Tweedledumb and Tweedledangerous

Daniel, your second Tweedledum is perfectly chiastically arranged but unfortunately reads the following way: “Tweddledum”. It would be a pity to leave such a scar on an otherwise extremely enjoyable post.

On a more minor note: Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe (one of those converted neoliberals) has made the following prediction – the more all economist’s projections for 2010 converge, the more the sense of false objectivity from that convergence will delay the realization that the thus converged projection is wholly wrong and unsubstantiated. Also something about hoarding and risk averseness on the part of economists – I guess he is taken aback by the fact his pessimism is not shared or a late realization that an optimistic outlook on the macro-economy does not at all fulfill his sense of fairness.

Uhh… but what about all the other economists who predicted the crisis. Don’t they get some credit too: http://mises.org/story/3128 ?

Luis Enrique 01.04.10 at 2:13 pm

“… nothing goes down better than economist bashing. ”

Well, the economy went down better than that, as well as the housing market, the stock market…………………….

Perhaps you should stop being sanctimonious, and start listening.

the very many economists who are sincerely trying to understand the economy the best way they know how

nah. Not buying it. I think that the killer point here is the objection made by (I think) John Emerson in this comments section, which went:

If you were someone wanting to commission a piece of sloppy, fallacious, politically slanted research in history, biology, sociology or nearly any other subject, you would be picking it up from the dregs of academia – third or fourth tier universities on the margins of accreditation. If, on the other hand, you wanted a piece of research in economics that ignored obvious facts, made elementary logical and mathematical errors and clearly slanted itself in favour of a particular point of view, then you could commission it from the very best-regarded universities in the world, with Nobel Laureates and John Bates Clark medallists to choose from.

This is a sign that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with academic economics, and looking away from it isn’t going to make it go away. Even the “good” economists you’re referring to (who I very much doubt whether they form a majority) aren’t actually helping because they absolutely refuse to police their profession – DeLong and Krugman noted with alarm that Cochrane, Fama and Mankiw were spouting politically motivated crap a year ago, but now they’re all mates again. And then there are people like Martin Feldstein, who really does not seem to have any concern about being wrong on subjects like Social Security privatisation, which he was apparently pushing once more at the AEA meetings.

How should they ‘police their’ profession? (Hopefully by other means than unfriendliness.)

Glen: “. It goes without saying that an institution that funds itself off of an endowment will defend the investments that are its lifeblood. In this era of the 401K, that rubric would include just about everyone who bothers to vote, so even insofar as we actually are still a democracy, even the demos has tied its interests to the capitalists, to roll themselves into one grand and inglorious “investor class”.

Incorrect. I don’t have the figures available, but last I heard, most Americans don’t have any direct or indirect investment in the stock market – remember, more Americans don’t have pensions, and most don’t have 401K’s. Of those that do, most have somewhere around ‘not enough to matter’; a few months of unemployment would drain those investements, even if the stock market wasn’t down at the time due to a recession. And in the current situation, of course, we have a combination of a reduced stock market + high unemployment + high long-term unemployment.

I recall seeing some figures from the late 90’s which put it at 50% of Americans having *any* money in the stock market, direct or indirect, and the median amount for those who did was ~$5,000.

In short, the stock market doesn’t affect most Americans except through the job market.

Now, one wouldn’t know that from hearing the US mass media, but that’s the point, isn’t it? The MSM tends to reflect the interests of the economic elites more than the rest of us.

#8 – basically in the same way in which the profession actually has policed out people whose work doesn’t fit into the shared Tweedle paradigm (as ably described by Paul Krugman). Not hiring them for prestigious jobs, not publishing articles unless they can justify themselves on the basis of hard facts to people who don’t agree with their conclusions, not building prestigious research institutes in honour of Milton Friedman if they’re going to be staffed by people like Cochrane and Fama, etc etc. The fact that this is more or less sociologically impossible for the economics profession is the “big, horrible problem” I was talking about in #6.

“… DeLong and Krugman noted with alarm that Cochrane, Fama and Mankiw were spouting politically motivated crap a year ago, but now they’re all mates again.”

Are you sure? I read DeLong and Krugman most days and I missed this reconciliation. And I don’t think it’s quite fair to associate Mankiw with the other two. Yes, his crap often seems to be politically motivated but he knows his Keynesian economics, in sharp contrast to Fama and Cochrane, who take pride in their ignorance.

12- so it’s not an issue of good economists then but it’s a question of success in economics being determined by sociological factors and not so much by being right economically. Are maybe it’s just a matter of a pervasive lack of humility; maybe modern economists think they are the heirs of Diderot and Einstein combined; maybe they think they can make The Grand Unified Theory, and so lead mankind across the dangerous oceans …

maybe modern economists think they are the heirs of Diderot and Einstein combined; maybe they think they can make The Grand Unified Theory, and so lead mankind across the dangerous oceans

No I don’t think so – I think most of them are, like Luis, doing the best they can with a totally broken toolkit, and in a sociological environment that rewards certain kinds of conformity.

Barry,

Most Americans don’t vote. If they did, we’ld be governed by at least Social Democrats, if not plain Socialists, if not Marxists. The Democrats and Republicans, unless they retooled their positions drastically, would be left squabbling over the far right of the electorate, and the far upscale of the electorate. The effect of 95%+ of those eligible to vote actually registering, and then actually voting, would be even more dramatic in key states. Texas would move from being one of the most radically conservative states in the Union, to probably the most radically Socialist. One of the results of such shifts in the composition of the electorate would be that eligibility to vote would be widened, as the folks who would, under this 99%+ turnout regime, would dominate politics, sought to further strengthen that dominance.

Among those who do vote, holders of 401Ks or some other of the alphabet soup of completely irresponsible govt inducements to pour money into a secondary market, for retirement, or for their children’s education, or folks who are keenly aware that their employer-administered pension fund is stock-market based, make up a clear majority. Nor would I take as indicative of importance to them a median size of “investment” that is low only because it is pulled down by the large numbers of people just starting their college or retirement funds, and who therefore have only small amounts “invested” so far. These people think, and then act, in terms of what they plan to have in the NYSE when they’re age 65, or their kids age 18, not by what’s there now.

Social Security and Medicare are sometimes referred to as the “third rails” of American politics. While there’s some truth to that idea, the very fact that politicians can refer to these programs that way is an indicator that they are not considered so sacred by so many that this blasphemy is fatal to their political careers. NYSE prices have become the real third rail of American politics. It would be simply unimaginable for a politician to propose any regulatory course of action that would require, encourage, even allow, the DJIA to tumble very far for very long as part of its workings. Concern for the DJIA is one of the factors that makes an institution too big to fail, too big to be allowed to fail without endangering electability. Sure, unemployment isn’t good for electability either, but despite that, our political system seems much readier to let a big employer go under than to let a big pillar of the DOW go under.

“So you have found evidence that economics is intellectually bankrupt, and your sample selection procedure was …?”

Look out the window. Or is your ivory tower too high for you to see the crowd of people in in the street?

