This cyber-stalking is getting beyond a joke

First of all, DeLong is not “stalking” you. Secondly, his latest post contains no “infantile caricatures.”

I think you’re overreacting a tad (actually a lot).

Mike, if you look at the original post you’ll see how badly he’s misrepresented Chris’s views:
https://crookedtimber.org/2011/05/22/the-fragmenting-coalition-of-the-left-some-musings/#more-20113

I’d be spitting blood if I was Chris, as that is a serious piece of what I can only assume is deliberate academic dishonesty by the man deLong. One of the reasons that a lot of people dislike deLong, is because he keeps pulling stunts like this.

Look, it seems like Bertram, Delong, Yglesias and Farrell should just calm down a little and all do a bit of Mickey Kaus bashing. Once everyone remembers what fighting against brain-dead neoliberalism is like, the rhetoric deployed against actual thinking people will be less vituperative. Hopefully.

Delong perplexes me. One minute he’s making interesting posts on economic history & Keynesian theory, with use of evidence and sound logic, the next he is crafting straw men and violating Godwin’s Law repeatedly. He seems economically sound, but politically confused.

As (de)long as he spells your name right…

He has no sympathy for Stalinism. None at all. For example, Maurice Dobbs’ inexcusable refusal to ever amend his history of the Soviet Union to include a detailed history of the Ukraine famine would probably strike as monstrous. He has no sympathy for Castro and no sympathy for Chomsky whom he sees as constitutionally incapable of admitting to any Stalinist aggression that provoked a response from the capitalist camp. I don’t think Brad has much admiration for Marx, but he is a scholar. For example, he worked through Dobbs’ student Keith Tribe’s book on economic discourse and Foucauldian epistemology for his undergraduate thesis parts of which he posted on his website. Pretty amazing stuff for an undergraduate or graduate for that matter.

He wrote a challenging criticism of Marx’s exploitation theory that left Marx’s defenders, including me, clutching for straws (I think a plausible answer can be found in chs21-23 of Capital I, but that occurred to me months later). He obviously does not think capitalism suffers from crises that left technocracy could not solve the same way a dentist can heal a toothache.

But Brad is clutching for straws in trying to explain why the relatively painless solutions that true macroeconomic science are not being adopted. So are Krugman and Quiggin. I think they are facing a genuine theoretical crisis.

What I don’t understand about Chris B’s framework is why he thinks eco-socialism and right wing xenophobic nationalism are necessarily opposed. The Sierra Club even in California has at times combined them, and made strict border and population control the central strategy for environmental protection.

But Chris you wrote: “Their voters, the swing voters of the left I suppose, will either move towards the eco-left or will drift towards xenophobic right-wing nationalism.”

The first confusing thing is that you had identified the swing voters of the left as xenophobic or anti-immigrant left nationalists. That is probably why Brad thought that you were looking to cross fertilize anti-market xenophobia with the eco-left. It was not an unreasonable reading of what you had written.

Ha-Joon Chang who was a student of Bob Rowthorn’s has echoed his teacher’s call for immigration restriction. He thinks that open borders would radically reduce wages in the first world (he has a charming little story about Sven the busdriver making many times more $PPP than Ram the busdriver though Ram is necessarily a better driver, and eager to take Sven’s job) and bring about cultural changes that would destroy any sense of national identity, fabulated as it may well be.

But because Chang is not a free trade economist he thinks no state (first world state or post-colonial state) should be prevented from using border control policies as well as industrial policy or indicative planning and protectionist measures.

Yeah, sorry, more than mere protests.

Brad DeLong is having another go at me . (It really does seem to be some kind of obsession with him.

An interesting exercise might be to work out the percentage of CB and HF posts devoted to DeLong, and compare that with the percentage of DeLong posts devoted to CB and HF. The obsession may not be entirely one-sided.

Cian @3: “as that is a serious piece of what I can only assume is deliberate academic dishonesty”.

