Amity Shlaes: A Public Service Reminder

I saw that Daily Show Shlaes interview too and was surprised that Stewart played it straight, as opposed to his almost casual demolition of Kristol later. The Kristol piece was actually uncomfortable to watch given the aggressive lack of self-awareness on display.

I don’t understand why, say, Jon Stewart, has helped this hack along by inviting her onto his show as a purported expert on the Depression (yes – he invites Kristol too – but he treats Kristol as a political hack).

Because it’s hard to make business funny (believe me), especially when your show is fitted out for political humor, so I’m guessing those guys are educating themselves on the fly. You’d think there’d be one history major in that overeducated bunch, though.

I should watch Colbert a little more; I suspect that his persona, and his Catholicism, will allow him to make a slyer critique of capitalism.

I thought maybe Steward didn’t know she was a political hack until about halfway through the interview, when I thought I saw it dawn on him. He had already positioned her as an expert, so he couldn’t switch his approach in such a short interview. But I thought I saw a small wave of nausea.

Isn’t Amity Shlaes a character in some Lemony Snicket book?

It takes both chutzpah and a complete lack of intellectual scruples…
Well boy gosh howdy it sure does. But then if intellectual rigor wasn’t part of her mandate to begin with, and the goal isn’t and never was to arrive at whatever objective truth might wait there to be revealed, but to further an agenda, an actual specific existing-in-the-real-world agenda, especially one that we dare not precisely speak to name… well then there now. Hey yup.
Is there a mystery here?
That hordes of incompetent pseudo-journalists continue to appear before us streaming nonsense and obfuscation, how can this be, and how can any editor worth an editor’s salary pass this dreck on to the public?
Is that the mystery?
Or is our inability to name more exactly what is obviously a concerted effort to advance that elusive agenda really the mystery?
Given the intellectual accuracy and firepower available to the task, why do we keep missing the target?
“And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

McArdle is basically a troll. Every time someone links to her, she wins.

OT, but is there an Irish word for chutzpah? Or maybe something close? Because English needs as many synonyms as possible these days, and Ireland seems like a good place to look for some.

Tom Paine @ #5 – how is her gender at all relevant to her political hackery? Unless I’m much mistaken, incompetence and idiocy are not exactly limited to the female gender.

It works like this: Blowing up a bridge in a pointless war of choice – work. Building one for the WPA – not work. Simplicity!

Here’s the John Stewart interview. Watched it at the time and she seemed quite likeable but distinctly odd. And Stewart calls her on some wingnutty ridiculousness (blaming LBJ for the present crisis for having taken the GSEs off the books):

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=187617&title=amity-shlaes

I’m no economist, and I’m no historian, so I may have misunderstood the debate between Lichtblau and Tabarrok, but I got the feeling the relevant facts are these:

Lichtblau thinks treating people employed by the WPA as employed makes sense, because they did real jobs.

Tabarrok thinks treating people employed in “make-work” schemes by the government gives you artificially low unemployment figures, and points out that later unemployment figures do not take such workers into account. Thus, for Lichtblau to be consistent, he should treat, say, unemployment figures under George W. Bush as lower than they are right now treated.

Tabarrok moreover thinks that if Lichtblau’s methodology were used, then the government could easily and always make unemployment zero–just hire everyone in America to do something useless.

Lichtblau responds that, even though WPA employees are employed by the government, they did real work, and so should definitely not be counted as unemployed.

I get the sense that there’s rightness with both Tabarrok and Lichtblau. I agree with Lichtblau that the WPA employees did real work, and so should be counted as employed. But I agree with Tabarrok (and, I think Lichtblau might even agree with this) that you have to be very careful about counting just any government employees as employed for the purposes of measuring a country’s unemployment, because then the government could get away with a lot. So coming up with unemployment figures is an art, though an art one should consistently apply, not just to FDR, but also to later presidents.

There’s also a separate issue, which is that the WSJ and Schlaes like to point to 1938, a years in which unemployment was 20%, to cast doubt on the efficacy of FDR’s policies. Lichtblau points out that unemployment was 20% only because the person on whose figures Schlaes and the WSJ were relying didn’t count WPA employees. That seems like an important point.

Lichtblau also points out, however, that unemployment had gone down steadily from 1933-1937, and that Schlaes, WSJ, and (I guess) Tabarrok discount this. But this raises the question of why unemployment rose so much from 1937 (14%) to 1938 (20%), even though we’re using the same methodology for determining unemployment. This is why Taborrok et al. say that Lichtblau seems to be committed to there being two great depressions, one starting in 1933 and one starting in 1938.