18- that’s fair enough at a certain level but I do think that economy has the arrogant dominance that physics once had and encyclopedic knowledge before it; the sociological environment that you decry is perhaps non-coincidentally collocated with a certain sense of ‘world saviour status’ and economy as the ultimate knowledge now we’re well rid of God, metaphysics and the GUT. I believe there’s something in this, I wouldn’t see why economists or sociologically different from sociologists (to pick somebody) except for the fact that they get all of the attention and are not self-critical enough to tell at least themselves that they’re not worth it.

#21 that’s too stupid and offensive to respond to. #22 beg the question, why not #23 see how arrogant I am! I’m like some kind of God.

#23 Mpowell: Is it more reasonable … to aspire to persuade university presidents that they should direct funding towards alternative departments trying to pick up the research that the economics departments ignore and devalue?

Something like this happened recently at Notre Dame (see here, here and here), IIRC.

Luis Enrique 01.04.10 at 4:16 pm

“Marc,

“As a scientist”. So you have found evidence that economics is intellectually bankrupt, and your sample selection procedure was …?”

To notice that one can fill one’s basket with deliberately fraudulent statements/statements which could be honest but fail Econ 101, and do it all from the top schools and the top people.

25: I’m not begging the question, I’m taking the corruption of the economics professions as a settled point in the debate. I may agree that there are economists trying to do good work, but if the rot is so deep that reform must come from the adaption of an entirely separate academy, worrying about the feelings of the ‘good’ economists is not sensible.

Actually, the only fact Luis throws out in is comments is about the 401k. Which is interesting. This is a system that, it is estimated, takes in 50 million people – not by any means close to the whole of the American workforce – and includes, in that number, those who have nominal sums invested. Now, why would Luis mention the 401k? Because it was the centerpiece of one of the great projects of the “great moderation’ – to extrude social insurance from the public sphere to the private sphere – privatizing social security, for instance. The design of the 401k was the proto-type of that project.

Now, Luis seems to think that project was a remarkable success.

There is an economist – one of Galbraith’s ignored – who would beg to differ, Theresa Ghilarducci. Her work has shown that the tax exempt encouragement of 401ks is not only strongly regressive, but encourages what a stream of bad investment – in fact, the kind of misallocation of capital that is the hallmark of the Great Moderation era. Furthermore, the motive for the turn to 401ks was, ultimately, to save firms money on pensions – and on that dimension, it has been an outstanding success. In 2002, Ghilarducci did a study of 827 firms and found that “that 401(k)s allowed employers to reduce pension costs by almost one third. And, if a firm adopted a DC or 401(k) plan between 1981 and 1995 lowered their pension costs per person by about 20%.”.

This is from Ghildarducci’s testimony before the House last year:
http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/25/94/89.php

Ghilarducci testified that “the shift toward 401(k) plans increases tax expenditures, does little to expand retirement savings and favors workers who need the help least.”

The “shocking results” of the 401(k) design, she said in her testimony, are that “6 percent of taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 per year get 50 percent of the tax subsidies.”

The promotion of such plans is exactly what James Galbraith is talking about – economists who refuse to recognize that they are advocating agendas that produce negative social benefit for the majority of the people, but benefit, to an extraordinary extent, the wealthiest.

Looking at this debate from the side, it seems to me that two separate issues are involved: the shaky foundations of neoclassical economics and the persistent misuse of neoclassical economics to promote the financial and ideological interests of elites. Mainstream economics may turn out to have been more astrology than astronomy all along, but it must be admitted that plenty of orthodox economists oppose the dominant neoliberal political economy without questioning the basic assumptions of their discipline. It may be that all economists are charlatans, but not all charlatans are whores.

A realistic economics is the study of human frailty not human progress, but economics is defined first as the optimistic study of the stupidity of others, then rationalized into a moral celebration of greed. A disinterested celebration of interested reason?
But there is no necessary logical relation of technical and moral progress. Increased complexity is just that.

Realism implies a certain cynicism about others, so I was raised to understand greed, but also not to be greedy. That duality is lost on both most economists and most liberals. A history of the modern academy would show that the fixation on money began in the 70’s first with the astronomical rise in salaries of administrators and the concomitant shrinking of the salaries of faculty. It became a scandal decades ago. Then the faculty caught on. The culture of contemporary academia, of professional intellectuals, is one of a neoliberal individualism. That some are paid $150,000 or more to preach against neoliberalism is irrelevant.
The choice should not be between vulgar determinism and the vulgar denial of what is at the very least a tendency. It’s annoying that all those so fond of the terminology of “memes” aren’t capable of imagining their own fixations as a prime example. A case of determinism for thee but not for me: and subtext is for other people. The “science” of history has been shown to be bunk, unless its the history of the present.

#11 “Sure, I have been horrified by some of the things I have read from economist Nobel winners, but I also am horrified by some of the things I read from eminent figures in other fields.”

IMHO the difference is that Nobelists in other fields might utter garbage on occasion, but the work for which they were awarded the Nobel isn’t. That’s in stark contrast to economics.

#39 – it’s not a Nobel prize! The Nobel Prize in economics is to the real science Nobel prizes as economics is to the real sciences.

Well, there are two rough patterns for professional recovery from intellectual catastrophe – internal and external. Internal is the history of medicine post-Lister – the Listerians, who had both a coherent theory of why the patients were dying (germs), an effective experimental method to demonstrate this (microscopy and bacteriology) and a set of effective technical solutions (antiseptics, surgical anaesthesia, and eventually antibiotics), took over and retroactively altered history as taught to look like the heretics were not only right, but accepted, all along and the great classics foreshadowed them intellectually. See also computing after the Software Crisis and the Garmisch conference.

External is astronomy vs. astrology. The astronomers seceded from astrology, and thrashed the corpse until they cut it up small enough to move it out of the way.

Of course, you can’t hope for total sterilisation – apparently there were still Galenic medical practitioners in Iraq in the 1970s, and of course a lot of people still believe in astrology. But if James K. Glassman is reduced to being the National Enquirer’s stock tipster in 20 years…ah, good point. Economics is more like medicine than astronomy in that it’s quite common for it to be safety critical. Glassman’s financial advice could still seriously harm members of the public.

Better aim for the coup option then.

If you were someone wanting to commission a piece of sloppy, fallacious, politically slanted research in history, biology, sociology or nearly any other subject, you would be picking it up from the dregs of academia – third or fourth tier universities on the margins of accreditation.

Huh? Bellesiles was a tenured professor at Emory. (History)
And Pinker and Herrnstein were both tenured at Harvard in psychology.

And sociology? It’s not corrupt, so far as I can tell, because it’s of no use or interest to anyone other than sociologists.

@44

Continuing with this bizarre ‘holier than economics’ mentality, the hard sciences are burdened with physicists whose swamplands are no more palatable the sweetwaters, and it wasn’t too long ago that this blog in no uncertain terms expressed its disappointment with Prof. West’s corpus without having to call into question the validity of top-tier AfAm programs.

