A Brief Theory of Very Serious People

First, Tyler is at this point merely a Koch wh*re with an actual earned degree, and should always be regarded as such.

Second, my comment there:

There’s something which somebody called ‘fractal error’, that is when the overall thesis is wrong, and the pieces are wrong, and so on, as far down as one cares to look.

This article is an example of that. The definition mocks those praised (by each other, or the ‘liberal’ media) as being serious, even when they are consistently, repeatedly wrong. So Tyler is wrong there, in attempting to push his own retroactive definition.

Now, let’s rip some of the pieces to shreds:

“1. Political decisions should be based on what people and institutions deserve, based on their prior conduct and also on their contributions to the general good.”

No, the VSP’s have no problems rewarding each other, no matter how much they don’t deserve it, or how damaging to the general good their actions have been.

“2. Economic nationalism.”

An even bigger lie – the VSP’s are really into economic ‘pan-nationalism’, happily destroying local laws and interests, whenever they get in the way of the VSP’s, making money.

“3. Traditional morality, based on respect for authority, repayment of debts, savings, and hard work.”

VSP’s thrive on ripping others off, being bailed out, never repaying debts unless their creditors have power, etc.

“4. Inflation is bad, in part because it violates #1 and #3, and in the case of the eurozone it often violates #2 as well.”

They tend not to like inflation (so Tyler gets 1/2 pt correct), but since they don’t care about #1, #2 or #3, Tyler is wrong here, as well.

“5. “I don’t care what you all say, the government should be able to find some way of arranging things so that I don’t have to suffer too badly from this.””

Partially true, in that the VSP’s use government power and money shamefully to make sure that *they* don’t have to suffer, but partially wrong, in the sense that they love to use government power and money shamefully to make sure that *other* do have to suffer, even if unnecessarily.

End score – standard Koch work.

Anderson 07.22.15 at 4:07 pm
“Tyler Cowen is a hack. You might as well ponder Megan McArdle.”

Seconded. To paraphrase Danial Davies, a lot of our problems come from the unwillingness of honest people to call out the liars, cranks, wh*res and hacks.

To paraphrase Barry: ‘My ideological allies don’t fight as hard and dirty for me as I’d like…’

The Schumpeter bit you’re thinking of is probably in his lecture “Science and Ideology”, which concludes:

“And so-though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all
without them.”

BenK 07.22.15 at 4:22 pm

“To paraphrase Barry: ‘My ideological allies don’t fight as hard and dirty for me as I’d like…’”

Wrong, but thanks for playing!

For an analogy, creationists don’t get respectful debate from biologists.

I think Henry is making it too much about the institutional aspects and not quite enough about the character flaws exhibited by the VSPs. There needs to be a character -as well as institutional aspect, if for no other reason than to incentivise better thought processes. Those who have been given the task to be public opinion makers need to shoulder the responsibility to make double sure that they aren’t being and down the garden path. Sure, no one no matter how serious they are about their intellectual responsibility/integrity is going to get it right always, but they really should see trying really hard to be a very important part of the job. Shaming, of those who don’t take this responsibility seriously should be part of the process.

Even shorter: VSP are those people Paul Krugman disagrees with.

Henry, you are taking on the VSPs too late in the process of their “becoming.”

there are institutional and racial and societal drivers, and to someone else’s excellent point upthread about the fractal (or holographic) nature of all of this, Seriousness is learned, taught, and organized for maximum effect by our elite schools, our elite social clubs, and of course those great cesspools to Conformity of thought and Setting of the narrowest of Overton Windows–the think tank complex. by the time you have an op-ed or a seat at the Sunday Gasbag table, you’ve already been so deeply inculcated with your narrow point-of-possible-views that there’s no chance you can even PERCEIVE those outside the window. they are just “they”, and their ideas and lives are of no specific regard or consequence beyond the making of whatever point needs to be made.

In my experience, what people who cite “common sense morality” a lot actually mean by it is “Daddy’s always right.” With the unstated corollary that Daddy had better be treated as right even when he’s wrong, because otherwise catastrophic breakdown of society, crack babies, wilding, cannibalism, etc.

I’m coming to believe that a propensity for this kind of thinking is built into some people at birth just as firmly as hair color and sexual orientation. Next, 200,000 words of evo-psych about how necessary this is to the survival of the species (because otherwise crack babies, etc). No, wait, actually I have to go have my fingernails pulled out by a grue.

“though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=although+we+proceed+slowly+ideology++blind+shumpter&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=though+we+proceed+slowly+because+of+our+ideologies%2C+we+might+not+proceed+at+all+withou

Kindred beat me

@ 21 does six months = a Friedman unit?

Very serious ideas are those where the poor and powerless pay the costs or suffer the “externalities.” So in the minds of the VSPs, “we” come out ahead in the cost/benefit analysis.

25 percent unemployment? We’ll that’s just the price Greeks have to pay for everyone’s mistakes and for Syriza not wearing ties or being polite according to hacks like Dsquared.

Bob Altemeyer explains how the right is authoritarian and Alice Miller explains why they are authoritarian. Daddy is always right because their parents traded attention and approval for obedience. (And the Stanford Prison Experiment explains why the right uses the tactics it uses and why we react the way we do).

Tyler Cowen is comfortable lying about public issues because he can get away with lying about public issues. The idea that the wars were moral is irrational, as Paul Gottlieb said. It is a lie and we will never stop the lying until we call people out by name and drive them out.

Yet as geo says these VSP got their jobs because they told their bosses what the boss wanted to hear. Our power to expose lies and punish the liar is small in comparison to the power of the people who own the media.

Speaking of Megan McArdle: A couple of years ago in a Washington Post chat I asked McArdle where she got her health care statistics, which she said proved that the ACA would destroy medical and drug innovation. She admitted that she made them up.

Yesterday she said this:

“Like a lot of journalists, I get hung up on that pesky issue of “truth.” Truth is our job. All we have is the public trust, and every time someone fails to do the work of vetting stories, the whole profession suffers. ”

We will never be rid of the VSP because the only thing serious about them is the serious money backing them. It doesn’t matter if they fail or lie or kill or destroy. Others must die and suffer so they can collect their fat paycheck and serve their masters.

And then they will lecture us about our lack of seriousness.

Great stuff, thanks. I would love to see you follow up on Tyler’s “mood affiliation” meme. This comment of yours seems like a good starting point:

people (on left, right or center) who believe that their reasoning capacity makes them more likely to be free from bias than those around them

Allow me to counter with a more Cowenite position.

Some people really do have more expertise in an issue, and really have given it more serious thought, than others. The example that Cowen is referring to (Greece) makes this particularly clear – a lot of people have acquired very strong views about the issue, while obviously knowing next to nothing about Greece, the Eurozone, or the institutional arrangements of the EU. And without that detailed framework of knowledge, they are forced to fall back on other considerations; often ones of morality, tribal solidarity, etc, that can be more easily applied without detailed knowledge. Blaming “greedy bankers” or “lazy Greeks” is easy. Trying to understand the actual political, institutional, and economic constraints is hard. Yes, I treat the first group as Unserious and the second as Serious, and I don’t apologise for it. And let’s be clear; your object-level views on the situation are going to be influenced by your level of seriousness.

Hopefully we can all agree that when Syriza took power in Greece, it was a disaster, precisely because they were Unserious in these terms.

And indeed, without proper knowledge of the constraints, giving power to the Unserious will almost always be a disaster – but it doesn’t follow that the Very Serious People are right. After all, there are some events that are better understood in terms of morality, and the very fact that some people have detailed expertise and knowledge of an issue is not a neutral fact, but evidence about the kind of approach they like to take to such a situation. Suppose we’re discussing whether or not to commit torture, and A has conducted extensive experiments detailing the effects and efficacy of torture on a wide range of people, while B only has lay ethical arguments that torture is wrong. A’s expertise may well make him sound more impressive than B, but B is still right; there is a reason B doesn’t have that expertise. Your level of seriousness is going to be influenced by your object-level views, and the process of acquiring that serious knowledge is going to change your views. You don’t become an FCO mandarin unless you started out viewing diplomacy as an effective tool, and your years acquiring that knowledge are likely to reinforce that belief.

Which is why people here who don’t like the VSPs, including the OP, would much rather talk about Iraq, which is an example in their favour.

Yet I can’t agree that the problem in the run-up to the Iraq war was that “[t]hose who advocated the pro-invasion case were treated as serious thinkers… [t]hose who disagreed were treated as flakes, fifth columnists, Commies and sneaking regarders.” It’s hard to deny that the anti-war crowd really was largely like that. Rather, the problem was that the serious thinkers were all pro-war, and wrong, because of reinforced bias. But note that the Unserious People would have been just as bad or worse. The VSPs’ disaster in Iraq doesn’t make me want to hand over foreign policy to the “No Blood For Oil” crowd, any more than the disasters of the EU make me want to turn it over to the Bruges Group. We need better information and less bias in our experts, not to replace Seriousness with Unseriousness.

I also wonder what world you are living in when you think that the VSPs don’t get massive feedback and consequences when they are wrong, whether on Iraq or on any other issue. They do (probably too strongly). But the reason that they still get treated as Serious is because, right or wrong, they did approach the matter in a serious way. I struggle to even comprehend the alternative. Colin Powell knows far more about military strategy in Iraq than I ever will – of course he will be paid for interviews, columns, etc, for his expertise, and neither I nor some random Chomskyian will be. That remains true if he blundered in Iraq.

So what you are saying, Salem, is that IF the people in power really are serious and IF the people in power really are right, then Cowen is correct. It’s too bad that one must create an imaginary scenario to get to that place but VSPs are much more comfortable with hypothetical scenarios in which they could be right than in reality, in which they have proven themselves over and over to be wrong.

No Susan, what I am saying is, to quote Cowen:

The one thing worse than the Very Serious People is the Not Very Serious People.

Well stated, Henry. I think it’s fine to riff off even the criminally misguided.

As for Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s hackery: though card carrying “Libertarians” they were very very quiet about the concept of War is the Health of The State during the run up and ahem execution of the sequentially recurring Middle Eastern Wars. One might conclude they’re actually closet Keynesians, as long as the[1] fiscal stimulus is channelled through the Pentagon’s myriad and metastasizing top-down directed[2] programs for the construction and deployment of weapons of widespread foreign capital destruction, rather than productive but not lethal domestic capital investment. I’m abusing capital here to broadly include humans as well. Consequently, they are firmly socially embedded VSPs indeed, the dirty and oily Koch industrial funds sluicing through the Mercator Center without end.

I wasn’t going to post, and just enjoy a flashback to genesis Crooked Timber, but the bullshit spewed by Salem put me over the top. Salem, Tyler has been continuously, without exception, absolutely wrong on every particular about health care. Should we write 50,0000 words about that, too, before you get the concept?