No. It’s a blog post, and if we applied the same standards to blogs as to academic papers, the world would be a very boring place.
DeLong’s was the first blog I ever read, and I have learned a tremendous amount from his writings, so I have a lot of affection for him. He can be frustrating of course, but his over-the-top dislike of certain kinds of left-wing thinking (I think hartal @11 has it right) is the price to pay for his willingness to go after his colleague John Yoo in a quite merciless but completely appropriate (and courageous, in an academic sense) fashion. For me, that’s a price worth paying.

Personally I see his dislike of Chomsky, Bertram, Ehrenreich et al. as an adorable reminder that irrational childhood prejudices and identity issues are not far from the surface for any of us, even those who supposedly value rationality the most.

Ebenezer: “His trigger, I think, is that he feels very uncomfortable with anybody to the left of him, except for Paul Krugman. He likes to think that he is as progressive as one can be, while still being reasonable (again, except for PK.) You can occasionally force him to admit that “no enemies to the left” is a rational policy, but I don’t think he really believes it.”

DeLong has what I perceived to be a common centrist-liberal tick, which is fear of being thought a Dirty Hippy by right-wing economists. He needs to understand that the right-wing economists will *always* do so. It’s the neoliberal economist cringe.

Who here is reminded of Megan McArdle? Anybody?

As for Timothy’s question at 16 I would like to know more about the failed Austrian uprising of 1934. It got pretty close. I remember reading Karl Polanyi’s wife (whose name I have forgtten) account, but not knowing enough to really understand the history
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People are stalking but not genuinely arguing against only person here–Karl Marx
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Henry, freedom is not always exit, having exit options from expensive barbers; it is also voice or institutional voice through the formation of groups. The problem is not that your opponents don’t know Marxist or social democratic thought; it’s that everyone has forgotten about Hirschman.

“DeLong simply deletes”

Maybe he should just disemvowel posts that he does not like, as you do, Chris B!

I tried to explain above why your post lent itself to the interpretation DeLong put on it. You wanted to win over left-wing anti-market xenophobes and prevent them from becoming right wing nationalists. DeLong thought that you thus wanted to cross fertilize left wing xenophobia and the eco left. What you wrote was confusing at the very least; or perhaps you are disavowing the implications of what you wrote.

And are you really taking offense to his defending economics for not ignoring but featuring the ultimatum game?

That’s not true. My comments were succinct defenses of a book (Milanovic) that almost no one on the the thread, including you my dear Chris, had read. You blogged about a book on the basis of another blog. I had read the book carefully; a honest person would have welcomed honest informed commentary. I didn’t find you to be honest at all.

hartal – as Cosma Shalizi makes clear, Brad DeLong’s criticisms made no sense (Cosma’s rejoinder carries more weight too, because as he says, he is more inclined to take Brad’s position than Chris’s in broader debates). The von Neumann quote is especially damning – it is a Good Thing to be on the same side as von Neumann in a debate over what utility functions actually mean.

bq. Chris Bertram, back from a conference where he heard Michael Tomasello talk about his interesting experiments on (in Bertram’s words) “young children and other primates [supporting the view] that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds”, wonders about the implications of the fact that “work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t — quelle surprise! — support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.”

bq. Brad DeLong asserts that the microfoundations of economics point not to a Hobbesian vision of the war of all against all, but rather to Adam Smith’s propensities for peaceful cooperation, especially through exchange. “The foundation of microeconomics is not the Hobbesian ‘this is good for me’ but rather the Smithian ‘this trade is good for us,’ and on the uses and abuses of markets built on top of the ‘this trade is good for us’ principle.” Bertram objects that this isn’t true, and others in DeLong’s comments section further object that modern economics simply does not rest on this Smithian vision. DeLong replies: “Seems to me the normal education of an economist includes an awful lot about ultimatum games and rule of law these days…”

bq. I have to call this one against DeLong — rather to my surprise, since I usually get more out of his writing than Bertram’s. The fact is that the foundations of standard microeconomic models envisage people as hedonistic sociopaths [ETA: see below], and theorists prevent mayhem from breaking out in their models by the simple expedient of ignoring the possibility.