#11 “Sure, I have been horrified by some of the things I have read from economist Nobel winners, but I also am horrified by some of the things I read from eminent figures in other fields.”

It’s not uttering garbage, but uttering garbage about things in their field. When Joe Nobel Blow in field X starts blowing hot air about field Y, it’s somebody spouting off about something that they don’t know anything about, which is the human condition.

Whaen Joe Nobel Blow in field X starts blowing hot air about field X, it’s something else entirely.

That last one could’ve used an edit or two.

Anybody read or watched Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize speech? Any thoughts?

She is one economist who has done real fieldwork and laboratory experimentation to see exactly how people manage common pool resources. She has a lot to teach us all about how real economies, not theoretical ones, actually work.

Of course, her work is not very well known and she gets no respect by the important people just like Brooksley Born and Elizabeth Warren, troublesome women all.

It’s not like medicine or astronomy or astrology. It’s like a state religion.

String theory is probably a pretty good analogue of economics. Fortunately almost nothing else in natural science is like that, as your remarkably lame examples illustrate in a negative way.

I think the parallels are to literary or political theory and philosophy that refuse to respond to actual data [product of empiricism] that undermine their formalisms. You can develop formal truths that will not represent the world outside themselves, or you can settle for imperfects description of the world. Some people choose the former and try to claim them as a model of representation. To go back to an earlier thread, I call that a good description of “Modernism,” of a specific response to the problem of modernity.
String theory may be beautiful math. I dunno.

Well said!

Of course Sperry & Luis etc are missing a trick, because this post can easily be described as a ‘conspiracy theory’ – and thus to be discounted without the need for any investigation or consideration at all. (Sperry seems to think the same applies to odd scientific hypotheses like ‘water memory’ – though that’s a bad example because as a non-scientist I’d presume it false – and if I thought it worth bothering to look into, I imagine I would find it had been pretty conclusively discredited – by the orthodox experts in the field.)

As with other true (or highly credible) quasi-conspiracy theories, a big task is explaining to those who are implicated but not themselves actually self-consciously bent, and to those who know them or respect them, or just assume a general low incidence of corruption, how such a thing can happen without involving weekly meetings of thousands of psychopaths in a vast (smoke-filled, preferably underground) auditorium.

One mechanism which has effect only once the corruption of the field has been achieved is a ‘self-selection filter’. [Autobiographical illustration: I myself chose to get out of economics (no great loss given my subsequent wastrel life, but it could have been – I was, fwiw described by my economics tutor at a minor Oxford college as the most able student he’d had for years) because I thought there was just too much too radically wrong with what I was being taught. Having drunkenly told a much more junior tutor that it was ‘the son of Satan’s arse and [hyperbole] a subject fit only for imbeciles’ I ended up doing philosophy at London instead, which was easy – apart from the history bits – because I didn’t have to learn and regurgitate stuff I believed to be false and utterly misguided.]

Also relevant – Jim Harrison @35: Looking at this debate from the side, it seems to me that two separate issues are involved: the shaky foundations of neoclassical economics and the persistent misuse of neoclassical economics to promote the financial and ideological interests of elites.
Kind-of, but not really separate in sociological terms – nor enirely separable in theoretical terms. Plenty of feedback from the needs of ideologues to the framing of research projects. And a kind of ‘divide and conquer’ strategy (metaphorical perhaps – I’m describing the phenomena, not leaping to intentional explanations) operates, whereby honest specialists in particular areas of theory can well see that their particular pixel is not the colour it’s (vulgarly) supposed to be, but still the overall picture (i.e. everyone else’s pixels) is assumed to be more or less as advertised.
Mainstream economics may turn out to have been more astrology than astronomy all along, but it must be admitted that plenty of orthodox economists oppose the dominant neoliberal political economy without questioning the basic assumptions of their discipline. It may be that all economists are charlatans, but not all charlatans are whores.
Surely sex workers are rarely if ever charlatans, but that bit of prissiness aside, I’d say it’s as above – to get to be an orthodox economist you have to learn – and probably to some degree internalise – the orthodoxy, then you specialise and go off into your Chinese room. To some extent the results you pass back out have to mesh with the generalised body of theory or no-one knows what to do with them.

Of course, plenty of self-aware corruption in pursuit of the usual same-old-same-old money prestige fame etc too, especially clearly among journos etc that are obviously ideologues and obviously paid to be. But that’s not usually the whole story in any quasi-conspiracy. There are plenty of unware participants, cowardly non-blowers of whistles, useful idiots, instinctive self-protectors, ostrich-heads and someone-else’s-problem merchants, as well as the marginalised honest brokers.

[Q: even if one believed straightforward conscious corruption to be the dominant driver behind an observed ‘quasi-conspiracy’, would face-saving, figleafing and other rhetorical considerations make it (a) politic, (b) justifiable to construct just-so stories about (another JKGism) ‘innocent fraud’?]

I don’t think many quasi-conspiracies can be reduced to the classic smoky room scenario, and I think (social) psychology, game theory, history and social sciences, among other disciplines, are all relevant to getting a better understanding of how these phenomena work.

Anyway that’s just my own take – and without projecting any of it on Daniel, I’d still like to say how pleasing it is to hear such forthright sentiment from someone with web-credibility.

She is one economist who has done real fieldwork and laboratory experimentation to see exactly how people manage common pool resources. She has a lot to teach us all about how real economies, not theoretical ones, actually work.

Very true. She’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, not an actually an economist.

The history of the GFC, and the nature of the issues it amplifies, are not issues for macroeconomics. Real learning from that experience is coming from Micro in work on mechanism design, contract theory, and so on. And for god sake, can we just bury Keynes as well!

krishna: Which is it? Are they incompetent, or are they all too competent at defending the interests of the wealthy? (People who are incompetent at almost anything they put their minds to, and who also are bound and determined to defend the interests of the wealthy, are too depressing to contemplate.)

Alex: Any insight as to why the Software Crisis of 1968 is relevant, given the almost non-existent historiography of the history of computing? That’s one of the sketchiest Wikipedia articles I’ve ever seen.

> [1] Christ, how I hate it when people like Galbraith sanctimoniously
> claim to be the only ones interested in the ‘real’ economy

The problem is that it takes 5-10 years at a manufacturing company, as well as some extraordinary hard work and/or clout and/or luck, to work yourself into a position where you start to see how decisions such as capital allocation, personnel management, and pricing are actually made. And in many organizations if you aren’t a member of the “ruling” social class (e.g. white male midwesterner from working class background with engineering degree from one of 20 universities) then you aren’t ever going to get to that point [1]. Whereas getting a PhD in Economics (in the US at least) means going directly from undergraduate to graduate studies and not spending that 5-10 years in an actual living, breathing, messy, theory-ignoring

Which leads to, e.g. Brad DeLong pontificating about how “firms” make “pricing decisions” without ever having sat in an actual pricing meeting where he would have learned that essentially none of the theoretical models that economists use to discuss pricing are even close to being used, and that those decisions are often made on utterly irrational factors (e.g. dislike of the VP of Sales for the VP of Manufacturing).