As Bill O’Reilly would say, Tell me where I’m wrong.

Questioner, I don’t see any reasonable sense in which Tabarrok is right. The private sector is also capable of employing people to no good end, as with all the dot-commers hired by companies who crashed before they launched. We don’t judge those people as unemployed because their employment bore no fruit, and the WPA produced many things. As for the fear that this means the government could simply end unemployment by hiring everybody, possibly for meaningless jobs: rightly so. That would, as a point of fact, eliminate unemployment. Of course, it is likely to create other problems, and a cost/benefit analysis would have to be done, but the specific problem of unemployment would be taken care of, at least for that time. Keynes said the government in a depression could just spend money burying things and hiring people to dig them up, and it would still be better than doing nothing.

Really – it’s O’Reilly who says that? I was pretty sure it was Walter Sobchek. And, of course, as even El Duderino conceded, he wasn’t wrong.

Oh yeah, and also those people and their families don’t starve to death or lose their access to health care. Some people consider that a plus ? it preserves your labor force for higher post-recovery productivity.

This suggests a way we can all get along. What we do is set up a project — let’s call it the No Deal Counterfactuals Truth and Reconciliation Comission (NDCTRC) – that would, among other things, estimate how many more people would have died of starvation, of diseases made fatal by malnutrition or inability to afford health care, of being machine-gunned in protest marches on the White House turning ugly, of exposure from being homeless, of alcohol poisoning from being hopeless, etc., etc., if there’d been no New Deal.

The goal of NDCTRC would be to count the “laissez-faire economic recovery collateral damage” fatalities as “unemployed” for some number of years after their deaths, the number being subject to negotiation, calculation and careful economic modeling.

But just how does one estimate how long these notional dead should have been considered unemployed? I’d go for some estimate based on how many years they probably would have worked if they’d lived. But maybe that’s just my bias toward the New Deal talking. Those of certain other ideological persuasions are likelier than I to staff this Commission. They will undoubtedly prefer to base the estimate on how much shorter they believe the Great Depression would have been if nothing had been done, and on the assumption that it would have been possible to dig up dead people and size them for clean clothes suitable for interviews, to get them to fill out job application forms properly, to train them for new lines of work, and to make sure they understood that they would be unwelcome in polite society if they persisted in reproducing their own kind by chasing the luckier people who hadn’t died in the Lesser Great Depression down the street and biting them.

Of course, objections can (and very likely, will) be raised concerning the feasibility of this project, given how ideologically polarized even the No New Deal constituency is. Take the problem of ideal organization for the reconstitution of the “differently-viable” (don’t use the Z-word, please!) parts of the post-Lesser Great Depression workforce. Would it have been better organized as a government program? Or left to private sector? Or perhaps a faith-based program would have done the trick? I can see the whole NDCTRC formation process dissolving very acrimoniously over that one! With strong intellectual leadership, however, a philosophy of “let’s cross that bridge when we come to it” should prevail, great progress would be made, and this long, poisonous national debate could finally be brought to an amicable conclusion.

Michael Turner 11.12.08 at 7:01 am

“This suggests a way we can all get along. What we do is set up a project—let’s call it the No Deal Counterfactuals Truth and Reconciliation Comission (NDCTRC) – that would, among other things, estimate how many more people would have died of starvation, of diseases made fatal by malnutrition or inability to afford health care, of being machine-gunned in protest marches on the White House turning ugly, of exposure from being homeless, of alcohol poisoning from being hopeless, etc., etc., if there’d been no New Deal.”

There are certain beliefs whose holders are reasonable judged to be ignorant, foolish or lying with evil intent. On another blog, I posted a comment that believing the phrase ‘Social Security is a Ponzi scheme’ is such a belief.

By now, ‘FDR prolonged the Great Depression [through implementing New Deal policies, as opposed to not implementing a stronger New Deal, and not backing off later on]’ is also such a belief. In the case of an economics professor, holding such a belief is an automatic conviction of lying with evil intent.

There are certain beliefs whose holders are reasonable judged to be ignorant, foolish or lying with evil intent.

But . . . these days, don’t you have to take a test to make sure you’re not one of these people, before they allow you on the Internet? (I didn’t have to, but I first got on in 1981, so probably got grandfathered in.)