bq. If you open up any good book on welfare economics or general equilibrium which has appeared since Debreu’s Theory of Value (or indeed before), you will see a clear specification of what the economic agents care about: this is entirely a function of their own consumption of goods and services. Does any agent in any such model care at all about what any other agent gets to consume? No; it is a matter of purest indifference to them whether their fellows experience feast or famine; even whether they live or die. If one such agent has an unsatiated demand for potato chips, and the cost of one more chip will be to devastate innumerable millions, they simply are not equipped to care. (And the principle of Pareto optimality shrugs, saying “who are we to judge?”) Arrow, Debreu and co. rule out by hypothesis any interaction between agents other than impersonal market exchange [ETA: or more exactly, their model does so], but the specification of the agents shows that they’d have no objection to pillage, or any preference for obtaining their consumption basket by peaceful truck, barter and commerce rather than fire, sword and fear.

bq. Well, you might say, welfare economics and general equilibrium concern themselves with what happens once peaceful market systems have been established. Of course they don’t need to put a “pillaging, not really my thing” term in the utility functions, since it would never come up. Surely things are better in game theory, which has long been seen to be the real microfoundations for economics?

bq. In a word, no. If you ask why a von Neumann-Morgenstern agent refrains from pillaging, you get the answers that (1) the game is postulated not to have pillaging as an option, or (2) he is restrained by fear of some power stronger than himself, whether that power be an individual or an assembly. (Thus von Neumann: “It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl.”) Option (1) being obviously irrelevant to explaining why people obey the law, etc., we are left with option (2), which is the essence of all the leading attempts, within economics, to give microfoundations to such phenomena. This is very much in line with the thought of an eminent British moral philosopher — one can read the Folk Theorem as saying that Leviathan could be a distributed system — but that philosopher is not Dr. Smith.

bq. One can defend the utility of the Hobbesian, game-theoretic vision, and though in my humble (and long-standing) opinion the empirical results on things like the ultimatum game mean that it can be no more than an approximation useful in certain circumstances, and ideas like those of Tomasello (and Smith) need to be taken very seriously. But of course those ideas are not part of the generally-accepted microfoundations of economics. This is why every graduate student in economics reads (something equivalent to) Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis, but not Bowles’s Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution; would that they did. If you read Bowles, you will in fact learn a great deal about the ultimatum game, the rule of law, and so forth; in a standard microeconomics text you will not. I think the Hobbesian vision is wrong, but anyone who thinks that modern economics’s micro-foundations aren’t thoroughly Hobbesian is engaged in wishful thinking.

bq. Update, 15 September: A reader observes, correctly, that actual sociopaths show much more other-regarding preferences than does Homo economicus (typically, forms of cruelty). I could quibble and gesture to dissocial personality disorder, but point taken.

bq. Update, 24 December: In the comments at DeLong’s, Robert Waldmann rightly chides me for conflating the actual social views of Arrow and Debreu with what they put into their model of general equilibrium. I have updated the text accordingly.

No. It’s a blog post, and if we applied the same standards to blogs as to academic papers, the world would be a very boring place.

I don’t care what it is. Misrepresenting what somebody has said, just so that you can attack them for it, is contemptible behaviour no matter what the venue. I can’t think of a good term for it, but lying pretty much covers it.

Maybe he has other fine qualities, but he’s done it enough over the years to enough people, that I’ve long since given up on him. If you can’t trust him to accurately represent what somebody said when all you have to do is click on the link, who knows what he gets up to when its harder to check. Why would anyone assume that he’s honest in other areas, especially when the stakes are high.

You’re being dishonest in spending half your conversational time conflating arguments you dislike with “obsession” and “cyber-stalking”, and the other half insisting that you’re offended anyone else would suggest you had an obsession. Watch this: “you explicitly suggested that I had an “obsession” with Brad DeLong. If you have any evidence to support that, I’d love to see it. If you have any evidence that I’ve misrepresented his arguments in the same way that he is demonstrably misrepresenting mine and Chris’s, I’d love to see that too”

Obsession and misrepresentation are two different things, but the pair of you keep flipping from one to the other and calling one by the other’s name. You can put a stop to it at any time simply by calling things by their right name, like this: “This misrepresentation is getting beyond a joke”. That would not have been hard, would it?