Cranky

[1] A respected and famous sociologist spent 10 years doing an in-depth study of one firm where I worked. Having read some of the outcomes of that study it is pretty clear to me that in 10 years not a single employee told him or his graduate assistants the truth about anything important. Not one.

For anyone who makes it to the last para, that should be ‘But instead of such an approach being routine, any mention of…’

Tim @63,

A just accolade and a useful addition.

Motivation to persist in becoming a Tweeconomist is rarely the search for truth and clearly not the allure of beauty (Minskian maths being decidedly non-Tweedle, not to mention being beyond pretty much all Tweedles).

More commonly, the motivation is psychological disposition to join a Henri’s priesthood, if not a simple commonsense desire to at all costs avoid being a loser.

@ 71-
Cranky- I’d love to know which sociologist you are talking about. If it’s Robert Jackall, I’ll have to rethink my whole business ethics class.

@72 By not addressing the mixed conspiratorial and merely quasi-conpiratorial mechanisms involved, he ironically enough leaves pure ‘smoky room’ theories as the default interpretation.

It doesn’t sound like you’ve actually read (or watched) Manufacturing Consent, Tim.

The 1968 software crisis was when programmers (some of whom were wanting to call themselves ‘software engineers’) collectively realised that they’d reached the limit of what rule-of-thumb, making-it-up-as-you-go-along coding could do, and to go any further they’d had to re-visist their first principles. The 1968 Garmisch conference, sponsored by NATO, was an attempt to make programming an engineering science akin to civil engineering.

Did it succeed? Ceruzzi, whose ‘History of Modern Computing’ I happened to be reading last night, which is why I know any of this*, appears to think that it didn’t: unlike (say) in civil engineering where there is wide agreement on methods and standards, software engineering is still a chaotic field. What I think that Alex was getting at was that after 1968, the profession became, and remains, reflexive; in that it’s aware that its claims to total knowledge and ability are limited, and there are big structural problems with their project which need to be tackled, but can perhaps never be solved entirely. Unlike, say, economists.

*Although I already knew, partly through O Level Computer Studies, and partly through hanging out with Alex, that GOTOs are considered harmful.

The macroeconomics “profession” is less a conspiracy than a confederacy of dunces.

It’s been a long time, but wasn’t there some sort of controversy, in which considering it harmful was considered harmful?

Dunno Henri, I haven’t got to that chapter yet. In 1983-84, ISTR that Cambridge University Examinations Syndicate considered GOTOs suitable for teenagers, but there was a proviso that once we grew up, we’d have to put them aside in favour of GOSUBs. Or something.

Wow, the guys who had the right idea were writing about the criminalization of institutions, ponzi schemes, and irresponsibility. I’m feeling a bit alienated about the system.

To some extent ‘not being mainstream’ and ‘being ignored’ are synonymous. If we’d do all what is proposed outside of the mainstream we’d be in a societal rollercoaster: not a type of kick that many would want to experience constantly.

74- Jerry, right on! I guess Joaquin means it in the same way one could try to mean that it’s near impossible to translate Shakespeare into English. But that is Davidson’s point – there are neither many nor a single one conceptual scheme.

Well, I was vaguely familiar with Davidson’s ideas on conceptual schemes (bear with me, I’m an amateur philosopher in time spent away from physics) but I just went back to read “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” and while I saw some things in there that made me raise my eyebrows, the notion that something can be translated between languages doesn’t seem all that controversial to me. More than that, it doesn’t seem to me that Davidson is using the word “translate” in any different sense than one would be using it if one were, you know, actually translating something. I can understand the argument that the poetic sense of Pushkin is untranslatable into English (although I would disagree; Pushkin certainly thought that the poetic sense of Byron was translatable into Russian and I find myself convinced by his efforts) but that isn’t the argument Davidson is making.

Are you, by the way, related to the cyclist? To write the story of his life is something that needs to be done.

Heh, you and the Czech railway conductors both want to know (I was asked this question when traveling in Europe a few years ago). The answer is: not that I know of. I don’t think my last name is all that common so I was kind of surprised to find a somewhat-famous person with it. However, when I asked my dad, he said that he was not aware of any Kazakh-based relations. I suspect it’s not impossible that we have a common ancestor in our recent past, but there’s no immediate relation.

Joaquin Tamiroff = Seth Edenbaum = Dr Oblivious = banned commenter =
bored observer. Edenbaum is currently subject to a lifetime sitewide ban.

Please go away Seth and don’t come back.

But “German” in Russian isn’t “German” or anything like it, it’s “nyemyets”.

Indeed, but Hermann, the character’s name in English and his native German, is transliterated into Russian as Germann. Hence Germann the German.

JoB @79: someone with web-credibility. Ouch!

Is the perceived slight one to your web-cred, or to your own comparable forthrightness on this topic? I haven’t come across examples of the latter. A lack of the former, as I was thinking of it but (sorry) didn’t devote any of my limited allocation of attention-space to making entirely clear, doesn’t necessarily reflect on the individual: it’s a matter of status, web reputation, citability, etc. Cet. par., I’d say non-anonymity helps, too. It’s somewhat vague and not very fair (not to say Daniel doesn’t have credibility in the general sense of course) – more to do with not being easy for opponents to dismiss than anything else. I was ‘just saying’ it’s nice to see such reputational capital being made use of.

I’d add that I’m an admirer of Chomsky’s political work in general; this is a minor niggle in the scheme of things. One may well think it’s not his job to provide such explanations, or that there is no need for them except as just-so-stories to persuade the naive and undercut the disingenuous, and one may be right. But I do think Chomsky does, understandably, err on the side of knee-jerk anti-conspiratorialism. His co-author addresses some quasi-conspiratorial aspects here, but those themes aren’t really addressed in MC.

Chomsky does deal with this kind of thing occasionally, e.g. in the 2nd excerpt here. Problem is I think this kind of stuff is much more important in rhetorical terms than Chomsky acknowledges. The introduction of new terms and catchphrases would be one way for the concepts involved to gain currency in popular discourse: imagine if a term as successful as ‘passive-aggressive’, say, were developed to illustrate and encapsulate the phenomena involved…

Not that I’m blaming Chomsky for not doing that. But I do think that he unfairly derides those he regards as chasing irrelevant ‘conspiracy theories’ – a constituency he should be courting and moderating. He thinks that ‘conspiracy theories’ are a distraction. That’s hardly surprising since he defines conspiracy as something abnormal:

all decisions involve people. So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth? And that’s a question of fact[NB not merely of mood music]: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power? (Understanding Power, p. 348)

Now given Chomsky’s positive analysis of power institutions, that means ‘conspiracy theories’ are almost automatically of no more than marginal interest, because they are anomalous. So far, so definitional, but it’s not as simple as that because in this area, (re)definitions have a way of being transmuted into substantive theses. Chomsky goes on to say that, insofar as the CIA is just an agency of the White House (and he says it pretty straightforwardly is), whatever it gets up to is not a ‘conspiracy’. Then he goes into full anti-conspiratorial smear mode as he dismisses the “Kennedy-assassination cult”.