[1] On effectively eternal time horizons, which sorta violates theoretical Keynesian principles…

[2] I.e. what they would lamentingly call “Statist” and “lacking accountability” in any otherwise positive domestic situation.

Since the VSP decide who is serious and who is not, merely saying that unserious is worse says nothing at all.

You’re right, they would have avoided invading Iraq, which would have been good. They’d probably have made more than enough other blunders to make up for it though. Not being part of the military-industrial establishment means you won’t have the biases and blinders that led them to go to war in Iraq. But it will also mean you won’t have the detailed domain knowledge necessary to actually make decisions. You are damned either way.

Similarly, the VSPs did a bad job in Greece, but compared to Syriza they did brilliantly. Syriza are right in much of their moral analysis of the insupportability of the Greek situation, but that doesn’t make them a competent government. Moral outrage, however justified, is not a substitute for serious understanding.

And the only good DFH is a punched DFH.

When someone punches a dirty hippy they expect the DFH to cry and give up. The DFH needs to punch back twice as hard. Civility is a tool for control.

In fact, VSP use their lack of expertise, their figures pulled out of the air, as signaling devices.

Tom Salem as good as called me a fifth columnist. Is that a “reasonable” post?

I don’t like being called flaky because I could figure out that my governor would be a terrible president or that the invasion of Iraq would be a disaster. I was right. The VSPs were wrong. Reasoning through the problem wasn’t difficult. It was easy. The only reason the VSP pretended it was a difficult decision is because they were being paid to say it was a difficult decision.

Salem, the example of Iraq actually shows how wrong this argument is. The architects of the war were not the best and brightest–not even close. They were “the f—ing stupidest guy[s] on the face of the earth,” in Tommy Franks’ memorable phrase. Similarly, the reason you’re getting pushback about your characterization of the critics is that, far from being exclusively made up of frivolous hippies, they included most of the actual experts in political science and Middle Eastern studies. The whole point of the idea of VSPs is that seriousness is not a measure of the depth of one’s knowledge but rather just a gauge of one’s willingness to be a useful idiot.

History here is long, and not constant with Cowen’s analysis. Axel Oxenstierna observed to his son as long ago as 1648:

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?

Which is a clean summary of the VSP problem. There are probably similar comments in original classical Greek sources.

I don’t think Salem’s analysis of the problem with Syriza is quite right – and obviously I come add this from the point of view of having been a harsh critic of some of their tactics. Quite apart from anything else, Tsipras did actually get the deal done, and is currently managing a very tricky process indeed implementing it in the Parliament.

Syriza proceeded rationally, from a factually false premis – that the Eurogroup was scared of Greek Euro exit. Although some of Varoufakis’ documents were a bit amateurish, they had very good advice and were surprisingly orthodox on most policy matters. Their disasters weren’t caused by being out of the mainstream or hippy Marxists or anything – they were simply a result of thinking their negotiating position was a lot stronger than it actually was. Once they (finally) realised this, things changed a lot.

Never having to say you’re sorry is also in a sense the definition of hegemony. I submit Very Serious People are hegemonic mouthpieces. Their main concern is US hegemony and everything they advocate ladders back to maintaining it, through whatever tactic (invading Iraq, say) is popular during a given news cycle.

“Could we not conclude that the label VSP is in fact a slur on people with relevant expertise who refuse to ignore the practical constraints of a situation, given by those who wish to engage in a far shallower mode of reasoning?”

So tell me how was my mode of reasoning about the Iraq War was “shallower” than Tom Friedmans?

Harold, VSPs do in fact have expertise. Their expertise is in how to make a comfortable career out of hackitude. It requires not just low integrity, but also a bit of talent.

I still think public shaming, of both individuals and institutions may be one of the few weapons we have.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden@20: “In my experience, what people who cite ‘common sense morality’ a lot actually mean by it is ‘Daddy’s always right.'”

And the people who claim to be the adults in the room are usually teenage boys on stilts.

Even if both pro-war and anti-war commentators are basically stopped clocks, voicing support/opposition before acquiring expertise on the particulars of a situation, the reflexively anti-war position is overwhelmingly better as a starting position. How many foreign invasions/bombings not-engaged-in would it take it to do more cumulative harm than the Iraq invasion? There might be circumstances where setting someone else’s house on fire is the right thing to do, but they are exceptional; the pro-arson brigade shouldn’t have the presumption of equal weight for their policies as a starting position. Much less should they be considered as more serious because they are willing to go to greater extremes.

VSPs earn their title by service to capital, plain and simple. Their expertise or lack thereof is irrelevant.

As an example, consider the Euro. US neoclassical economists from Friedman and Mankiw on the right to Krugman on the left gave an extensive economic analysis of why it would fail economically. They turned out to be exactly right. They also gave a current analysis of how to fix it. Nonetheless, the European VSPs — the Troika and hack German economists — have considered them unserious. Why? Because they call, in part, for the creditors to take a haircut.

In contrast, a marginal economist from a marginal school of economics teaching at a marginal university gets a column in the NYTs and is widely cited. Why? Because he is Koch’s lickspittle. (And a very good one I might add. Worth every penny.) And what policies does he propose? All to serve capital and screw labor. My goodness, he spent a month linking to every column and article he could find attacking Piketty.

Finally, consider the VSP pundits like Friedman, Brooks, and Will. What expertise do they provide other than analingus to the powerful?

” Could we not conclude that the label VSP is in fact a slur on people with relevant expertise who refuse to ignore the practical constraints of a situation, given by those who wish to engage in a far shallower mode of reasoning?”

Sure! So what “expertise” does Friedman have about anything? Or McCardle? Or David Brooks? Or any blowhard on cable news? And what the hell does Cowan, for example, know about who’s right or wrong about environmental policy? Or going to war?

The point of mocking Very Serious People is that they DO NOT HAVE ANY RELEVANT EXPERTISE, but their opinions have immense weight and are PRESUMED to have expertise because their opinions line up with center-right thoughts. So Friedman is VERY SERIOUS and must be listened to about economics, but Krugman is a dirty hippy who wants to give steaks to the Greeks.

“Black, Paul and others (including very many of us at CT) were very, very happy with the way the debate on the Iraq war was conducted”

I was reading CT as lurker around the time of Iraq war and my memory is it was mostly pro-war or at least “anti-hippie” (could be wrong and can’t check now)

Salem @ 32:

Blaming “greedy bankers” or “lazy Greeks” is easy. Trying to understand the actual political, institutional, and economic constraints is hard. Yes, I treat the first group as Unserious and the second as Serious, and I don’t apologise for it.

Uh no. Very Seriousness is the simulacrum of this deeper understanding. “Serious” describes a demeanor, and it is the salient characteristic of these people that they use this demeanor to avoid having to put in the effort of acquiring the necessary understanding. That’s why they’re called Very Serious People and not Very Knowledgeable People. You basically got suckered by those people and the rest of your argument falls apart after that.

Layman @69: I think you may be conflating the defense of banksterism with a sharply voiced disdain for reflexive and undiscriminating leftism. As a reflexive and undiscriminating leftist myself, I deprecate his occasional lack of forbearance. But I can’t bring myself to condemn it quite as strongly as you. Banksters are pretty awful people, and will all be strung up from lampposts after the revolution. You’re not suggesting we do that to dsquared, are you?

Of course it would be exposed. But presenting an alternate explanation is all that such a poster desires. (This is a method of authoritarian control according to Altemeyer.) The appearance of reasonable discussion is the goal; s(he) wants to move the discussion from reality to theory. Add on some civility policing and the poster is now able to control the direction of the discussion.

I haven’t read all the comments so sorry if I repeat, but my understanding of the term was that it was never really about the VSPs themselves. The term is more a critique of how certain people are regarded / deferred to in the mainstream discourse.

On further thought I take back my last comment, there is an element of critiquing the VSPs for thinking that advocating suffering for others makes them more realistic than everyone else.

Geo @ 76

The disdain is certainly there, but it isn’t only triggered by actual ‘reflexive and undiscriminating leftism’. It just seems to be the case that any disagreement is perceived as ‘reflexive and undiscriminating leftism’, and results in insults and authoritarian bullying, to the extent that such can take place in a comment forum.

As for ‘bankster’, I think he fed at the trough of finance, facilitating banksterism, until he’d made his bundle, and sailed away to lands exotic, surfacing from time to time to pen cheery articles advising banksters how to pocket their bonuses with more feigned humility. I don’t say we should lynch him, but I’m not a lyncher.

“Similarly, the VSPs did a bad job in Greece, but compared to Syriza they did brilliantly.”

How so?

I think that just about everyone except Tyler Cowen (and possibly Salem) knows what a VSP is. You might have done greater service had you examined Cowen’s own coinage, “mood affiliation”.

It seems to me that there can be no better example of mood affiliation than Cowen’s own blog; it would really be a more apposite name than Marginal Revolution. Almost every post is either special pleading in the service of a special interest or else self-aggrandizement in the form of the pretense of hyper-rationality. Only the ruthless, diamond-hard intellect of the great Tyler Cowen can perceive the excellence of a greasy samosa served out of a food truck! Says Tyler Cowen.

So what’s your take? Is “mood affiliation” a preemptive strike?

“He’s so constantly wrong, and always in the same higher-moral-justification-for-horribleness way, that it makes me suspect that his much vaunted ethnic restaurant recommendations are probably horrible too”

But he agrees with you almost completely on Greece, so there is that. Wait….

VSP on the economic crisis would be an interesting topic. Proposed VSP statements:

Saving Banks from their bad loaning decisions isn’t moral hazard, and in fact represents a necessity.
Helping debtors with their bad borrowing decisions is moral hazard.
Austerity economics works.

The last one is clearly VSP, because the troika knows it doesn’t work and forces it anyway.

Henry, Please help me! I’m not sure that I understand either one of the concluding implications of your structural argument.

1. Won’t “those whose opinions are closest to the social core and hence most likely to be reinforced by the social system they live in” be VSP’s by definition, if they publicize those opinions?

2. As for the other one, I don’t understand how “people (on left, right or center) who believe that their reasoning capacity makes them more likely to be free from bias than those around them” are especially likely to become VSP’s, based upon Mercier and Sperber.

I must be missing something here, but I don’t know what it is!

Group think would be a preferable method to the VSPs.

Just to restate a point made above. The VSPs are not the experts, on anything. In principle, they should have better access to expert advice than the rest of us, but in practice they have insulation mechanisms that ensure they only hear advice that confirms their prejudices.