Calling it stalking is playground taunts, “ooh you’re so obsessed with me!” It would be better to address the thing you’re actually objecting to than to try to affect an air of indifference to an obsessive pursuer.

bq. The question is whether those points have made their way into leading grad programs.

I will bet large amounts of money that you can’t find a reasonably respected econ Ph.D. program in the country which doesn’t require you to take courses on the ‘basics,’ going on from von Neumann-Morgenstern to Arrow-Debreu etc. I would bet a smaller, but still significant amount of money that there is no respected Ph.D. course in the country which requires you to take a course on the funkier stuff that is happening with psychology, herding models etc. These are, undeniably, growth areas, and may be the topic of optional courses – but they are not at the core of graduate training.

hartal at 17: I think the argument that x-amount of cultural/ethnic/whatever diversity prevents the citizens and inhabitants of a country from feeling national unity is bull. The state of a country can use the various tools available to it and foster a sense of national unity amoung their citizens. It worked in France, Italy, Germany, and various other places in the 19th and 20th century and there is little reason to believe that it can’t be done in the 21st century. It requires a combination of soft and heavy handed tactics at times but it is necessary in any country aspiring for democratic and liberal governance. There needs to be a certain amount of team spirit to make democratic government, especially in the more progressive forms, viable.

There’s far less racism and nationalism in the US then one would suppose by liberal hand wringing. I live in a Deep Red area, in a 1st generation immigrant multi racial household and there have been no problems.

Liberals often raise the bogeyman of fascism as an attempt to shake some sense into ‘far-thinking’ elements of the ruling class, R. Reich goes near this route frequently. But fascism is only adopted by the ruling classes in a response to a resurgent Left. With no Left, there is no need for fascism – no need to win back the street.

The problems in the US are linked class and power but the US working class is not racing towards hard-right nationalism , perhaps drifting in small measure, but much less than would be supposed by our economic crisis.

I think Ajay and others are right — it’s in the nature of argument that antagonists will mischaracterize your position. Yes, it can be deeply irritating to set them right. But this rhetoric of “stalking” and “obsession” is undignified whining. Chris, please: when you title posts this way you just sound rattled.

If Brad has indeed misrepresented, and used his power of deletion to sustain misrepresentation, that’s a serious thing, but it’s not “stalking.”

I clicked on the Delong “off to the races” link and got a blank screen.

You may want to delete my link to the cache then.

Done – thanks.

60: The comments in brackets are indeed from DeLong.

@48 – It’s not really fair to anyone involved to reveal that there are secret personal issues between Brad Delong and Chris Bertram, is it? Especially when you’re claiming that these secret personal issues poison everything Delong writes about Chris.

Harry@25: “…a common centrist-liberal tick, which is fear of being thought a Dirty Hippy by right-wing economists…”

Not at all limited to centrist liberals.

Why does everyone thing Barry @ 25 is Harry @ 25?

Kevin@67, Barry wasn’t very Harry, Wuzzy?

I’ve had my disputes with DeLong, and Bertram and Farrell, and I hope that this gets resolved amicably, but I admit that my sympathies rest more with B & F, who have been far more gracious toward adverse criticism than D has. Nevertheless, the gap — even imagined — between Delong and CT is far less than that between them and any GOP counterparts.

Isn’t this thread in part about xenophobic nationalism? So what do make of the horrific actions and ideology Anders Behring Breiviksy? In thinking through questions of multiculturalism, we probably can’t do better than begin with thinkers such as Bhikhu Parekh and Joan Scott–they are lucid and controversial. What is so confusing to me is why civic conceptions of nationalism are so fragile and why there is so much suspicion of Muslim migrants that they will forever have uniquely strong extra-territorial loyalties that distinguish them from all other members of society, many of whom are foreign-born or heavily invested abroad.