91- the controversy begins not with Davidson but with Quine and the essay you read won’t give the original sense of intranslatability. Quine (short and inexact): philosophical Sapir-Whorf (in the assumption the latter is better known) i.e. relativism, i.e. some things cannot cross cultures. Davidson: there is no such thing as a culture and hence whatever else Quine got right, there’s no such drama as the one implied in de facto segregation of cultures (neither multiple – nor a single cultural point of view, strictly speaking). I don’t know whether this helps.

As to your cycling namesake: he deserves a physicist Pushkin fan writing his life’s story.

Tim, 97- whatever I meant I didn’t mean offense but there is some irony in your reference on a thread discussing how wayward economics has gone based on the credibility of economists.

Oh, I see. Sorry, misread the original sentence – I thought you were saying that “Gherman the German” was something you lost in translation from Russian, rather than something you gained.

Very much the latter. The character is even introduced with the line: “Германн немец”.

“That’s a rather neat bit of footwork which elides the difference between “things that people in the CIA do, with due authorisation, as legitimate parts of their jobs” and “all the things that people in the CIA do”.”

No it isn’t. For one thing, Chomsky would never define what the CIA does with due authorization as “legitimate”–just because the White House says “go engage in covert activity X” and just because this might possibly be a legal thing to do under US law doesn’t make it a moral thing to do. He’s making a claim, which may or may not be true, that the CIA is an agency of the White House and does what it is told.

Tim @72: institutional (say) explanations may incorporate conspiratorial elements, e.g. the intentional exercise of proprietorial control over editorial content

Why is the intentional exercise of proprietorial control over editorial content “conspiratorial”? Proprietors are (alas) legally entitled to control the editorial content of their media properties. If a left-wing essay or documentary (or, more likely, a critical threshhold of them) outrages the propietor’s sensibilities, or if he thinks it would outrage major investors’ sensibilities, he will call in the editor for a little chat about “balance” and “objectivity.” The editor will go over the piece and soften it here, trim it there, ask for a “balancing” quote from a government or industry flack in another place, and in passing communicate to the reporter(s) that he (or the brass) think the piece was a little overzealous. The message could not be more clear. (I suspect that, mutatis mutandis, similar messages are communicated in similar ways to aspiring left-wing economists.)

The point is: in a business society, whoever pays the piper calls the tune. There’s nothing conspiratorial about this, at least in the mindless sense that reflexive, NY Times-editorialist-type centrists use the word.

Donald Johnson @105: no, ajay is right. Chomsky seems to say that if the CIA have authorisation from the White House, then whatever they are doing is no longer to be counted as conspiratorial, including cases in which ‘plausible deniability’ is sought. In what interesting sense of ‘conspiratorial’ is that the case? You are putting a lot of weight on ajay’s use of the word ‘legitimate’ in ‘legitimate parts of their jobs’.

Here’s the passage:

If you look at the place where investigation of “conspiracies” has absolutely flourished, modern American history, [not ancient or renaissance Rome or Florence, etc etc etc etc: plots from long ago or far way aren’t “conspiracies”, see] I think what’s notable is the absence of such cases- at least as I read the record, they almost never happen. I mean, occasionally you’ll find something like the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities, but that was sort of a fringe operation – and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate much of that stuff. As far as the Pentagon goes, sure the Services will push their interests-but typically they do it in pretty transparent ways.

Or take the CIA, which is considered the source of a lot of these conspiracies; we have a ton of information about it, and as I read the information, the C.I.A. is basically just an obedient branch of the White House. I mean sure, the C.I.A. has done things around the world- but as far as we know, it hasn’t done anything on its own. There’s very little evidence-in fact, I don’t know of any-that the C.I.A. is some kind of rogue elephant, you know, off on its own doing things. What the record shows is that the C.I.A. is just an agency of the White House, which sometimes carries out operations for which the Executive branch wants what’s called “plausible deniability”; in other words, if something goes wrong, we don’t want it to look like we did, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them to the wolves if we need to. That’s basically the role of the C.I.A., along with mostly just collection of information.

It’s the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things the people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about-they’re “nothing” organizations. Of course they’re there, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together-that’s not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually function.

It doesn’t happen; not as far as I know; hardly ever; not typically; not without being blown wide open; only as a ‘fringe’ activity; not without proper authorisation; it’s not a big surprise. Note the Reaganites are mentioned as examples of conspiratorial activity. Chomsky is, uniquely on this topic, floundering a bit and even inconsistent, and it’s because he wants to insist on a dichotomy between his own systems analysis and vulgar ones that consider individual motives and behaviour, a dichotomy that isn’t really sustainable.

geo @107 – ‘editorial content’ was needlessly ambiguous – I meant reportage, as you realised but I may as well point out. And I agree, the intentional exercise of proprietorial control over content may not be “conspiratorial” in a mindless sense that reflexive, NY Times-editorialist-type centrists use the word.

But it is conspiratorial in the sense that people are colluding in corrupt activity, I mean the reporters involved would deny they are falsifying the news, wouldn’t they. The concept of what is ‘conspiratorial’ is a Protean one and the NYT types are expert at manipulating it – so they might acknowledge proprietorial control but deny it’s conspiratorial (so that’s OK then), or claim that a particular accusation of such control is a ‘conspiracy theory’, and thus (one is supposed to conclude), ridiculous. You can see the same kind of two-step in the case of, say, the Israel Lobby.

Indeed the whole point is that they are not (usually) falsifying anything. They have a doctrine, they are a part of what he calls “doctrinal system”. They operate within this system, they don’t need to falsify. Same is the case with economists, as Luis (4) properly noted: “And of course an insult to the very many economists who are sincerely trying to understand the economy the best way they know how“. This is very common; indeed, this is the rule not the exception.

Chris Williams: When you’re done with Ceruzzi’s book, check out I.B. Cohen’s brief biography of Howard Aiken, which is very good. He slants towards the Harvard side on the Harvard/Navy/IBM narrative re. the development of the Mark I during the war, but he doesn’t overinterpret his sources for the other perspectives.

No question software engineering and s/e management are a challenge, but we know a lot more about it now than we did in the early 1960s. I’d estimate everybody has their own concept of what “Software Crisis” refers to, but that there are discontinuities too (points at which there was a shift from a more or less cohesive set of ideas to a new more or less cohesive set).

Envoi
(Can’t resist)

The funny thing is that when the C word isn’t lurking around casting its malign influence over proceedings, Chomsky is entirely reasonable on such topics. Conspiracy theories are bad, m’kay, so Chommers populates the category with bad and silly things: irrelevances, rogue units, one-offs.

At the other extreme, though Chomsky doesn’t tend to mention it much, is the classic strawman of the eternal, all-powerful, omniscient, centralised, single-minded, inhumanly evil controlling force. (‘There is no all-powerful conspiracy!’ that is the cry of the running dogs of ponero-plutocracy.)