The Iraq war was a case in point. All the expert evidence from the intelligence on weapons, to the weapons inspections, to the IR experts to the estimates of the cost of the war showed that the war was both wrong and stupid. But the intelligence was censored and massaged, Blix was derided, the IR experts were dismissed ( disregarding real expertise in favor of ‘savvy’ is a core trait of VSPs) and Lindsey and Shinseki were sacked for giving cost estimates that were at least plausible, though still massively understated.

If you think I’m trolling, you’re very badly wrong (hint: when one of the links laying out the argument goes to a paper I’ve co-authored, it suggests either that I’m being sincere, or that I’m the most committed troll of all time). The Very Serious Person theory is a somewhat popularized version of an argument that I think is more or less right, and very important.

Not that I have any particular objection to trolling if it is done well. Two of the obvious implications of the Mercier-Sperber research are that (a) the distinction between trolling and reasoned argument is at best murky, and (b) there is considerable heuristic value to really well executed and appropriately targeted trolling (which, it is to work properly, requires an ability to get inside the head of the trolling’s target and to understand how he or she reasons). As I have noted on this blog, Socrates was an obvious troll. Max Weber’s advice to professors in Wissenschaft als Beruf can plausibly be interpreted as ‘don’t try to convince your students of your inward beliefs; just troll the hell out of their own to unsettle them in useful ways.’

I don’t think the arguments laid out by Salem are particularly convincing. When he/she says:

Yet I can’t agree that the problem in the run-up to the Iraq war was that “[t]hose who advocated the pro-invasion case were treated as serious thinkers… [t]hose who disagreed were treated as flakes, fifth columnists, Commies and sneaking regarders.” It’s hard to deny that the anti-war crowd really was largely like that. Rather, the problem was that the serious thinkers were all pro-war, and wrong, because of reinforced bias. But note that the Unserious People would have been just as bad or worse. The VSPs’ disaster in Iraq doesn’t make me want to hand over foreign policy to the “No Blood For Oil” crowd, any more than the disasters of the EU make me want to turn it over to the Bruges Group. We need better information and less bias in our experts, not to replace Seriousness with Unseriousness.

he/she rather ostentatiously disregards the fact that rather a lot of actual serious thinkers were strongly opposed to the war (he/she may not recognize the names of these people, still less of the many hundreds of other eventual signatories, but if he/she doesn’t, that suggests that his/her mental map of ‘serious thinkers’ in the non-pejorative sense could do with some remaking). The ‘well if it hadn’t been Donald Rumsfeld in charge, it would have been them dirty hippies’ argument seems to me to actively misrepresent the many people who opposed the war, in ways that are somewhere between loaded and actively misleading. Even within DC, a lot of people in conventional foreign policy jobs knew it was going to be a disaster, but had strong incentives not to say so in public (Republicans for obvious reasons; Democrats because the word had reportedly gone out from Richard Holbrooke that anyone not with the program could expect that they wouldn’t get a job). I can remember a number of depressing conversations with people in the lower echelons of the foreign policy world in those years. Finally, the ‘We need better information and less bias in our experts, not to replace Seriousness with Unseriousness’ is completely irrelevant to my actual claim – which is that the problem is not with individuals, whether “Serious” or smelling of patchouli, so much as with the systemic factors that mean that some people’s idiocies are less likely to be corrected than others. So too for that matter are the exercises in this comment section arguing over who is, or is not a Very Serious Person given their personal predilections. I suspect that even Tom Friedman would have intelligent things to say under different structural circumstances (he is not naturally a stupid person).

Tom Hurka may be engaged in his own exercise in trolling, in which case fair play, but the annoyance that someone may feel if they think they are being Oppressed in CT Comment Threads seems to me to be categorically different than the anger and despair that many of us felt during the Iraq War. If you feel grumpy about me or your fellow commenters (and god knows, I sometimes feel grumpy about me, and very often feel grumpy about your fellow commenters), then you can either go and do something useful with your time or easily find more congenial ways to waste it. When you’re in a country that is going to war, or fear that Social Security is going to be slashed Just Because, you’re rather differently fixed.

engels – you misremember. This site was vigorously pro-hippy and anti-war from its very early days. I think that John Holbo may have vaguely supported the war and then swiftly reconsidered but that his Damascene conversion happened before he came on board – that’s it. I know Chris, Kieran, Maria, dsquared, John, Ted Barlow (of glorious memory) Harry and I were strongly and vocally opposed. This, among many other examples.

Sebastian – here I imagine that PK and many others would disagree with me, but I don’t think that e.g. Wolfgang Schaueble is a Very Serious Person in the common sense of the word. I think he’s highly intelligent, has a big vision of how the EU ought to be that departs from the German conventional wisdom in some crucial respects, and is horribly wrong in his belief that the means he is using will help create the end that he’s after. My sense from Varoufakis’ public remarks is that he thinks the same.

Henry–

Tom Hurka can speak for himself, but I read him as being less about what commenters feel and more about how commenters are perceived. Not least by other commenters. No one wants to go on about Very Serious People and discover they’re assumed to be taking a swipe at one of the front page posters. I personally am not interested in a discussion defending VSPs that’s based on the assumption to do otherwise is to attack you guys; you can call that grump if you like.

Henry Farrell (@98) is correct, of course. I don’t think either Schäuble or Krugman qualify as VSP, since they are experts (in the case of Krugman) and policy makers, in the case of Schäuble (however wrongheaded), whereas, the VSP tend to be pundits, mediators, gatekeepers, whose job it is to keep the discussion within the limits desired by powerful people. Who was it that said that they are very serious about their careers and totally crazy about their policies — or maybe that was very realistic about their careers and crazy in their policies? Or perhaps that was the US foreign policy establishment. It applies to their enablers and hangers on, as well, in any case.

So (#1, 2, 4, 9, 28, 38, 88), a Harvard Ph.D. who holds a named chair at a big university and has written more than a dozen books is a hack, while no-name posters of comments on a fringe blog have the world all figured out. I’m glad to have had this lesson on the intellectual standards of Crooked Timber’s readers. Its writers deserve a better audience.

@ Kurt Schuler #104

This Phd agrees that Cowen is a hack regardless of his credentials. His blog should be called Disingenuous Economics Reasoning Revolution.

There are two cases in the past week on the blog where the assumption is made of sufficient market power by labor to negotiate one’s full marginal product as a wage when that assumption is well known to be false in most cases. He’s supposed to be an economics professor and he’s making a disingenuous argument.

http://informationtransfereconomics.blogspot.com/2015/07/implicit-models-minimum-wage-and.html

Sebastian – here I imagine that PK and many others would disagree with me, but I don’t think that e.g. Wolfgang Schaueble is a Very Serious Person in the common sense of the word. I think he’s highly intelligent, has a big vision of how the EU ought to be that departs from the German conventional wisdom in some crucial respects, and is horribly wrong in his belief that the means he is using will help create the end that he’s after.

I think this is a variant of the error by Salem that I previously identified. I think the problem is built right into the nomenclature: Very Serious Person is really meant to apply not to a person, but to Very Serious Arguments.

Schauble, like every other Very Serious Person, takes positions that are not Very Serious, even if we decide that they are obviously wrong. So when Schauble advocates expansionary austerity during a Depression, he’s a Very Serious Person. But if he thinks forcing Greece out of the Euro will be good for the Euro in the long run, he’s just wrong (or he’s right, if you prefer) but not Very Serious.

To offer even more nuance, I’d propose that everybody thought Colin Powell was a Very Serious Person in the runup to the Iraq War. Turns out he was just a liar, which is a different thing.

It’s inevitable that guys like Schauble are going to get stuck with the Very Serious Person label, though. It’s like the old joke that ends, “But you fuck one pig …”

#104 @Kurt Schuler

I think the Harvard PhD is being judged for his glib blog, rather than his position at a Koch industries supported economics department.

Regardless of whether Schäuble is a VSP, he should be ashamed of himself. He should apologize and resign from his job. He has two flaws: he does not know much about economics, and he cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

@MPAVictoria #111

Ha! That’s another one that brought out the hacktastic

http://informationtransfereconomics.blogspot.com/2015/06/mathiness-is-next-to-growthiness-4.html

@Kurt #104 … BTW, that’s another PhD that brings the hack when needed, albeit from lowly public ivy Berkeley

Kurt Schuler @104

A ranking of top academic economists commonly used in the profession, based on citations, can be found here: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html

While Tyler Cowen isn’t in the top 10% of the profession, John Quiggin of CT fame is rated in the top 1% (355), slightly ahead of Piketty for a name non-economists would be familiar with.

Tyler is a profound hack pretty much always working backward from the conclusion. But it’s worth checking the site on occasion to see what Tyler/Koch is worried about. The relentless posts on Piketty made it pretty clear that Tyler/Koch thought this inequality thing might be a problem. Same with the new literature linking inequality to lower growth. These guys are playing the long game and it’s Tyler’s job to keep pushing the Overton window to the right. And besides, there is good money to be had as a toady to Koch.

Could people not, even in jest, discuss murdering me please? I suppose it’s slightly wimpy of me to object to it, but I find it does rather unsettle me. I hope it’s not too much of a request to make.

Very sorry, dsquared.

Being a VSP greatly hinges on being accepted into that guild by other VSPs. Once admitted, you are almost immune from awkward questions about having been wrong about nearly everything.

Henry Kissinger is still sought out as an authority on foreign policy. Questions about war crimes or violations of the Logan Act never seem to come up. Dick Cheney is asked for his opinions on ISIS. Nobody has thrown cream pies into the faces of Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith. And on it goes.

The rise of VSP goes along with the decline of independent journalism. I recall reading a piece by Gay Talese, saying that the best reporters came from blue-collar backgrounds with a deep skepticism of authority. Post-Watergate came a crop of reporters who wanted to be part of the milieu they covered; embedded journalists who can’t bring themselves to be rude to people they dine with.

John @113. That was one of the tricksy things from the war’s supporters, (that it could force inspections short of war). The reality was that once a significant investment was made moving war materials to theater, it became unthinkable to not follow through. Unthinkable, because imagine how bad the administration would have looked if they’d had to say “oops, no cause to invade, so sorry to have spend so many taxpayer dollars for nuthin”.

#104 – “a Harvard Ph.D. who holds a named chair at a big university and has written more than a dozen books”

Oh, the irony … Cowen’s blog is overfull of comments calling Krugman all kinds of names. Last I checked Krugman is a Nobel prize winning Ph.d with a chair at an even bigger univ ! Cowen’s audience is exactly the one he deserves.

