John Quiggin

My critique of Tyler Cowen’s post arguing the unimportance of social mobility has started off, or maybe merged into, of those old-fashioned blog firestorms we used to have back in the day, now also reticulated through Twitter – a few links here, here and here. But rather than criticise Cowen further, I thought I would try to work through the bigger issues involved from a social democratic perspective[1].  In particular, as discussed in comments here, should social democrats favor policies to enhance social mobility, or does mobility between generations make inequality even worse, for example by justifying what appears as meritocracy?

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The endless EU vs US debate rolls on, but now with an odd twist. Although the objective facts about economic inequality, immobility and so on are far worse in the US than the EU, the political situation seems more promising. (I’m not talking primarily about electoral politics but about the nature of public debate.)

In the EU, the right has succeeded in taking a crisis caused primarily by banks (including the central bank, and bank regulators) and blaming it on government profligacy, which is then being used to push through yet more of the neoliberal policies that caused the crisis. And, as we’ve just seen, formerly social democratic parties like New Labour in the UK, are pushing the same line.

By contrast the success of Occupy Wall Street have changed the US debate, in ways that I think will be hard to reverse. Once the Overton window shifted enough to allow inequality and social immobility to be mentioned, the weight of evidence has been overwhelming.

This post by Tyler Cowen is an indication of how far things have moved. Cowen feels the need, not merely to dispute some aspects of the data on inequality and social mobility in the US, but to make the case that a unequal society with a static social structure isn’t so bad after all.

Update Cowen offers a non-response response here. Apparently, disliking arguments for inherited inequality, such as his point 3 (because of habit formation, social mobility reduces welfare) is a “Turing test” for reflexive leftism.

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Not long ago, I read Daniel Ellsberg’s[1] autobiography, Secrets, and also watched the film, The Most Dangerous Man in America. A striking feature of the book was that Ellsberg’s biggest problem in leaking the Pentagon Papers was the logistical difficulty of making 20 or so copies of a 7000 page cache of documents. It took him and a couple of helpers several months, IIRC. 

Now of course, such a task is easy, as demonstrated by Ellsberg’s successor (allegedly Bradley Manning) who supplied vast quantities of classified documents to Wikileaks. On the other hand, if Ellsberg had been 20 or so years earlier, he wouldn’t even have been able to make a single copy. [2]

Our blackout yesterday as a protest against SOPA and PIPA reflects a simple fact about the Internet – it is, in essence a way of making and distributing vast numbers of copies of documents of all kinds.

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Back in 2009, I made a bet with Bryan Caplan that the average unemployment rate in the EU-15 over the following 10 years would be no more than 1.5 percentage points above that in the US. Before talking about the bet itself, I’d like to note that while we disagree about a lot of things, Bryan and I both take a strong stand against war, with a limited exception for self-defence. As Bryan says here, that takes a lot of sting out of the possibility of a losing bet for either of us – agreement on war and peace is more important than disagreement about labor markets in my view. 

Now, on to the bet.

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Arthur Brisbane, Public Opinion editor for the NY Times, has copped a well deserved shellacking for a column in which he asked whether reporters should act as ‘truth vigilantes’ in relation to statements made by public figures.

Having observed the silliness of asking whether newspapers should (aspire to) tell the truth, the obvious question is: How should they telll it. Here are a some suggestions

1. Its unreasonable to expect reporters to take the burden from scratch in refuting zombie lies. Newspapers, including the NYT, should include a set of factual conclusions, regularly updated, in their style manuals. The most relevant current example is that of global warming. As with the current account deficit (routinely glossed as ‘the broadest measure of the balance of payments’) the NYT should formulate a standard set of words, such as “a conclusion endorsed by every major scientific organization in the world’) to be used whenever the views of Repubs on the issue are mentioned. Similarly, any reference to claims about ‘Climategate’ should include the words ‘a conspiracy theory refuted by a number of inquiries in the US and UK’. Rinse and repeat wrt evolution, the Ryan budget plan etc