The idea of reasonably cohesive money interests having the power to tightly constrain and even direct what the politicians do, which in turn involves all sorts of secretive and illegal activity up to and including domestic assassinations, isn’t a conspiracy theory, because it’s not silly. (And if the White House doesn’t want to know – or need to know – about some particular project, then I’m sure that isn’t enough to tip such activity into the ‘conspiracy’ bucket either.)

And that’s not just a matter of ‘mood music’. Chomsky’s understandably unwilling to be associated with various strange ideas about aliens etc – which get called ‘CTs’ becuase they involve government coverups, even though such rudimentarily conspiratorial aspects are, shall we say, not the most arresting features of such beliefs. So he repudiates ‘conspiracy theories’ by applying that term in an idiosyncratic way. But having done so, he contributes to the taboo, intellectually ghettoised status of anything so-labelled whether or not it falls under Chomsky’s odd and unclear conception.

On Watergate, for example, he says that Nixon was taken down by the powers that be, and this is unremarkable, part of the normal operation of power institutions – not conspiracy theory material. Meanwhile he points out that the real story was Cointelpro, which involved burglaries, intimidation, organising riots, ‘gestapo-style assassination’, etc, and had been going on under successive changes of administration. That is exactly the kind of thing that (the less outré) ‘conspiracy theory’ websites are mainly interested in, and so they bloody well should be. But I suppose to Chomsky they don’t count as ‘conspiracies’.

Anyone who thinks they do, however sane, reasonable, scrupulous and thoughtful, is outside the pale with the logo-analysers, the Freudian-slip watchers, the occultists, anti-semites, alien-spotters that are among the predictably superstitious manifestations of a lack of control and knowledge among a baffled and buffeted populace. And that phenomenon has the features of quasi-conspiracy, too.

But anyway: economists, quasi-conspiracy and information cascades…

If, for instance, JFK was killed by the CIA as some conspiracists claim, that’d be an example refuting Chomsky. Complaints that “he’s trying to have it both ways” are false–he’s trying to have it one way.

#120: It’s an irrelevant claim to fixate on. He is having it both ways; he’s also flagging which way he prefers in the case of ‘rogue CIA’ scenarios (MKULTRA – going by what we can tell from such records as weren’t destroyed – seems not to have been authorised. But then that involved the army, too, and no doubt a ‘plausible deniability’ hypothesis, or unsubversiveness relative to Executive aims, or failure to be sufficently spectacular, or – cheekily – insufficiently hermetic secrecy, or something, can be invoked to save the hypothesis.)

But I’m not going to follow your example and repeat myself, Donald, if I may reciprocally patronise a second time. (This really is heavy patronisation territory isn’t it.)

#121: Let’s say, incredibly, that evidence were now unearthed that the CIA killed JFK (and – yawn – I’m not saying they did). I don’t think Chomsky would take it to refute his position.

Such an event might be like the case of Nixon in the Watergate link above (also featured in slightly different form in the same book, Understanding Power, pp117 ff): Watergate is a very clear example of what happens to servants when they forget their role and go after the people who own the place: they are very quickly put back into their box, and somebody else takes over.

Alternatively, and still sticking to what Chomsky says in the same section of Understanding Power, it might be a ‘blip on the screen’ (i.e. we’re not going to learn anything about the world from it, at least nothing that generalises to the next case), as he described – with some justice given the, er, extraordinary circumstances – the generals’ conspiracy to kill Hitler. This is similar to his “even if it were true, who cares? It doesn’t have any significance” remark about of 9/11 ‘inside job’ theories (see previous disclaimers). Note also that on his prveiously examined view – and undercutting the ‘blip’ rationale for not caring – a “Bush done it” theory wouldn’t be a conspiracy theory at all (though it would be particularly ridiculous, of course, simply on the basis that Bush couldn’t organise a cutlery drawer.)

Or it could be like the MLK assassination, of which in the same section he says:

that’s the one case where you can imagine pretty plausible reasons why people would have wanted to kill him*, and I would not be in the least surprised if there in fact was a real conspiracy behind that one, probably a high-level conspiracy. I mea the mechanisms were there,[?] maybe they would have hired the Mafia or something to do it – but that conspiracy theory is perfectly plausible, I think.
[*note the top-down approach, often characterised as ‘conspiratorial’ (except here it’s nemini bono).]

It’s not clear if he thinks this is another blip on the screen, or a normal operation of power institutions, or what, but either way, it is a conspiracy theory and it is one he endorses, and endorses as a conspiracy theory. Now you can if you like try and two-step between that and the stuff on the previous page rubbishing ‘conspiracy theories’, but I think it would be better to accept that there is something wrong with what C is saying on the topic somewhere along the line.

Nice use of the ‘conspiracist’ label by the way. Given Chomsky’s MLK views, you had now better decide whether he is a conspiracist too, or whether you are applying that label on the basis of a substantive generalisation about everyone who gives substantial credence to the possibility of CIA involvement in the murder of JFK.

(Anyway, back to explanations of the uncoordinated emergence of ideologically-orientated economic theory, anyone?)

Sorry, geo, went off on one and didn’t directly address your/Chomsky’s suggestion re: bypassing or subverting institutional channels. I (currently) don’t think that really works, I mean for one thing it becomes progressively more restrictive a definition (to the point of being implausibly so) as you expand your idea of the institutional channels involved, for example if institutional channels include leaving the CIA to get on with ridding Chosmky’s plutocrats of various turbulent priests, or less dramatically, if they include Blair’s unminuted, mendacious and cliquishly autocratic ‘sofa government’.

And common or garden non-weird (though – yawn – still quite possibly very wrong, silly etc) -conspiracy theorists- mooters of conspiratorial hypotheses tend to tink in terms of conspiracies against the public, whether or not carried out through more-or-less official (or ‘institutional’) channels.

Not yet settled views, though.

me @124: I’d say the element of some kind of wrongdoing is pretty fixed

actually, the Night of the Generals would be a counterexample to that on the face of it – perhaps a disjunctive conception: either formal (e.g. in terms of positive law or similar norms) ‘wrongdoing’ or substantive (by the speaker’s lights) wrongdoing, or something like that. I think that’s more useful than just ‘wrong in some conceivable context or frame’.

125 And common or garden non-weird (though – yawn – still quite possibly very wrong, silly etc) conspiracy theorists mooters of conspiratorial hypotheses tend to think in terms of conspiracies against the public, whether or not carried out through more-or-less official (or ‘institutional’) channels.

Remember, he’s an anarchist analyzing power structures. I imagine, from his prescriptive, everything and anything they do is a conspiracy against the public. The only non-conspiratorial act would be to relinquish the power, to self-destruct. So, this model completely misses the point.

MLK may or may not have been assassinated by the FBI, but Fred Hampton and a whole bunch of others certainly were, so the MLK story doesn’t add anything (except uncertainty) to the analysis.

[Warning – if you don’t like leaden and longwinded irony you won’t be very keen on the following break from laboured earnestness.]