Politicalfootball makes a good point that we should probably be talking about Very Serious Arguments–and that VSPs are people who make the VSAs in a public and career-enhancing way. This allows for some interesting refinements in the discussion, because then it becomes clear that VSAs have a big element of in-group or tribal identification. So for example, The Bell Curve operates under the same principles as other VSAs but is targeted to proto-racists. I’ll admit that I was a full fledged proponent of the VSAs regarding the Iraq war, much to my shame. Which leads to:

“To offer even more nuance, I’d propose that everybody thought Colin Powell was a Very Serious Person in the runup to the Iraq War. Turns out he was just a liar, which is a different thing.” Very Serious Arguments are not only highly resistant to the truth, they are also so ‘important’ that sometimes you think you can get away with small seeming lies to further them.

I’m not actually in Powell’s head of course, but I suspect the lie was along the lines of “it is important to go forward with this war, and we probably find evidence of WMD, so why not just say we already have such evidence?”.

I largely believe that understanding because if he knew he was faking evidence and didn’t believe it would be found, they should have faked the actual evidence on the ground just after the invasion.

Coming back to Greece, the VSA is that Greece can’t leave because leaving will be so bad for it. The “you must be a hack” position is that Greece will be crushed down for years and still forced to leave anyway, so why should it take all the additional bad years and still get fucked in the end?

This isn’t a new argument, d-squared and various parties, including myself, ran through it years ago here in 2012. There he suggested that they couldn’t risk it because they might lose 25% of their GDP if they left the euro. Behold, they lost that anyway, and they didn’t trade that pain to be more likely to stay in the euro, they are now less likely.

Similarly he wrote in 271 on that thread in defense of the German/French bank bailouts: “What I meant was that the troika and ECB (and maybe the Greek banking system to an extent) would be the only creditors, and so a writedown on Greek debt would be much easier to negotiate on much easier terms. I’m not interested in what might be necessary for long term debt service in Greece because I don’t think anyone is planning that.”

But look how that actually played out. When we were talking about the bank bailout, it was clear that the Eurocrats were scared of banking disaster. Now according to d-squared “Syriza proceeded rationally, from a factually false premis – that the Eurogroup was scared of Greek Euro exit. Although some of Varoufakis’ documents were a bit amateurish, they had very good advice and were surprisingly orthodox on most policy matters. Their disasters weren’t caused by being out of the mainstream or hippy Marxists or anything – they were simply a result of thinking their negotiating position was a lot stronger than it actually was. Once they (finally) realised this, things changed a lot.”

All of those arguments seem 1-to-1 mirrors with the Eurocrat arguments all along.

But that doesn’t seem to have caused any re-evaluation. The Greeks followed the VSAs. They got hit with the very outcomes that VSPs warned against if the anti-VSA course was taken (25% GDP loss PLUS a worse situation in negotiations). Yet the VSA-Eurocrats continue on as if they were right all along.

The interesting problem is that reality can’t be mocked forever. I don’t think the Eurocrats have any idea how much damage they just did to the European Union in the last month.

Salem,

The only sense in which Syriza was “incompetent” was that it was insufficiently strong to overcome the opposition of the Very Serious and dominant Germans and their allies in northern Europe. Indeed, Cowen has been weirdly way off on all this, completely embarrassing himself with his absurd attempt to somehow justify the VSPs by claiming morality and common sense for them, when what is most important about them is that they are dead wrong and total assholes, as is the case with the execrable German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schauble. Sneering at the Syriza leadership for failing to overcome this short-sighted creep is shameful.

It is also the case that in Washington, after the Iraq war the VSPs were most notable for pushing hysteria stories about the US social safety net, particularly its Social Security system. These people, who include many writing on the editorial page of the Washington Post, continue to push this line, even as it becomes sillier and sillier. This is almost a pure signal of VSPishness in Washington, obsessing over that.

I fear that poor Tyler may identify himself too much with the VSPs, and so spends all this effort trying to justify their existence and make them look better than they are.

No come on Barkley:

the opposition of the Very Serious and dominant Germans and their allies in northern Europe.

By the end of the process, Germany had allies in northern, southern, western and eastern Europe. That’s the point. It should have been very easy to build a coalition with Spain (still might end up in same place), Italy (desperately needs nominal growth), France (always wants to join a coalition that scores points off Germany, Ireland (had own recent near death experience). It was quite an achievement on the part of Varoufakis to get even the Slovenians to hate him.

This is actually the equivalent of VerySeriousness, by the way. Unlike Tsipras, Varoufakis never needs to change his mind or say sorry – he will be able to go on finding audiences of people to hang on his every word, with their universities paying his speaker-bureau rates, more or less forever. Within a few hours of being fired after the humiliating collapse of his big referendum idea, the PR firm for his book were emailing offering interviews with the “Minister of AWESOME”. This really damaged his reputation in Greece, but apparently not in the market that counts.

Actually I had not stayed up to date on Renzi. Unless I’m misreading things, Syriza should have been able to find some common cause with him. Unless the current mood is more of literal scapegoat–i.e. so long as we can focus on Greece, the focus isn’t on us.

Shorter dsquared on Syriza: what they wanted was morally and economically reasonable but politically impossible. Their not realising that will hurt a lot of Greeks.

That doesn’t seem trollish to me. Unlike Salem, who really should be ignored as an obvious troll.

I think we’ve long lost the point of the OP – that the creation of VSPs is a STRUCTURAL phenomenon. Abuse of individual VSPs (however well merited and personally satisfying) is kinda beside the point.

104 makes a good albeit unconscious point. The sv pis very much related to “professionalization” – the imposition of disciplinary norms that took place approximately after WWII and that reconfigured the human sciences and the media. Where once the interested amateur could roam, the new norms inverted the relationship between content and credentials. In some ways, this did create a more democratic environment, with the massive increase in college students. At the same it led to a sort of credential-protection that was extremely bad. The bright young systems men who led us into the catastrophe in Vietnam are a case in point – they were fighting amateurs. Giap would never have made it at rand. that rank mouthbreathing blog commentors would be more correct than Harvard trained foreign policy analyst ( who happened to have no knowledge o Arabic or Iraqi society in any sense, much less any tacit knowledge) makes those with positions depending on the credentialing system breathess with rage, in the same way journalists couldn’t believe they could be plunked by bloggers.

Giap would probably have made it at RAND; he certainly succeeded at the French colonial academic system

RAND provided both analysts who predicted imminent Viet Cong collapse (Leon Goure) and analysts who recommended withdrawal (Konrad Kellen). Kellen even wrote a letter (along with five other RAND analysts, including Daniel Ellsberg) to the NYT. As this BBC Magazine article acidly observes

So Kellen stood up and said that Goure was wrong, that the Vietcong were not giving up and were not demoralised. It was not, he said, a battle the US could win – not today, not tomorrow and not the day after tomorrow.

Nothing happened. Goure had cocktail parties and entertained visiting dignitaries and helicopters whisked him off to aircraft carriers, and Kellen wrote long, detailed reports that were ignored and then forgotten. The war went on and things got worse and worse.

This seems apropos to the discussion of what, structurally speaking, promotes viewpoints to the VSP.

I realize I’m entering this discussion rather late, which means I shouldn’t say anything fundamental, but what the hell. I disagree with all the definitions of VSP, in the OP, on this thread, and Tyler Cowen’s.

What we need is a definition that makes sense of sanctimonious hawkishness in foreign policy (e.g. Iraq), hostility to Keynesianism in economics (austerity) and hostility to the welfare state in social policy (Social Security, including its disability component). VSP’s give at least two cheers for sweatshops and think cultural and personality flaws harm minorities more than discrimination. What could tie all of this together?

I propose the following: all systems of hierarchy and power derive stability from some combination of force and legitimacy. Legitimacy in the modern world comes from the benefits the non-rich and non-powerful majority derive from the existing order. Broadly speaking, the peace-and-prosperity stuff and the welfare state are the basis for legitimacy claims.

The VSP faction is the one which says that the carrots are corrupting and don’t get the job done; we need the stick. The international order requires war. Economic indiscipline will be cured by austerity and less buffering from welfare state programs. The poor and vulnerable are the victims of their own shortcomings and should not be given handouts or special protections. Debtors must pay the price for their foolish ways. The soft-hearted who think that order and progress can be based on generosity and trust are deluded and unserious. There is a time for discipline, and this time is now.

There is nothing intrinsic to VSP-ness that requires it to be wrong in an objective sense, although it happens to be wrong a lot more often than right in the world we are actually in. What makes it contemptible is (a) its unquestioning affiliation with wealth and power and (b) its moralization of the hard-soft dichotomy such that humanitarianism (concern for the unemployed or victims of war) is viewed as weakness, while a willingness, even eagerness, to exercise force and prevent the sharing of economic resources is seen as the sign that one deserves to be taken seriously.

Peter Dorman #142: “What we need is a definition that makes sense of sanctimonious hawkishness… and hostility… I propose… some combination of force and legitimacy.”

Political science has been pointing to a good definition, using hard polling data, for some time now. I attempted a brief collation from the literature under a John Quiggin post almost exactly one year ago, here:
https://crookedtimber.org/2014/07/17/condemned-by-history-crosspost/#comment-543475

Thus it is KNOWN what the definition is, from solid research: The basics are in individual management of “risk perception”, which is considered to be an objective psychological existent. This includes the existential fear of death. Force and legitimacy are merely the results, not the cause (although often, they are severe results).

This is intimately involved in the current psychology of money, which was formulated in about 600 B.C. when the ancient Greeks (ironically, given the modern Euro’s problems) combined their previous tribal function of ritual status objects with the function of accounting markers borrowed from the Mesopotamian grain-storage accounts (via the Phoenician traders).

This symbiosis also emerged independently in other areas; in Asia for example.

The combination of two functions turned out to be explosive, for the individual management of risk perception.

Among other fallouts, there immediately came about the widespread notion that a person should repay his or her debts across all forms of transaction in order to maintain the status of being a trustworthy member of the new commercial society — something which Tyler Cowen includes in his list of the propositions of “common sense morality”, under number 3.

We should step back and moment and note that the general form of this social cognitive bias happens on the Right and on the Left: people refer to the opinions of their in-group, have kneejerk reactions to scientific discoveries, etc.

But the outbursts are very salient on the Right in this era. The next question (to some of these political scientists) is, why? The answer appears to be that, for the Right (and for the current VSP’s) the individual management of risk is intimately combined with “System justification”, BY DEFINITION. Whereas the Left is usually against the System.

And the System itself is now cracking by its own logic. That is putting the Right under special pressure. After about 2500 years, and after the last 100 years of war and other distractions, the System itself is falling under serious questions: How is this going to work? Can these debts actually BE repaid? If we make a non-austerity jubilee, how does the expectation of debt-responsibility continue, after that? How can private investors keep the economy going if a surfeit of capital drives rates below profitable ROI, and if the resulting lower-productivity jobs for most people will prevent them from paying the required return to keep the wheels turning further? Etc. etc.

