repatriate capital, lose confidence, call in loans, all at the same time, and the country crashes.

So wait. They can still claim victory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geryon.jpg

Fraud: the monster with the face of an honest man.

@Tim Wilkinson: Until the recent crisis, the term “austerity” was mostly used in relation to Britain in the years after 1945, which was, at least in macroeconomic terms, a boom period, and saw among other things the introduction of the NHS.

As regards this thread, MapMaker asserted that Krugman was in favor of austerity, but this assertion relies on the Keynesian idea of fiscal contraction/austerity as the appropriate policy in boom periods.

” no good preserving TTID if the database is flawed.”

Not sure the TTID one is. It was certainly mismanipulated in this paper, yes. But that’s conclusions being drawn from the data, not the data itself.

“which was, at least in macroeconomic terms, a boom period, and saw among other things the introduction of the NHS. ”

And that’s a conjunction I’ve not understood. Yes, I agree with both points, it was a boom (to the point that they ran budget surpluses) and they did indeed introduce the NHS. But the NHS was simply the nationalisation of the extant health care system. This isn’t a macroeconomic event in any manner.

First new NHS hospital wasn’t until 1963.

This is nothing to do with whether the NHS was a good or bad idea: it’s just an observation that the introduction of it wasn’t something that depended on government investment.

Timothy Scriven: maybe you’re thinking about J.L. Austin, “There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”? Sense and Sensibilia.

I’m not understanding why Reinhart and Rogoff would damage their reputations by fudging politically hot work in such a way that the fraud was fairly likely to be exposed, unless cheesy fraud is explicitly approved by their leaders or paymasters. I would think a higher quality of lying would be demanded of people at their level of the food chain.

@37, Anarcissie

Just read the R&R defense in the NYT piece. The way I’d call it, it’s just a plain case of fudging, as you said.

Their closing statement caught my attention:

“Resolving these debt burdens usually involves a transfer, often painful, from savers to borrowers. This time is no different, and the latest academic kerfuffle should not divert our attention from that fact.”

How do you read it?

On a side note, I’m not quite so certain that “their leaders or paymasters” care enough whether the fraud is cheesy or not. Such a nonchalant attitude is very much in character with those who are in the position of power.

“Until those on the centre-Left can accept the premise that their opponents on the Right do not share an interest in the common good, there will never be any clarity in our political struggles or debates.”

Who could possibly labor under such an illusion, do tell?

In all other respects, I think your analysis is spot-on.

Roger, I’m pretty sure W. said that about Moore. But it is possible it is an urban legend that took on a life of its’ own.

Seconding Roger – if there’s one lesson to be learned from the past decade or so, it’s that lies told on behalf of the elites don’t need to be good. Think of propaganda – a message is repeated a lot, and delivered in a variety of formats. Mid-level people know which messages are to be supported, which are to be mocked, and which aren’t even allowed to be mentioned.

Anarcissie 04.27.13 at 2:36 pm

” I’m not understanding why Reinhart and Rogoff would damage their reputations by fudging politically hot work in such a way that the fraud was fairly likely to be exposed, unless cheesy fraud is explicitly approved by their leaders or paymasters. I would think a higher quality of lying would be demanded of people at their level of the food chain.”

A comment I had about Congress years ago after a bribery scandal: ‘I understand that they are wh*res, but it’s amazing what cheap wh*res they are’.

If R&R’s careers are harmed in any way, shape or form by this, I’d be surprised. They’ll be able to walk into any economic conference, with their heads held high, and only a few will dare to say anything against them.

Regardless of Keynes’s vocab in that quote, I don’t think that counts as ‘austerity’ in the current sense of painful spending cuts (still less – of course – in the sense of what is also going on in the UK at present, i.e. an opportunistic attack aimed at permanently ‘rolling back’ the state.)

The reason for austerity during a boom period is precisely because it isn’t painful, from a policy position, at least; whether it is painful for politicians to advocate it depends upon elements outside the realm of policy analysis) to do it then. As you point out, certain forms of spending go down automatically and tax receipts go up. Austerity right now isn’t painful because of anything inherent in austerity; it’s because all of the non-painful ways to do it are unavailable.

I remember reading an analysis of your typical nigerian/advance fee scams that basically boiled down to “if your email story is too convincing it’ll trick clever people too, and you don’t want that.”

Because keeping clever people tricked is chancy at the best of times and too much work regardless [and they might ask questions your other marks might hear]. Better to spin an obvious bullshit yarn that’ll only attract the most grotesquely gullible.

[also, the two most valuable demographics to advertisers are “gullible people with a lot of money” and “gullible people with easy access to credit”].