Cranky Observer @128 says:
Cheney managed to build a secret office, create a “4th branch of [US] government”, and presumably use that office to take actions the to this day have Republicans, the press, and most Democrats cowering in fear and refusing to criticize or even discuss Cheney. And he kept it secret for 8 years in Washington DC, the most gossip-riven town in the world.

Chomsky says:
Just another blip, or perhaps business as usual – in either case, uninteresting compared to endless detailed and specific analysis of biased press coverage. I think you’ll find that particular situations, often in the present or recent past, are not really representative of the general run of things. And when they are they’re unremarkable.

The MSM says:
Taking a broad view and putting any actual evidence into a wider perspective, it’s evident that the picture you are painting is a typical cultic conspiracy theory. Everyone knows the blogs are full of those, not like the much more credible, er, MSM.

And you’re wrong, I’m sure, about these supposed ‘secrets’ (yeah right – secrets, but you -know them- know about them, do you? Fantasist! Liar! Troublemaker! Supercilous self-aggrandiser! Comfort/thrill-seeker! Er, racist!).

The fact of the matter is, no-one ever keeps secrets, and people who are involved in – or who suspect or discover themselves to be implicated in – powerful, corrupt, ruthless and illegal groups generally can’t wait to tell all – preferably in unambiguous terms, attributably, on the record. Failing that, they certainly love to devastate their mourning relatives with the well-known phenomenon of “deathbed confessions” – though not the kind that is said to a priest – they just can’t be relied on to publicise such stuff properly.

Hushing things up, you see, is not a matter in which there is any leeway or room for error. It is like trying to plug holes in a balloon, not a box. Truth is always recognised as such, and never contested. It spreads irresistably and exponentially, even when based on unattributed, partial or unsubstantiated evidence. It is always reported in detail, investigated and tested impartially and in full public view, and then officially endorsed. Incriminating evidence is never contradicted, and those who give it never retaliated against, marginalised, ruined, persecuted, driven to penury or to assisted or unassisted insanity, or anything like that. If that sort of thing happened it would be all over the papers, wouldn’t it.

And there would have to have been hundreds, probably thousands, of people involved, all of whom would have access to top-level strategy, on the well known ‘fuck it – you may as well know’ basis. Where are all those whistleblowers?

Name one credible conspiracy theory for which, er, credible evidence hasn’t come out. The fact is these things always come out in the end. (Small print: after about 40 years when everyone of any seniority is dead, any documents which haven’t been destroyed may be declassified with appropriate redactions. After about another fifty or so, established historians will have a look at those documents and the contemporary newspapers, and start drafting some tentative conclusions.)

It’s good to wait a long time for all the facts to become clear and organise themselves. Otherwise the ‘fog of war’ tends to obscure the overall narrative – and individual, caught-up-in-the-moment, witnesses who don’t have the whole story might find their initial reports taken at face value.

Once they’ve had time to consider their memories in the round and let their perceptions settle down from their initial confused and unclear state, witnesses often retract their initial reports, or anyway say something which has many of the features of a retraction, like: “Well, I wish I hadn’t said that. I didn’t think I would get all this attention, anyway it’s been pointed out that my observation might be taken to imply that [something I have no way of knowing anything about happened], and I didn’t say that, and I don’t think it did happen, and I don’t want my statement to be used to imply that, and my words have been twisted, and I don’t want to talk about it any more”, which is just as good.

And anyway, the whole structure, approach, method, motive and er, spelling of your crazed theory is unsound. To see this, preserve the structure, but change, say ’40’ to ‘two milion’, ‘Cheney’ to ‘the Elders of Zion’, ‘Office of the Vice President’ to ‘secret ungerdround alien army’, and “4th branch of [US] government” to ‘sepurnatural all-konwing unspeakably evil wolrd-dictatorship’ . In principle, it is exactly the same theory, but you wouldn’t endorse that, would you?

And I do think Chomsky has a problem, as an anarchist who denounces the way power always works behind the scenes, given that the only popular image of groups working behind the scenes in that way is “the Jews,” which is almost certainly not the idea he wishes to convey.

bianca steele @132
Henri Vieuxtemps nailed an important part of Chomsky’s view, and I don’t quite understand why you took issue with what he contributed

Well, I didn’t take issue with his description of Chomsky’s (headline) position; I was more saying that it’s not the whole story and doesn’t address my issues with C’s views on the topic of ‘conspiracy theories’, explicitly-so-called, which are really just a very moderate version of the general problems that infest any discussion involving that phrase.

his linguistic and psychological theories have no evident connection with his views on politics.
I would assume the same. I didn’t – and don’t – intend to go anywhere near such topics if I can possibly avoid it.

Chomsky’s position, as you describe it, raises some important questions, for me at least
Good – it’s gratifying and encouraging to hear it.

Is it possible that the term “conspiracy theory” as ordinarily used is used incorrectly?
I think that kind of question might indeed in favourable cases be silly or even senseless, like ‘is everyone out of step?’, but in this case it’s more a case of being totally broken, with usage shifting in the space of a single sentence, laden with (often unacknowledged) evaluative baggage, and with talking at cross-purposes (sometimes disingeniously) the norm.

When someone is “owned” by the powers-that-be, does he consciously conform his activities to the head honcho’s wishes or to those of some intermediate person?
That’s a yes-or-no question rather than a choice of two specific alternatives, correct? I don’t think that can (or should) be seen as a senseless question – perhaps slightly stylised, but you got to start somewhere.

That is my other criticism, a softish one: that Chomsky pays insufficient attention (for my liking) to that kind of issue – and that not dealing with it in more depth means that lots of ‘ordinary’ people won’t even consider his points, because (among other reasons like the constant campaign to keep him outside the pale) it just sounds implausible to them that all those presentable, serious, high-status, professional journalists routinely falsify and twist the news just because they are paid to. In fact such a view presented so baldly and cursorily might be (and is) described as a ‘conspiracy theory’, at which point all is lost and he might as well be talking about shape-shifting reptiles.

I don’t think that’s really the only popular image of groups working behind the scenes in that way.

“The president is a secret Muslim” is popular now.

Tim Wilkinson @ 13[56]: No argument from me, I think. For most people “illuminati” have exactly the same level of reality as “aliens.” For some people, I think, “cia” and “mafia” have not that much more reality than “x-men”: good to think with, and so far from daily reality that expanding the definition doesn’t mean too much. Before the movie came out, a person I’d have thought wasn’t the type to take those kinds of things seriously told me in all seriousness that the Templars (still) exist, protecting the holy places. If that’s what Chomsky is annoyed with (and he is pretty accurate on the range of “okay” ways of talking about the JFK assassination in this country too), I’m with him to that extent.

I started to re-read Rorty’s “Is there a problem with fictional reference?” a little while ago, and I realized though I thought I’d known what the issue was the first time I read it, I’m no longer sure.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl2/33-conspiracy-theories.html

bianca steele @139: that would be the Da Vinci thing? Yes, most unfortunate.