In regard to this profound sea-change in human social thought, I think that David Graeber (in Debt: the First 5000 Years) was headed in the right direction, although he barely treated the central issue of the new challenge to the ancient social psychology of debt.

a rebate agreement for all profits made by the ESCB on their holdings of Greek bonds under the SMP

Not one cent of which has been paid.

D2 I am curious whether at this point you think it would have been better for Greece to leave the Euro back at the start of this mess?

“But presenting an alternate explanation is all that such a poster desires. (This is a method of authoritarian control according to Altemeyer.) The appearance of reasonable discussion is the goal; s(he) wants to move the discussion from reality to theory. Add on some civility policing and the poster is now able to control the direction of the discussion.”

Thanks. I may have to memorize this and quote it in future threads. (Seems easier than reading Altemeyer, but maybe I should do that too.) I’ve seen this behavior when playing my usual role of random Chomskyian ranting about some Western atrocity, but couldn’t have described it so succinctly. That part about moving the discussion from reality to theory hadn’t occurred to me in those terms, but it’s dead right. As for control, another aspect is that the poster will usually take advantage of any intellectual honesty on the DFH side-for instance, the willingness to admit that that yes, both sides in a given conflict have committed atrocities as a matter of policy. This becomes universal agreement that the Enemy is guilty, but it’s an open question whether we are.

@149: “As best as I can reckon, Cowen is talking about trusting elites even when we know they are deliberately lying.”

Cowen defines Very Serious People as:

[Those who] realize that common sense morality must, to a considerable extent, rule politics [even though common sense morality will very often be wrong].

That seems to be dsquared’s position: despite it being quite wrong , the ‘common sense morality’ of the German electorate is just a fact of life that Syriza should have understood and accepted as a fact of life. Cowen says such morality demands (among other things) ‘repayment of debts, savings, and hard work’.

It seems to me that dsquared is a Very Serious Person to the hilt by that definition at least.

That should be point (2).

Inevitably, when I think of Very Serious People and their favored language, I come back to this vintage Doonesbury cartoon. “I said, ‘Look, Martha, here come the bombs.'”

#146 no I don’t think that is right either – eg €1.5bn was transferred on 31 July 2013. (Source: http://www.efsf.europa.eu/mediacentre/news/2013/efsf-disburses-2.5-billion-to-greece.htm)

You’re right that the SMP rebate has been subject to the same conditions as the rest of the program and that this has led to a lot of uncertainty and heel dragging, but it is real money.

Roger Gathman @ 141

Well said, all of it. It’s nice to see a proper defense of finance-ministers-who-ride-motorcycles which doesn’t involve (metaphorically?) calling for dsquared’s head. Bless you also for ignoring the interminable technical analysis of VSP-ism for a bit, and for locating the place where new things under the sun emerge in the imagination, without making the usual cringing apologies for doing so.

I do wonder, though…. Must we really ask why the Euro is popular among Europeans, or why they’re only now discovering the horrors that can result from having your debts denominated in what is effectively a foreign currency? The only reason for asking the weak why they aren’t strong, it seems to me, is to grant us license to insult them. If we’ve already beaten them up and taken all their stuff, why do we still feel the need?

Following on dsquared @ 159, any VSP wannabe must propose policies which cause other people pain. It is this sober, serious, regretful willingness to sacrifice the well-being of others, in the name of adult problem-solving, which is to me the hallmark of VSPism. We must cut social security and Medicare now so we don’t have to cut them later. We must bomb Syria in order to save Syrians. We must let people loose their homes because moral hazard. We’re the adults, so we must look forward, not backward.

Oddly enough, Varoufakis doesn’t fit into that mold at all, so I don’t know what that bit is about.

Oddly enough, Varoufakis doesn’t fit into that mold at all, so I don’t know what that bit is about.

Right or wrong, Varoufakis was calling for a considerable amount of pain for the Greek people.

“Right or wrong, Varoufakis was calling for a considerable amount of pain for the Greek people.”

As opposed to the considerable amount of pain for the Greek people he was explicitly rejecting?

“Some economists, and The Economist’s, favourite cliche always used to be ‘belt-tightening’. Yep, driving children into poverty, unemployed people out on the street and disabled people to suicide is analogised to a fat middle-aged man going on a diet.”

This +1000

‘Even the “my super negotiating strategy might look like it’s destroying the economy and threatening a currency crisis, but we are about to get major concessions from the troika. ‘

I think you need to distinguish between being a VSP and simply being wrong about something. Didn’t you earlier say that Varoufakis’ proposals were sound, but that he misjudged his leverage in the negotiation?

I get that you don’t like his style. So what? His proposals were sound, but his motorbike and lack of tie irritated the bankers. Who’s the VSP in that circumstance?

As opposed to the considerable amount of pain for the Greek people he was explicitly rejecting?

On this specific question, I’m not too far from dsquared, but I’m considerably more sympathetic to Varoufakis, and so at the risk of a little redundancy, I’ll venture an answer.

Varoufakis was proposing a considerable amount of guaranteed, immediate pain in exchange for an uncertain result in a complex situation. (Sound familiar?)

I’m not Greek, but it was my opinion in the long run that the majority of Greeks are likely to be better off when they heed Varoufakis and walk away from the Euro. The majority of Greeks, however, plainly don’t want to take that path, and under Layman’s rule of VSPs (which I endorse), I think it’s a particularly egregious violation for me (or Varoufakis) to advocate a position whose adoption would cost me nothing and cause considerable pain to the people who actually have something on the line.

It has certainly shaken my confidence in Varoufakis that he doesn’t appear to have mapped out any serious plan for Grexit. (I wonder if he withdrew all of his own money from the Greek banks.) The idea that you can embark on a radical strategy without significant planning and just have everything turn out okay, well, that sort of thinking ought to be very familiar to you if you’re an American.

The interesting thing about the banker’s off the hook, debtors not, Greek problem is that it has VSP tendencies from multiple directions at multiple times in the crisis.

1. 2010: VSP lefties and some more libertarian rightys want to say “No bailout” because the risks of no bailout mostly don’t fall on them, and they can take the tough on banks look.

1a. VSP can also say “Greece should have exited then”, which would have been an enormous gamble and which might have paid off but then again the down side would be on Greece. They are dismissed as idiots, because it is too much of a risk and the EU will fix things eventually.

Actual outcome, banks got bailed out, private investors learned that they don’t need to be careful about loaning to euro countries (see currently low Italian and Spanish yields) sowing the seeds for the next eurozone sovereign lending crisis. But on the other hand, we didn’t have a world crushing banking crisis in 2010, so that is good.

Outcome for Greece: crushing austerity measures and enormous GDP loss.

2. 2012, Greek GDP has cratered under the watchful eye of the troika. VSP who don’t have to worry about actual Greek suffering suggest that more belt tightening is needed because austerity leads to growth. (Yes I know that VSP have mostly abandoned that frame now, but now is three years later. This absolutely was the frame then). This is a VSA which was already known to be wrong, but not yet abandoned by the political decision makers.

2a. Other VSP argue that by God Greece should have left in 2010, and look what happened when they didn’t. They suggest that leaving now would be a good gamble. They are dismissed as idiots, because it is too much of a risk and the EU will fix things eventually.

Outcome, crushing austerity and further enormous GDP loss.

3. 2015 VSP argue that Greece didn’t try hard enough, and that they also elected a not-fully-committed-to-austerity government. VSP confused about why the Greek people would elect such a government after the obvious successes of the austerity regime (only -25% GDP growth!). They are especially confused since the GDP briefly flirted with going above zero growth and certainly the common people noticed that with all of the aid going back and forth between banks! I won’t characterize their demands at this point. But I will note that the idea of Greece exiting the euro (with all the pain that would entail) is now floated very publicly by the German Finance minister who is in charge of the negotiations.

3a. Other VSP argue that by God Greece should have left in 2010, and look what happened when they didn’t. They suggest that leaving now would be a good gamble. They are dismissed as idiots, because it is too much of a risk and the EU will fix things eventually.

Here’s the thing. If Schäuble gets to force Greece from the Euro and they get to be hit with all the pain that will entail, is that enough to make you reconsider 2010? Will the 7 years of austerity PLUS the whole euro exit problem really have been better than euro exit in 2010? Or are you still convinced that isn’t a likely outcome?

Further, what counts as failure? The ECB policy making clearly isn’t working, and it isn’t just for Greece. But all current indications are that all the analysts understand that fact, AND IT DOESN’T MATTER because the VSP keep it from mattering.

Is there an amount of GDP loss in Greece that would make you think “Hmmmm, maybe they shouldn’t have submitted to the troika?” If so, what is that amount? We are already well worse than the most horrible outcome projected by the troika. How did that happen? Is that changing minds somewhere useful? Italy and Spain can’t continue on like they are either. But so far as I can tell the Eurocrats don’t give a fuck.

The only people who were definitely saved were the private creditors, and they seem to be repeating the mistakes that led to Greece.

D-squared, you’ll probably take all this as an attack, but I’m just looking for a shred of hope. Am I wrong? Are private creditors worried that they might not get bailed out in Spain? Is there something that signals German change on transfers to Spain and Italy? This looks to me like a train wreck than the VSP think will all be fine.

Reading dsquared and Anatole Kaletsky today, I’m reminded of a series of conversations I had many years ago with selected VSPs, long before anyone thought to call them that. These conversations always seemed to go something like this:

Are there flaws in our current implementation? Of course there are. Has it really never occurred to you that we’re already aware of these flaws? Do you really not understand what is meant by the phrase with all deliberate speed? Taking that tone in our discussions, I can assure you, is unlikely to advance your cause. Do you actually suppose that you represent the will of the so-called people? Could you not at least get someone to iron your shirt and find you a tie before coming here to speak to us?

Such conversations are never really negotiations — they’re demonstrations of who’s calling the shots, and more importantly, who isn’t calling them. Dsquared’s complaint about Varoufakis seems to be that Varoufakis didn’t understand the ancient principle involved, and for purely egotistical reasons, refused to submit gracefully to the signals being displayed for him, and so tossed away any mercy his early submission might have gained for the people he represents. I would say on the contrary that a) dsquared is rather conveniently blaming the victim, and b) that relying on the whims of a power which has just succeeded in humiliating you is not just hard on the ego, it actually encourages the bastards to twist what they’ve already stuck in.

If this sort of posturing is a game, it’s a long one, and it ain’t over yet. Kaletsky offers us the consolation that what he likes to think of as the creative hypocrisy built into the complex mechanisms of the Eurozone, once the bent knee of the Greeks is there for all to marvel at, will permit Eurocrats to grant more mercy to the Greeks in private than they have hitherto been able to acknowledge publicly, and despite a bit of misery here and there, which is to be expected, we will all move more rapidly than anyone now supposes into the sunny uplands of prosperity, even, God love ’em, the miscreant Greeks.