2. If the approach suggested above, it will rapidly become apparent that Republicans lie all of the time about everything, whereas Democrats only lie some of the time about some things. A serious paper of record would acknowledge this, noting the partial exceptions like Jon Huntsman. That is, if the NYT were reallly serious about truth, it would gloss every statement by a Repub as (X, a member of the Republican Party claimed Y. Extensive studies by the NYT have shown that most statements by members of the Republican party are false. In this case …)

3. This is a sad state of affairs, just as its sad that Americans won’t have a chance to vote for a serious  Presidential candidate who opposes indefinite detention of innocent people. But that is the situation and organizations like the NYT have limited choices – they can either publish lies or be ‘truth vigilantes’.

A little late to the game, the NY Times has quite a good piece by Jason DeParle on the well-established finding that the US is not only the most unequal of developed societies but is also at the bottom of the scale for social mobility.

I’ve been arguing since the Triassic era of blogging that this isn’t a coincidence – a society with highly unequal outcomes can’t sustain equality of opportunity, but until this year (in fact, until the emergence of the Occupy movement) I didn’t see any evidence that the facts were sinking in, even among the majority liberals. Now it’s as if a dam has broken. Some thoughts, cautionary and otherwise over the fold.

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Corey Robin’s new book The Reactionary Mind has attracted plenty of attention both favorable and otherwise. I don’t want to offer a full-scale review, but to respond to the central thesis. As I read Robin, his central claim is that the current situation in which people who call themselves “conservative” are in fact radical reactionaries is not an aberration, but the norm, and that this has been the case ever since the first self-conscioulsy conservative thinker, Edmund Burke.

I’d put this more broadly – conservatism (and, it’s opposites, progressivism radicalism) are, in essence ideas about process, but the most people active in politics are more concerned about pursuing particular goals than about the way they get there.

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Thanks to everyone who has made comments on the drafts of the new chapter of Zombie Economics, on Expansionary Austerity, for the forthcoming paperback edition.  I’m now editing in response, and adding a section on Further Reading. I’d welcome any suggestions for this chapter, as well as any useful references that weren’t in the hardback edition.

This is the final draft section of the new chapter of my Zombie Economics book, on Expansionary Austerity. 

As before comments are welcome. That includes everything from typos and suggestions for better phrasing to substantive critiques of the argument.  If I can get organized, I will try to post the edited version of the entire chapter and invite another round of comments.

As an aside, I just got an email link to the Journal of Economic Literature (behind a login screen), which contains Stephen Williamson’s review of my book, including his claims that both the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and DSGE macro are devoid of any implications. I bet that if I had submitted an article to any publication of the American Economic Association making such claims, it would have been shot down in flames by the referees. But, now it’s been published – anyone keen on a radical critique of mainstream economics can now cite the JEL to the effect that the whole enterprise (at least as applied to finance and macroeconomics) is irrelevant to reality.

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Now that Obama has signalled that he will sign the National Defense Authorization Act, US citizens have no legal rights that can’t be over-ridden by miltary or presidential fiat. Anyone accused of being a terrorist linked to Al Qaeda can be arrested, shipped overseas and held indefinitely without trial, or alternatively tried by military commissions.[1] And, if arrest isn’t feasible or convenient then (at least outside the US), they can be hunted down and assassinated, with or without warning.

On the face of it, that makes the US a scary place to live. But, as a matter of everyday reality, most Americans aren’t scared at all.[2] Should they be? 

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My plans for a full-length movie extravaganza based on my hit book Zombie Economics have gone nowhere. But, now, thanks to the wonders of Xtranormal, reader Paula D’Itallo has produced her own movie version, Zombie Mourning: Exploring the Lives of Dead Economic Theory. Watch and enjoy, as zombie financial theorists explore the risks and opportunities created by an apocalyptic zombie bubble.