“I assume Keynes (like Tim Worstall, it seems) saw surpluses/debt paydowns as something enabled by – a response to – established booms;”

We might assume it’s easier. Automatic stabilisers and all that. But the political pressure rather runs the other way. Look! Look! There’s all this money that wondrous things can be done with! Reading The Guardian from 2000 to 2007 (or even just Polly Toynbee’s columns in that time) gives a good list of what people came up with to spend the money on.

Keynes was (as usual) rather more subtle. Just as you should boost demand when it is deficient, you should reduce it when it’s booming. Running a budget surplus in a boom is the flip side of a deficit in a slump: it’s all demand management. Similar to the point that (I’ve forgotten who made it) a central banker’s job is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going but referring to fiscal policy not monetary.

Bruce Wilder @ 40

I do wonder how many times and in how many different ways this has to be said. For my own part, I’m tired of saying it. I’ve never expected the message to have any effect on my enemies — they have no earthly reason to pay my concerns any attention whatsoever — but it does depress me to see my friends putting their fingers in their ears. I think I know why they do; the end of our shared pretensions often looks like the end of the world even when it’s not, and it’s human nature to be cowardly when disabused of our fundamental notions. Still, if we really are headed to the end of whatever we’re headed to the end of, it bothers me to think that anyone would prefer to meet that end like a stunned ox.

To put it yet another way, Paul Krugman is a likeable guy, but for me, at least, he’s not the herald of any plausible salvation.

There is much hand-wringing among the chattering classes on the Left about the “problem” of Inequality, as if the unequalness of income distribution is the problem, and not that so much of the economy is founded on active and aggressive parasitism and predation.

True, though it’s dangerous to assume that these chatterers have a genuine interest in fixing inequality. Personally I think it’s more likely their priorities are different, the Center-Left being nearly identical to the “white moderate” classes Dr. MLK called out; nowadays they’re just using different language to express the same unease, distance, and privileged condescension. These are people who, had they been born 55-75 years ago, would be expressing concern that it’s “not the right time” for drastic reform.

They’re not primarily interested in solving the problem of suffering, they’re interested in solving the problem of tension between antagonists. And pretty much anyone interested in solving that problem is more interested in suppressing it, by offering to adjudicate it: “here’s where you’re right, something ought to be done. Here’s where you’re asking too much of your antagonists. Ok, glad that’s resolved! You can thank me later.” Conflict resolution by distanced adjudication only makes sense if you presume all antagonists are equally capable of representing themselves and equally deserving of representation.

You’re not going to win such a person over to one side of partisan antagonism, even if that’s what their expressed convictions should impel them to do. Their convictions are sincere to the extent that they would feel hurt and offended if you were to question them, but they hold and maintain priorities that constrain their ability to act on their convictions — mainly, the priority that standing above a conflict between parties is morally superior to contributing to it — and they reject any proposed adjustment to their priorities as extremist. Provided that I’m inferring correctly, and not just unduly cynical, it’s us on the Left Left that are better said to be wearing blinders, etc, for seeing these folks as our potential allies, as people to be won over. You can’t hope to pull someone’s head out of the clouds if they deeply value their superior cranial height.

@54

That is quite correct.

William Timberman: Paul Krugman is a likeable guy, but for me, at least, he’s not the herald of any plausible salvation.

Indeed. Because he has a certain nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s America he grew up in (something I’ve been accused of, as well), and because he has considerable integrity, people often seem to miss the fact that he’s pretty much a conventional neoliberal. (That Nobel makes it difficult to credibly point out that he’s not much of an economist, but he’s not.) Roger Nowosielski needs to look no further, if he wants an answer to his question, “Who could possibly labor under such an illusion, do tell?”

The liberal / social democratic state of the 1950s and 1960s, was designed by a generation, which had experienced life under the “malefactors of great wealth”, who had stolen for themselves the product of the Second Industrial Revolution, creating the Gilded Age in America and the Proud Towers of European Empires. And, they were able to do it, because the massive failures of the Great Depression and two World Wars had made political solidarity a dominant fact of political life, imposing egalitarian values and the potential for mass political participation that made social welfare a purpose of government.

Quiggin’s memorial to WWI gave rise to a thread, which demonstrated how little people fathom the “social tension” (as one insightful commenter put it), which existed between proprietary government by hereditary, feudal aristocracy, and the rising forces of mass political solidarity in the form of nationalism.

I suppose, as philosophies, liberalism and social democracy have always had an ambiguous relationship with nationalism and political solidarity, embracing it in some circumstances, where the drama was appealing, and rejecting it in others, when the stink of the unwashed body politic rose up in racist sentiments or populist authoritarianism. A deep ambivalence, and reluctance to take responsibility for logical consequences, figured in some of the greatest tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Reconstituting the Turks into a liberal democratic secular national state was going to require getting rid of a lot of Greeks and Armenians, and that was not going to be pretty. Manifest Destiny wasn’t going to be pleasant for the American Indian.