This may not be bullshit, but it sure smells like it, and I think it remains to be seen just who and how many are prepared to eat it.

that relying on the whims of a power which has just succeeded in humiliating you is not just hard on the ego, it actually encourages the bastards to twist what they’ve already stuck in.

William, there’s also a discussion on this thread about impreviousness to evidence. Since Varoufakis left, not only have the troika agreed a new financing package, Angela Merkel herself has started indicating openness to debt reduction.

“William, there’s also a discussion on this thread about impreviousness to evidence. Since Varoufakis left, not only have the troika agreed a new financing package, Angela Merkel herself has started indicating openness to debt reduction.”

Good grief! The Troika were always ready to agree to a new financing package – the negatiation was about how much austerity had to accompany it. And Merkel’s softening is because of, not despite the fight Tsipras and Varoufakis put up, including the referendum – because it led to demands for debt reduction from Italy & France, the IMF, and the U.S.

“Just to keep right on top of this – the bankers took a 75% loss on their debt holdings in 2012. The much maligned German and French ones even agreed (after some arm-twisting by the regulators) to not sell down or reduce their GGB holdings in the interim period and to make a fair share of a contribution.”

Now we’re covering old ground. The German & French banks were largely bailed out in 2010 – when their debts were bought out by the public – and any haircut they agreed to in 2012 would have been drastically smaller than their pre-2010 exposure.

This series of posts is practically a demonstration of VSPism in practice.

The German & French banks were largely bailed out in 2010 – when their debts were bought out by the public

No they weren’t. Nothing was “bought out by the public” in 2010. Financing was provided to allow the repayment of debts maturing in 2010 and 2011, before PSI was concluded early in 2012. And the German and French banks didn’t even benefit from that because, as I mentioned above, they had been strong-armed by their regulators into rolling over those of their Greek bond holdings which matured, precisely because those regulators realised it would look really bad if the Eurogroup was providing an exit for Deutsche Bank. A lot of private sector investors did manage to get out by being repaid on 2010 and 2011 maturities, but these ones specifically didn’t.

“Nothing was “bought out by the public” in 2010. Financing was provided to allow the repayment of debts maturing in 2010 and 2011, before PSI was concluded early in 2012. ”

The 2010 plan involved EZ sovereigns loaning money to Greece which was, in turn, used by Greece to reduce the exposure of German and French banks. This really isn’t in dispute.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/former-central-bank-head-karl-otto-poehl-bailout-plan-is-all-about-rescuing-banks-and-rich-greeks-a-695245.html

“A lot of private sector investors did manage to get out by being repaid on 2010 and 2011 maturities, but these ones specifically didn’t.”

Is there anything general that can said about these two classes of investors, ie those who got out between 2010-12, and those who took the haircuts in 2012? As in, is there a useful (political) distinction here that meant the earlier ones got out but the later ones not ? Or was it just the nature of the loans (long term vs short)?

Susan of Texas @89:

This is where I come in looking like more of a defender of McArdle. Maybe it’s because I just don’t read her all that much, but on most days, I don’t think she’s as bad as many on our side do. Her rise is undeserved, but I don’t think she’s as unscrupulous as, say, Stephen Moore. I guess it’s more about incompetence or poor work ethic than anything else.

And really, her rise makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. She’s not a complete idiot, nor is she a raging lunatic/bigot like Coulter or others on her side. She seems pleasant enough from what I can tell of the few times I’ve seen her speak, so people would want to have her on their shows and so on as a result. Who else like her is there? Virginia Postrel is similar, but older, and she does her own unique thing. Coulter is out, as is Malkin. Star Parker? KellyAnn Conway? One of the Fox people? I guess Megyn Kelly qualifies, but she’s broadcast. Basically, as undeserved as I might think her rise is, if you are looking to make your outlet something other than an old crusty (usually white) men’s party AND you are looking for someone who isn’t a liberal, who else is there?

bjssp:

If you want an incompetent, dishonest female conservative/libertarian with a poor work ethic who blogs about the economy but doesn’t deserve her position then yes, McArdle might be your only choice.

I really have to stop discussing Greece here; it’s off topic for Henry’s thread. It’s now quite easy to write responses on my Medium posts.

Dsquared #192: “…it’s off topic for Henry’s thread.”

I am not so sure, because the point is how the VSP’s are by Tyler’s definition concerned with the common morality of debt repayment, and your answer to my question might shed light on Henry’s definition that they will never admit error.

Actually, I am suddenly very intrigued by the idea of structural circumstances under which Tom Friedman would shave his mustache.

@Layman. As I understand it (I did look at it at the time and this is what memory tells me) the BIS figures were badly calculated. For foreign banks which owned Greek banks, the BIS included as a foreign liability the entire exposure of the Greek bank, when it should have been limited to the foreign bank’s equity exposure to the Greek bank (an order of magnitude less).

As a sort of test of the kind of things that VSP journals get away with- for VSPs would be nowhere without the media collaboration that provides them with perches to pontificate – take a gander at the big bad New York Review of Books article about ISIS, a solemnity concocted by “anonymous” – who we know is a great expert, because, the magazine assures us, he’s been posted to the Middle East by the US government.
In fact, so serious that the editors seem to have blithely given him carte blanche to say things and give references that have the same relation to fact as, say, the figures of monsters on medieval maps have to zoology. At least the medieval cartographers were cute.

But where to begin? Reading the hopeless mess of the article, I was struck by one passage.

“The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006.”

I asked myself why such a toll hadn’t attracted much more world wide attention. Then I looked up the “u.s.” analyst, Larry Schweikart. There’s no reference in the article for Schweikart’s article, but going to Schweikart’s author page, I learned all about his expertise in Iraqi history, which is, it appears, non-existent – although, admittedly, he does have some knowledge of the electric guitar, which he once played in a minor rock bank. His cv is impressively dotted with books with titles like a Patriot’s History of the US and a bestseller entitled 48 Liberal Lies About American History.

So, basically, under the highminded pretence that we are reading about anonymous’ very informed views about the Middle East, we are served up retreads from Fox and Friends, which often interviews Mr. Schweikart. NYRB, meet Daily Caller. At least the rightwing site makes no pretences. And of course a factoid is launched – a casualty count that will surely pop up in GOP accusations that Obama lost Iraq. The dishonesty is comically blatant. It comes at the same time we are being prepped for author tours with the disgusting Emma Sky, the aide to General Odierno, whose death squad practices in Iraq, we have been assured by Ms. Sky, are totally exaggerated.
.
It is interesting that in the period of time since 2002, when the media hysteria about Iraq was at its height, to now, when the media hysteria about ISIS is at its height, the major journals have learned absolutely nothing about reporting. The NYR should profusely apologize to its readers for thrusting anonymous on their attention. I doubt they will.

The Greek situation is bewildering to an American who is not well-versed in economics or finance and who has lost his trust in news media, such as myself. Reading Dr. Krugman and others have convinced me that most of the specific austerity measures forced onto Greece (in return for international financing) have been cruelly counter-productive; but I think I have learned the most about the mechanics of what has been going on from Daniel Davies on this thread, for which I thank him.

(Despite this thread not being about Greece, the back-and-forth between dsquared and various interlocators seemed more educational to me than other posts about Greece -perhaps because those other posts laid a foundation to which some final bricks of knowledge were added here.)

The “French and German banks got bailed out” distinction *might* not be a useful one, but a significant portion of creditors *did get* repaid during 2010-11 before the haircuts in 2012. Is there a coherent class of creditor that got repaid?

205 – I have to agree. The revisionist idea that the EU would involve hundreds of billions of euros to save Greek banks – which is the alternative theory – is implausible in the extreme. We are meant to believe, in this scenario, that European banks and technocrats simply acted out of their innate nobility.
This factoid is always launched on the basis of “something I remembered” or “being part of the process at the time.” Nothing so vulgar as what is put down on paper or reported in the newspapers.
When you are supposed to swallow an idea that goes against everything that you know about the motives and behaviors of the elite financial technocrats, you usually should spit it out and look at it. These factoids are reminiscent of the way the cigarette industry defended itself for years, or the way climate change denial works. Same mechanism.

engels @161, no worries at all. I don’t remember how much I wrote about the Iraq war at the time – it was quite possibly only or even entirely in comments on others’ posts, so you are far from remiss in not remembering that as part of the general flavour of CT at the time. (then there was the whole ‘decent left’ thing, remember? Sigh. Some of Chris’s least favourite times on CT, I am sure.)

In any case, as Henry says, yes, I was extremely anti the war (though a lot more people are anti in retrospect than were at the time, funny that), went to marches etc. Sod all use, of course. Both Henry and I had spent time there as children and had since taken a great interest in the country. But I don’t think I wrote much about it.

engels @165, +1000, as MPA says. I’m stealing that one.

(non snarkily) have you seen

https://medium.com/bull-market/2010-and-all-that-relitigating-the-greek-bailout-part-1-a889d468e8ae

and

https://medium.com/bull-market/2010-and-all-that-relitigating-the-greek-bailout-part-2-7c839e32c286

(i think it gets into his position in greater detail)

OK people, I spent 10 minutes googling for your benefit.

Layman links to this article:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-07/how-greece-s-bank-bailout-benefited-greeks

This article links to this BIS report

http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qa1006.pdf

The 177.9 figure is from table

“Table 9A: Consolidated claims of reporting banks – immediate borrower basis”

Do you know what consolidated means? Good.

RG 200: I have read the NYRB article on ISIS with caution after reading your criticism. The gist of the article is that we don’t understand the phenomenon, which seems fair enough to me. Other than Schweikart’s dubious numbers, which are marginal to the main thesis, what is your beef?

Other than the dubious numbers? Hmm, what would you think of an article in the NYRB quoting Rush Limbaugh as an expert on the Ukraine? The numbers quote makes me doubt very seriously the notion, a, that the Iranians were protecting al quaeda in Iraq (along with the hilarious idea that Osama bin Laden had a soft touch for the Shias, when throughout the late nineties and the 00s, al qaeda was vigorously either attacking Shias in Pakistan or providing support for those attacks), which is neo-con nonsense that tries to align Iran with al qaeda, a well known neo-con meme from the 00s, and b., the idea that, via those numbers, the American surge was succeeding on all fronts – when in fact this is a very debatable proposition, and other figures would say that the surge, by encouraging the ethnic segregation of neighborhoods by means of guarded communication ways and berms, was doing precisely the opposite. Here’s a bit of the other view: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/11/17/why-surge-iraq-actually-failed-and-what-that-means-today/0NaI9JrbtSs1pAZvgzGtaL/story.html

RG 216, I caught the bit about Iran allegedly helping those who then went on to blow up Shia shrines. I am skeptical of that although then, the US also helped those who later blew up the twin towers. Nevertheless, I didn’t pick up the strong propagandist scent you seem to identify. Maybe I’m naive but mostly it seems the author is arguing for more humility since we really understand so little of what’s going on.