Still, theories about stuff like Bohemian Grove or ‘occult’ societies are particularly prone to being dismissed on unfair grounds (even though there are normally plenty of fair ones adequate to that purpose) because the occultiness that features in oblique context, inside the theory, tends to be attributed in a blurry way to those tabling the theory – i.e. if I think that a bunch of people are doing nasty stuff because of some crazy beliefs, a casual observer may see that as me putting forward a theory based on subscribing to those crazy beliefs, or more likely just think ‘crazy beliefs – I’m off’.

A less unreasonable approach is to reject the idea that all these serious people would subscribe to crazy views. An entirely reasonable one (to go off on a bit of a Bohemian Grove-related tangent) is to point out that even if power-crazed sybarites might indulge in grotesque activities, that doesn’t tell us anything about anything else they might be doing. Of course such activities or beliefs might form a part of a scenario involving, say, blackmail or the conditional expectation of it.

@144 Referring to Doubt.

Being a Yank, from my perspective Chicago School (aka Freshwater) economics didn’t come into prominence so much because it seemingly represented a better mousetrap at the time, but specifically because it gave cover to an already established political aim – that is to roll back regulation and return to “laissez faire” policies that supported, to put it directly, the rich.

That is “the facts were tailored to the policy”.

Subsequently because of its convenience it is likely to rear its ugly head for quite some time.

What ultimately is truly remarkable though, is how the vast majority, and this includes significant numbers of so-called liberals, were convinced that these free market policies were in their best interests when they were exactly the opposite. That took some substantial double-think to accomplish.

In fact much of the Republican agenda, is entirely contrary to the benefits of those who most vehemently subscribe to their views. It is frankly amazing the number of poor and down and out who attend this “church” of conservatism, and yet are tortured daily by the fruits of their support.

“But I’m not going to follow your example and repeat myself, Donald, if I may reciprocally patronise a second time. (This really is heavy patronisation territory isn’t it.)”

Eh? What was that about? I take it from the italicizing of my name that there’s something patronizing about first name use.

“Nice use of the ‘conspiracist’ label by the way.”

Maybe that’s what it was about. Touchy, touchy. I didn’t even enter into this to argue with you–I was irritated by ajay. I was defending Chomsky’s views from the claim he is having it both ways. As I understand him, he thinks Presidents order the CIA to conduct covert ops and they don’t go and do it on their own. His MLK suggestion is a departure for him, unless he thinks LBJ ordered it. (I also think it’s stupid.)

I’m touchy about the conspiracist label myself, when it is applied to things I believe, such as the conspiracy theory that holds the Bush Administration deliberately lied us into the Iraq War and a friend of mine once dismissed the allegation that the US tortured innocent people to death with the response that “Yeah, well, people write books saying Bush did 9/11”. I don’t want my quite reasonable beliefs about powerful people doing bad things tied in with theories that are ridiculous (9/11 Truther notions) or even those that are not crazy AFAIK but have much less evidence supporting them (this or that group killed JFK). It’s useful to have a term that distinguishes between reasonable conspiracy theories with lots of evidence for them and the ones that seem to attract compulsive types who believe in some elaborate version of history that is hidden to most. Unfortunately we don’t have a good word for this.

Donald @148 yes, sorry if that was slightly touchy but it is unusual to see first name interjected or appended rather than used to establish addressee, esp. twice in one thread. Anyway no wounds inflicted, eh.

Same re the ‘conspiracist’ thing – though I’m not saying it’s a huge deal in any given case, nor advertent on your part, it is a problem I think, because it loads the issue with a personal dimension and tends to mean that 1 and 2 are easily assimilated to 3 (and as you say, there is a continuum along that dimension, so by 3 I probably mean the far extreme in that direction). In fact, I would object a bit to saying ‘paranoid’ at all. It’s inaccurate unless the theory is self-centred, and redundant given that the theory, to get into class 3 must surely actually, objectively and independently be categorised as wildly implausible or actually impossible. Basically, more heat than light.

Same with ‘compulsive types who believe in some elaborate version of history that is hidden to most’.

That’s a bit of a strawman invention of Popper (in his guise as amateur propagandist) taken up by Hofstadter later on, the ‘conspiracy theory of history’, and doesn’t apply, from what I can see, to most (I have no numbers of course) 9/11 inside job types, for example. Those who do talk in a way that is consistent with that conception are, I think, often (not always; all of this is a matter of the percentages – which I freely admit I can’t supply) not very attached to the idea and see it as a hobbyist diversion, somewhat analogous to those who read horoscopes or go to fortune tellers but if pressed will agree it’s basicaly bollocks (or more recently ‘their own truth’). They also tend to have in mind what I’ve called ‘agent-based theories’ that are pretty thin on detail.

In fact, in a way, it’s the opposite approach that Chomsky objects to – the focus on isolated individual events, rather than the tight fetters of capitalist history and its integral covert action etc.

And I still say C’s position is defective – simply because his headline position is (basically) that conspiracy theories in general are always wrong, while his argument consists largely of saying the CIA (no mention of FBI, or more secretive/ad hoc special forces, or any other actors) don’t act without presidential authority, which includes deniable nods and winks. There’s more detail and context above though your searching and wading through it would no doubt be beyond the call. I may do so later.

And the issue of getting authorisation is not the same as top-down planning. For example Operation Northwoods, it appears, was agreed by the joint chiefs and CIA before it was offered to Kennedy for sign-off – which disappointingly for them wasn’t forthcoming in the event. And what is more, Chomsky doesn’t even establish that the CIA are under the complete control of the White House. A specific example of his general approach which isn’t interested in intra-class machinations. He thinks, for example, that Nixon was brought down by big finance – is that with or without the assistance of CIA elements?

But anyway, getting explicit recognition of the scale that includes 1 to 3 was probably the main part of my (self-imposed) brief really. Not that it isn’t obvious (and I don’t say it wasn’t so to you all along), but from previous conversations with fairly clued-up people (I’m not claiming special ablities, just to have taken an interest in the general topic where others haven’t), it’s clear that the distinction is often overlooked, and certainly there is a big interest in – and apologists in the press expend a lot of effort on – assimilating instances of 1 to classes 2 or 3 – as seen in the rhetoric surrounding the Iraq war plot.

Tim Wilkinson (taking no chances on the name thing)–

I can’t say where the burden of proof goes on the JFK question. My own personal feeling (on why I haven’t read more about it) is that one would need to master a great deal of essentially very boring detail (on ballistics, Oswald’s life, Ruby’s life, the lives of every person alleged to have some role in the various conspiracy theories, the habits of the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, Castro, and goodness knows what else) to be able to judge which theory seemed best. I lean towards the Warren Commission, mainly out of Chomsky-like bias, but have tried recently to have a more open mind. But I’m not going to start reading Vincent Bugliosi (supposedly the best presenter of the mainstream view) along with all the various conspiracy authors–life is too short to delve into something so vast and uninteresting in its details, with the significant likelihood that one would come out not being that certain at the end of the process. Which is not to say that others shouldn’t try.

So without knowing more, I can’t say much.