The secular decline in felt needs for social affiliation in the U.S. has reached a remarkable extreme. As the title of a book on the subject put it, we are bowling alone. That trend has opened up the possibility of realizing liberal ideals of tolerance and an embrace of diversity as a virtue, which I, personally, find admirable and hopeful. But, it makes it difficult to know how to organize a mass response, to elite depredations. What are our common bonds? What does it mean to merge identities into a mass group, and act in concert? To join a team, a club, let alone to join a union?

It is psychologically difficult, and painful, to admit that the great and powerful are out to get you, that you are not safe in society, that the police work for The Man, and the The Man is not nice or fair. It is a natural legacy of childhood, to deny the incompetence of parents, by extension, authority figures. And, yet, here we are, in 2013, and the elite are openly building a police state, and eating the economy alive from the bottom-up. In the last recession, 5% of the labor force was simply thrown away, and in the recovery — well the recovery only happened for the 1% (strictly speaking, it seems to have extended down to include about 7%, but I’m being poetical), everyone else is experiencing an erosion of wages. For the bottom 50%, nutrition and life expectancy are declining. The social contract has become very much like the “contract” that accompanies a Bank’s credit card — something entirely made up, and changed at will and without notice, by the Bank, to benefit the Bank, but who is willing to take up negotiating from the other side of the table, to insist that there be another side to the table, that there be a table and a negotiation?

Saying it isn’t enough, because there’s no there, there, . . . yet. No political solidarity upon which to found an organization for concerted action. It certainly isn’t going to occur in the twitterverse or on Facebook, those fishbowls designed for the police state to monitor.

American liberals cannot accept that they cannot have political power, without making a durable alliance with people, for whom populist appeals make sense — their natural allies are the Fox News audience!

True enough, but step one, before we even think about doing anything together, is finding — or rather founding — a shared discourse. When I say the colloquial equivalent of oligarchy, and my Fox News interlocutor says nigger in the White House — and I had almost exactly this conversation with a guy sitting on a park bench with his dog the other day in my little AZ town, including his whipping the N word on me right from the get-go — I figure talking AT them might be easier on my nerves than talking TO them. Which means, I suspect, that we need to do whatever media we can get our hands on, keeping the temptation to engage these disgruntled folks’ egos and grievances is at least once removed from an ugly personal confrontation.

What hasn’t been said enough is that the single data point of New Zealand that drove the conclusions should be the one year that is excluded from any statistical analysis. For nearly half the year there was a massive waterfront strike. To include only that, and weigh it the same as the UK’s high debt economy isn’t an “error”, it’s bordering on unethical.

Salient @ 55

Well said. Those words could apply to countless social tensions not just the discussion at hand.

Bruce, William, Salient – yep. This is one reason I’m always banging on about abuses of ‘conspiracy theory’, ‘paranoid style’ etc. (As well as trying in my own small way to push the limits of acceptable discourse about actual conspiracy theories). This is an area in which bien pensant lefties not only could easily manage to relax their fastidiousness about the company they keep, but in my own opinion should do so anyway because there is a strong element of VSPism at work among the educated classes on this kind of topic which distorts a proper understanding of the world. I won’t try to reprise the whole repertoire here, but – a trifle ruefully – would single out Salient’s comment above simply because it is conveniently at hand and exemplifies a kind of too-nice approach that undermines a properly robust attitude to the serious;lyu nasty bastards we are up against:

Provided that I’m inferring correctly, and not just unduly cynical, it’s us on the Left that are better said to be wearing blinders, etc, for seeing these folks as our potential allies, as people to be won over.

The comment is otherwise a perfectly good one in my not-unduly-humble opinion, but as an exhortation to leftists to finally stop kidding themselves, take the plunge and accept that a certain kind of centre-‘left’ist is on the hypocritical-dishonest spectrum and not to be pandered to, it suffers from the sudden impingement of self-doubt expressed in the the emphasised clause, which robs Salient’s message of its force.

Another constituency that could be engaged with and accommodated in good conscience is the religious, specifically Christian, lot. This is largely a US-specific issue, so I’m not sure of my ground here. Certainly even from what I do know there are prima facie problems. Unfortunately a lot of Western/Northern Catholics, e.g. are horribly ‘conservative’ in their attitudes to socialism and so on – the infernal Ian Duncan Smith is a left-footer, for instance, not to mention Blair’s weird – but I don’t think many UK RCs would have vote for them on that basis – certainly not Blair, who I believe is rightly considered by rank and file RCs to be a touch on the sacrilegious side. And the Church hierarchy is not much interested in alleviating poverty, indeed rather likes it (cf Hitchens on Mother Theresa) and all the opportunities it gives people to concentrate on the afterlife and the Holy Spirit – as well as swelling the deeply corrupt coffers with their tiny but multitudinous contributions. Likewise, alleviating ignorance. And as for the unholy influence of Opus Dei, don’t get me started.