Those Friedman pieces are classic, right down to the ‘lazy Greeks’ canard. Greeks work more hours per year than do Germans, and Germans retire at earlier ages than do Greeks.

I thought it was an interesting post and quite a good comment thread (though some of the dsquared-and-Greece discursion left me flat).

Oddly, perhaps, I thought among the more interesting comments were Salem’s (especially the first, Salem @ 32), where he used the label, “Very Serious” to apply to people, who really are serious, and not just the subject of ironic disdain for attempting to appear “serious”. It was the OP stripped of the capacity to appreciate irony, and in doing so, laid bare some serious problems in the approach of the OP.

I don’t think the pundits to whom the label, Very Serious People, applies, within the terms of the OP, are, in fact, “serious” in a non-ironic sense. That’s kind of the point: that these are hacks, who play serious people on teevee and in op-eds. There’s a deception involved in their self-presentation.

Salem’s analysis did highlight a real problem, though, which is that the critics of the “Very Serious People” admit some pretty “non-serious” arguments into the core debates.

Those who advocated the pro-invasion case were treated as serious thinkers, of enormous gravitas, who were taking the tough decisions necessary to protect America’s national security. Those who disagreed were treated as flakes, fifth columnists, Commies and sneaking regarders. As we know, despite the agreement of the Very Serious People that the Iraq war was a grave and urgent necessity, it turned out to be a colossal clusterfuck. As we also know, many of the People who were Very Serious about Iraq still continue to be Very Serious about a multitude of other topics on our television screens and in our op-ed pages.

Being a Very Serious Person is about occupying a structural position . . .

One of the problems I had with the OP was the passive agency embedded in this phenomenon that defines who is a “Very Serious Person”: “were regarded”.

Tyler Cowen had a view on how “Very Serious People” are selected, that these pundits are particularly good at interpreting issues in terms of “common-sense morality”. But, I don’t see that the OP has a stance. Nor do I see an explanation for how the Very Serious come to be treated as very serious by . . . whom?

Clearly, the label, “Very Serious People” is meant to call into question the bona fides of people, like Tom Friedman. The irony is that these people are NOT very good at applying common-sense morality: you know stuff, like, don’t lie your country into war.

Paul Krugman has a column up about his fellow MIT economists and apparently they are all serious dudes, like Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi and Olivier Blanchard. I suppose these are the sorts of people Salem had in mind, in the way he used “Very Serious People”, rather then Tom Friedman. Krugman assures us that they are reality-based. So, I’m not sure how Krugman expects us to respond when they solemnly tell us that there is no alternative — something all three have participated in.

It is right to slip from Tom Friedman to Ben Bernanke or Olivier Blanchard?

I guess it turns on this question of who is doing the all-important “regarding” in “were regarded” and by what process of selection.

I tried to think of someone, who plays the role of gatekeeper of “Seriousness”. One examplesI came up with was Charley Rose, who does a talk show for public television in the U.S., where he interviews geniuses and billionaires and corporate chieftains about the state of the world, aspiring to be a little taste of Davos for the masses, I guess. Charley just excludes points-of-view he finds distasteful. He has Tom Friedman on a lot and it was on Rose’s program, where Friedman spoke the infamous “suck on this” theory of the Second Iraq War.

Another example I came up with is Politico(.com), which is a political news service that, as part of its market positioning strategy, supplies journalist-reporter-pundits to news talkshows and roundtables. Politico was founded on the journalism side by two reporters who came to prominence at the New York Times and Washington Post, where they took the lead in keeping the Clinton Whitewater scandals alive for years on end. It may not be obvious that they are gatekeepers, because they’re not exactly, not in the way Rose is. Rather, they are place-keepers. By occupying one of a very limited number of seats on an unlimited number of shows, they effectively block competing points of view, while enhancing their own prestige (look! we’re are on all these shows! People take us seriously.)

Anyway, some admittedly disjointed thoughts on the OP.

Hi Kurt! You came back and proved me wrong. Good!

You clutched pearls over the word “turd”. Bad!

You whined about personal attacks when really people were just attacking your arguments such as they were. Bad!

You failed to respond in any substantive way to the criticism levied on your arguments. Bad!

Net Score: -2

Care to try again?

@216 Good comment. Isn’t there a basic contradiction in your thinking, if I understand your position. You’re effectively arguing that we can’t really judge the wisdom of an individual action until we see the impact of the action in the longer term – for example: arming and training ubl to eventually attack America. The impact of the surge can’t be measured at all, because it was followed by something quite different from the surge. The short-term of the drop in violence is balanced by the segregation etc. But what if trust and limited co-existence grows out of the practice of not killing each other? The fundamental problem with the Iraq invasion was that getting was going to be a cakewalk, and it was. Getting our heads out of the beehive whilst being stung by an extremely motivated swarm with a newly acquired confidence in their own abilities to take on a more powerful adversary (we see the propaganda impact of that daily) was/is always the risk. That’s one of the big reasons a half-ass invasion was/is such a seriously bad idea. We’re looking for closure on this. I’m not at all sure the “other side” has any desire to lay down arms for a good while yet.

“The US blog meme about Greek vs German working hours is not only irrelvant because there is no conflict about working hours but also based on shady data. You cant just compare average hours worked including part time jobs of a stay at home wive economy with one that has among the highest employment to population ratios including many part time jobs.”

As it turns out, Germany has about 15% higher labor force participation (78% vs 68%); but those Greeks who work put in 50% more hours per year (2100 vs 1400). I think that means on balance Greeks are more productive. The same holds true, more or less, with other Mediterranean Euro members. You can pretend there’s no Northern Europe perception of the south as lazy slackers, and further pretend this view doesn’t color the debate, but don’t expect me to take that seriously.

Employment Rate: Aged 15-64: All Persons for Greece
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LREM64TTGRQ156S

Trigger warning – horror.

Moderation due to links to Fred statistics showing that:

Before the crisis, Greek males were about as likely to work as German males, about 75% (females were less likely, presumably Greece is more traditionalist wrt gender roles). So the claim – widely believed in Germany – that Greeks went into early retirement en masse is just false.

Uh, you dont actually know why Germans or Greeks retire at which age. Maybe many Germans retire before the regular age based date because they cant keep up with the required work speed or behavioural expectations without getting clinically depressive, ive certainly meat my fair share of such people -_-. While it would seem plausible that Greeks work harder at first view, since thats what you expect in a poorer country unless you`ve eaten too much protestant working brings you closer to god attitude, thats unfortunately not even obvious at all to be the case in reality.

> Uh, you dont actually know why Germans or Greeks retire at which age.

Nor do you.

We’ve got a structural problem here: you’re treating all ambiguity and uncertainty as resolving in your favour. Which is fine as far as you’re concerned, but you’re demanding that we do the same, which isn’t: we’re exactly as entitled as you are to select how we treat unknown data.

@@RP and TM:

I don’t actually disagree it’s about social domination—I just understand “social domination” rather differently than you do, it seems. I’ll say half of what I had in mind to say, and I’ll say that very obscurely (because, as ever, I am lazy and not up to writing multiple paragraphs).

I think of modes of social recognition—the kind of thing Du Bois is talking about in the bit RP quoted—as irreducibly normative relations. (This to me is related to the “positional goods” stuff and how they’re also irreducibly social, etc.) When I hear “psychic rewards” or whatever, I think of affective states. A model of how certain kinds of normative social relations can be self-perpetuating and systematically oppressive makes total sense to me. The idea that this is supposed to be explained by a bunch private affective states is totally bizarre to me.

(The other half was about certain misunderstandings re “real” and “material” and their relation to, well, what I think of social types of things, but I can just grant you your sense of “material”—the “psychic” stuff is really what’s super weird.)

226 – I dont think I’m making quite the consequentialist argument that you suppose here: “Isn’t there a basic contradiction in your thinking, if I understand your position. You’re effectively arguing that we can’t really judge the wisdom of an individual action until we see the impact of the action in the longer term – for example: arming and training ubl to eventually attack America.” My argument is, rather, that our ability to produce a theoretical shorthand that will enumerate individual actions should be thought of as a convention, and not a reflection of the reality of events, which are always saturated in context. It is the context where the real struggle in image management occurs.
Iraq offers such irresistable examples. Take the whole WMD thing. The pro-war people emphasized that Hussein was building up such capacity that, in the words of Tony Blair’s government, he could send a missile to London. The anti-war people emphasized the work of the inspectors. What was obscured here, perpetually and maddeningly, was why a man in possession of WMD’s would want to attack London or New York and yet never, in ten years, whisk the merest hint of a missile into the capital of Kurdistan – since for a decade, the coalition had pretty much wrenched a good fourth or fifth of Iraq away from him, and it was totally outside his control. The one thing we knew from Kuwait was that SH had a very jealous disposition with regard to what he thought of as his territory; but suddenly, we just forget all that. I mean so completely forgot that never once, in my memory at least, did I hear anyone puzzle over the fact that a potential nuclear powered tyrant, with nerve gas aplenty, allowed his nose to be thumbed and his territory to be taken by a bunch of amateur Kurdish militias. Militias that had even invited him in, in 1996, when the Kurds were staging a brief gang war between their leading factions! Instead, for no good reason, he was supposed to be contemplating eviscerating NYC. I guess the assumption was that the US was a piece of cake, but those Kurds were fierce, man!
Which gets to the negative function of the VSP as I see it, which is to set up a lure. A lure is a way of obscuring a context that is unpleasantly inconsistent with a news or policy narrative pushed by established power. It is hard to avoid a lure. But the best response is being patient, and patiently taking apart melodramatic scenarios to return us to, at least, the narratives which we are unconsciously discarding or distorting from the recent past. As well as bringing up new aspects of the context that are being undervalued, or that are being shut out with grossly improbable stories.

Thanks, Maria. I didn’t know that about you and Henry – must have been interesting…

I must write about it some time, engels. Or Henry certainly should!

I’ve always wondered how highly educated people can just flat out lie. They have to know thats what they are doing. Stupid people dont get into the schools many of them attended. Yet they do lie, knowing that their lie can easily be proven to be just that. I just watched a video on PBS of Michael A. Peterson. It was about 25 mins long. Just because I was so disgusted I decided to fact check his remarks. At about 12 mins, I had so many it was ridiculous. The Peterson money (over 1 billion in direct spending or funding of think tanks) funds propaganda which in turn gives VSP cover, and has completely changed the conversation about debt…to one that is false. There is so much noise on the internet that its almost impossible to hold anyone accountable. There will always be a segment that will read what VSP have to say and believe because it reinforces their own opinion…or they are too stupid to know better.
Whether its austerity, gun control, war (which has now been outsourced to be its own business with making money the primary goal)…its very hard and labor intensive just to filter the noise…something not very many people are willing to do.

“thats besides the point since im not argueing that Greeks are lazy, no one is!”

Hix, you need to use the google:

Speaking at a rally in the western German town of Meschede on Tuesday evening, Merkel suggested southern Europeans are not working enough, while Germans are expected to bail them out.

“It is also about not being able to retire earlier in countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal than in Germany, instead everyone should try a little bit to make the same efforts – that is important,” she said.
“We can’t have a common currency where some get lots of vacation time and others very little. That won’t work in the long term,” the chancellor stressed.

“We can’t have a common currency where some get lots of vacation time and others very little. That won’t work in the long term,”

Merkel said that? Also das bringt mich wirklich auf die Palme. That is so disingenious. Nobody has more vacation time than the Germans! Everybody in Germany I know goes on vacation three times a year. And there’s nothing wrong with it – they should be proud of it, everybody in their right mind admires this as an accomplishments. But Germans just can’t stop complaining. They can’t stop feeling that somehow they are not getting quite what they think they deserve, that somebody else somewhere has a better life, and must be despised for it. Germans really – I hate to stereotype but my experience again and again is that Germans have no clue how good they have it, how lucky they are. Outsiders keep telling them, to no avail. They just can’t stop complaining. Now the Greeks, with 25% unemployment, less than half the per capita GDP, supposedly living the high life in a depression economy out of the 1930s playbook, are the objects of actual German envy. I just can’t believe that. Frustrating and depressing. Sorry for the rant.

Yep, she said it. It’s dated – circa 2011 – but easy to find if you google ‘lazy Greeks’.

https://euobserver.com/political/32363

VSPism is about being in the 1 percent of social cachet.

Bloody typo record: ‘Depends on how broad your definition of “brainwashing” IS, ‘affilications’ > affiliations’, ‘controlling > to control’, 1st instead of 2nd paragraph addressed to Roger Gathmann. Persuasiveness fatally diminished. Whatever, better luck next time.

@engels Opposition to the Iraq war was a defining thing in the formation of CT, in fact. Norman Geras was a member of the proto-CT mailing list and (as you know) very pro-Iraq war. He left the group before we founded the site because of this (and before we threw him out).

Afghanistan was pre-CT and I did indeed write a piece arguing that it met the traditional just war criteria. Even it that was right, it didn’t make it pragmatically a good thing. My very first piece as a blogger (for Junius, not CT) argued against war in Iraq.

(Also, I’d plead the point that hindsight is a wonderful thing here. At the time, a lot of people’s perceptions of the rights and wrongs of intervention were shaped by Rwanda and by Bosnia (specifically Srebrenica), where many people thought that the west was culpable for not intervening. Certainly that was true in my own case.)

As for the claim about the “supporting the troops” etc, I’m not sure that’s quite how we saw it at the time. We never had a CT “party line” but IIRC (you can check the archives if you like) we failed to regret the end of Saddam’s rule (he was a nasty piece of work after all) and we hoped (pre-insurgency) that post-invasion Iraq would stabilize rather than descending into the sectarian bloodletting that actually happened. I don’t think that was an unworthy hope, though it may have been a naive one, and it certainly doesn’t constitute hippie-bashing.

And yes, I know the US got a green light from the Security Council, for public relations purposes, but only after it made perfectly clear that it would do what it damn well pleased in Afghanistan, with or without the Security Council’s feeble assent.

I remember the arguments in the run up to the Iraq invasion here, but they didn’t happen. Looking back, the invasion was Mar-03, the blog started Jul-03. It was clear the invasion was falling into chaos well before anyone could have written anything. It’s a bit bewildering.

@engels 07.28.15 at 6:29 pm
>using the word ‘hippies’ was supposed to be sarcastic, I appreciate that mibht not have been clear

Oh, I got that. It was the ‘not saying there’s anything wrong with this’ part that I reacted to. My snark concerning the notion of ‘hippies’, ‘crazies’ etc. was inspired by other commenters who had posted earlier in the thread.

IIRC (you can check the archives if you like) we failed to regret the end of Saddam’s rule (he was a nasty piece of work after all) and we hoped (pre-insurgency) that post-invasion Iraq would stabilize rather than descending into the sectarian bloodletting that actually happened. I don’t think that was an unworthy hope, though it may have been a naive one, and it certainly doesn’t constitute hippie-bashing.

I probably shouldn’t get into this, because it was more than a decade ago and I didn’t really read CT (or any blogs) at the time, but I did a quick search for ‘Iraq’.
1. the posts I saw were consistently critical of the original decision to invade (as I acknowledged above)
2. at least early on, there were also posts criticising the anti-war movement demonstrations in quite hostile terms, eg.:

But even walking a few streets around my home and looking at the posters urging people to demonstrate, I’m quickly reminded why I would not. “Bush” is represented on many of them with a swastika in places of the “S”—an absurd implied equivalence anyway, and a grotesque one a few days after the synagogue bombings in Istanbul. The stunt with the statue also suggest the triumph of theatre over political and moral judgement. And then there’s the fact that the Stop the War Coalition calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq and that some of its components even support what they call the “resistance”. Since the imperative now is to stop Britain and the US from “cutting and running” and to insist that they ensure a transition to stable and constitutional Iraqi self-goverment (and put the infrastructure back together again) what the demostrators largely want is the opposite of what ought to be done.

Fine. Fwiw I didn’t actually know when you started CT, all I know is that when I started reading it was already quite well-established (and I didn’t read any of predecessor blogs). I was just trying to be open about the fact I was now rooting through the archives rather than referring to things I personally remembered reading.

@Chris Bertram 07.28.15 at 6:46 pm
> … IIRC (you can check the archives if you like) we failed to regret the end of Saddam’s rule (he was a nasty piece of work after all) and we hoped (pre-insurgency) that post-invasion Iraq would stabilize rather than descending into the sectarian bloodletting that actually happened. I don’t think that was an unworthy hope, though it may have been a naive one, and it certainly doesn’t constitute hippie-bashing.

What one *should* have been hoping for is, first, US defeat and, second, a more decent, less Islamist resistance. As a matter of principle, aggressions and subsequent foreign occupations should fail. The more smoothly they go and the less resistance they face, the worse the precedent and the domination they create – even though it looks better in terms of human cost in the short run, as all conquerors and collaborationists since time immemorial have pointed out. In this case, if there hadn’t been an insurrection and if there hadn’t arisen a broad consensus that the Iraq war had indeed been a costly and chaotic failure, the neocon agenda would have been able to continue successfully, even more countries would have been invaded, and whatever reaction against Bush policies Obama represented (and it’s a very meager one even under the current conditions) mostly would not have happened. Ultimately, the result would have been more wars, more people killed, and more states more subjugated by a more unhinged US.

BTW, as for the current ascendance of ISIS, which does proudly and openly things that even the Nazis only did secretly – a phone call to the US’ junior allies, Turkey and the Saudis, at an earlier stage probably would have solved that particular problem, but that was not exactly the US’ priority at the time.

@’Since the imperative now is to stop Britain and the US from “cutting and running” and to insist that they ensure a transition to stable and constitutional Iraqi self-goverment (and put the infrastructure back together again) what the demostrators largely want is the opposite of what ought to be done.’

Oh, I’d blissfully forgotten that sweet argument that went ‘Yes, we invaded them wrongly, and *that’s* why it’s our white man’s burden / responsibility to continue occupying them until we’ve restored them to great shape’. Of course, that was likewise an excuse to support the occupation and present a reward (what these governments had wanted to achieve to begin with) as a punishment. The assumption was that the Western governments who had just committed an outrageous crime are some kind of benign demigods who can be assumed to be both able and willing to rule and manage selflessly barbarian countries for as long as they see fit. Sure, it probably would have been best to organise a transition to democracy – and that should have been done by a UN force and administration without participation from the aggressor countries, with the expenses paid by the aggressor countries. Somehow I didn’t hear ‘responsible’ and ‘reasonable’ liberals call for that. The pettier complaints about Nazi comparisons and too much theatre likewise make the impression that one is just looking for a pretext to be ‘responsible’, a leftish type of Very Serious Person, do some hippie punching, and support one’s native empire.

@Chris Bertram 07.28.15 at 6:46 pm
At the time, a lot of people’s perceptions of the rights and wrongs of intervention were shaped by Rwanda and by Bosnia (specifically Srebrenica), where many people thought that the west was culpable for not intervening. Certainly that was true in my own case.

Between Srebrenica and Afghanistan there was Kosovo, and anyone who had been paying attention to the actions of the West in and surrounding the Kosovo war should have had no illusions left by the time of Afghanistan and Iraq. While the Kosovo conflict certainly did need an intervention by the *real* international institutions and probably a UN force on the ground, the role NATO actually chose to play in it was outrageous, and crazy hippies of the Chomsky variety were certainly able to notice that. It very much foreshadowed the Iraq war, both in the way a war of aggresion was justified by claims of urgency and by the fact that ‘we are the good guys’, in the way significant concessions by the target were ignored and possible diplomatic solutions were deliberately derailed and rejected in order to ensure a military one, and in the demand ‘just trust us, we know it’ with respect to the need for the attack. By the way, lethally bombing the state TV for being biased was a nice touch, too, and the de facto alliance with the KLA was up there with the more recent collaborations in the Arab world and in Ukraine.

To be clear, although I’ve mentioned Afghanistan alongside the other wars in the preceding post, I am not convinced that helping the ‘Northern Alliance’ defeat the Taliban in itself was necessarily a bad thing to do. The case for self-defence was not convincing, as geo has mentioned, but there was an ongoing civil war in the country and the Taliban had never been recognised as a legitimate government in the first place.

@dsquared 07.31.15 at 10:44 pm
>Oh brilliant, we’re being leftsplained that the SWP got it all right.

I would like to announce that I have read your comment and have done my best to take it into consideration.

@steven johnson 07.31.15 at 10:59 pm

Sounds reasonable.

@engels I’m coming in late, but are you now claiming that CT’s hippie-punching consists of ignoring the “hard left”?

Much as I love CT, Engels has a point more or less (if he is saying that the hard-left is underrepresented). It often seems like this blog extends more sympathy and intellectual courtesy to the right than to the far left. Don’t mean to whine or anything- politics is politics is politics and to cry “we are underrepresented” would be beyond pathetic, but as an observation it seems true.