Oh dear I’m not doing too well at this rapprochement business, am I – but, point is, there are Hectors around (though I’m not quite sure where Hector in particular is actually coming from since on the topic of Chavism he pretty much functions as good cop to Latro/Jesus’s bad cop, enthusiastically endorsing all of Latro’s contumely, but with reversed valence) – and, notably, Michael Moore, who featured some priests in one if his anti-capitalism films. The only real definite sticking point – for the RCs and various evangelical types, not all Xians I don’t think – is abortion. Plenty of RCs ignore the recent ban on ‘artifical’ contraception, and anyway don’t try that much to stop others getting hold of it. Creationism doesn’t matter much, and I doubt Young Earth idiocy, taken literally, is anywhere near as widespread as a few very vocal and promient advocates would like us to believe – certainly RCs don’t have to believe in it. But the thing about it is that it only has the prominence it does because it’s a wedge issue and a shibboleth of Culture War – and if anyone is going to try to de-escalate that, it is surely the rational, sensitive, decent folk of the left. Soimething very similar might even apply to abortion – if what is essentially a matter of persional conscience could be de-politicised, an accomodation is not impossible – think of that film asking protestors what punishment women who have abortions should get – then subtract the aggressive sarcasm. How much good has actually been done by railing against those who would like to see abortion rights reduced? How much has the Republican party done for that cause that keeps them voting for it? I genuinely don’t know the answer to these questions, but they are certainly relevant to breaking the Right’s grip on the religous constituency. I dunno, tricky.

Another thing: the left really needs to stop pandering to this Market stuff which is a classic two-step, with the front-foot posture being ‘nothing succeeds as planned (by public institutions)’, the back foot stance really not amounting to much more than ‘we won the Cold War’, with a lot of Hayekian rhetoric and a studiedly know-nothing economics strewn around to give the appearance of cogency. Leftists need to be quite clear about this – for all Cosma Shalizi’s (and Daniel Davies’s) Very Serious stuff on the markets v planning issue, there is actually very little to it and it needs to be rejected properly and wholesale. Politically, no doubt there’s a need to be circumspect – this stuff is well-entrenched and people need to be persuaded – but there’s no need to internalise this stuff. The counterarguments (and not just from me) are dotted around all over CT, but the desire not to be extremist and to go with the flow of markets (inc oligopolistic ones) seems very strong nonetheless. Admittedly, 50+ years of politicised academic economics is a big disadvantage, but no-one needs me to point out the difficulty of the task.

That is what’s already happening, Lupita.

The comment is otherwise a perfectly good one in my not-unduly-humble opinion, but as an exhortation to leftists to finally stop kidding themselves, take the plunge and accept that a certain kind of centre-’left’ist is on the hypocritical-dishonest spectrum and not to be pandered to, it suffers from the sudden impingement of self-doubt expressed in the the emphasised clause, which robs Salient’s message of its force.

‘sudden impingement of self-doubt’ is so spot-on. Sucks to know I robbed myself. But the last sentence was probably doomed anyway, because there’s also the problem that I’ve kinda given up on the ‘a whole category of people have blinders on’ motif. It feels more and more like most of us — meaning ‘us’ in the broadest sense of politically active ppl — have at least a somewhat good handle on which groups of people are motivated to do what, at least good enough that ‘blinders’ is unproductively condescending unless applied really narrowly. That’s because a lot of claims on support are really aspirational statements. Taking them literally, it looks like the ‘blindered’ person is being naive, but really, they’re expressing a hope in a way that makes it feel emotionally compelling.

Another potentially dooming problem: I am very pro-pandering, or at least very very pro-finessing, whenever it gets good things done without abandoning whole swathes of people. But that’s irrelevant here. My argument against pandering much to the ‘chattering classes’ of the OP remains in force (whatever force wasn’t robbed) and is twofold. One, pandering is not an effective way to sway those folks; they personify inertia and at best chase after momentums already generated elsewhere. Two, pandering to them in effect requires abandoning whole swathes of people. It’s the price they demand you pay for entrance to their judicial chamber, in the name of seeming reasonable and non-extreme. So, ok, delete my force-robbing last sentence and stick in this diatribe instead:

Fuck the chattering classes. We shouldn’t let them convince us of the sincerity of their concern, even if they’ve convinced themselves. Let’s work elsewhere where we can, and let them sweep up in our wake, just inertly following the prevailing trajectory while claiming to have come in their individual adjudicating mind to some supremely well-contemplated decision to lend their support — just as they are claiming now with regard to gay marriage! I don’t know if we can rely on them never, but we sure as hell can’t rely on them now.

And fuck sudden impingements of self-doubt, too. Because.