Henry

Does the Daily Show owe our former co-blogger Ted Barlow, a writing credit?

Watch and decide …

(Direct link to video )

One of the more annoying libertarian shticks to us lefties is the “increasing poverty and inequality don’t matter because consumer spending is going Up! Up! UP! ! !” three card monte routine. I think it must surely have reached its apotheosis in this failed November hack job on Edwards by Jeff Taylor in _Reason Online_ which I didn’t see until Nick Gillespie linked to it today.

However, the slapstick of the Edwards misstep should not obscure the really big picture, the fatal flaw in his “Two Americas” spiel. Many thousands of Americans evidently have $600 to spend on a video game machine. What’s more, this Christmas is expected to usher in the year of the flat-panel. With price points dropping below the $1000 mark, high-end TVs are moving down-market fast with Wal-Mart leading the way. Contrary to the Edwards’ pitch that labor-hostile companies are leaving American workers destitute, somebody is making some money out there in America. More importantly, they are making it in many, many cases without a union card. This reality will very hard [sic] for union-funded Democrats like Edwards to ignore as the 2008 presidential campaign unfolds. Hewing to the union rules, clear evidence of prosperity, like perhaps a shortage of $600 game machines, will have to be swept out of the campaign.

It isn’t hard for me to believe that someone would make the hilariously cackleheaded argument that because “many thousands” can afford a Playstation 3, economic inequality is a non-issue; I see this kind of guff in the comment sections of blogs all the time. But it is rather surprising that it’s being published by a sometimes quite interesting website as a purportedly serious contribution to political debate.

(As an aside, Taylor also introduces us to the interesting sounding concept of ‘Pythonseque depravation one-upsmanship;’ a spelling error trifecta unless depravation is a portmanteau term indicating Taylor’s opinion of the moral qualities of those wicked enough to be poor. Someone really needs to be proofreading the contributions to Reason’s website a little better).

Via Dan Drezner, Greg Mankiw accuses Deval Patrick of not understanding basic economics.

The money quote from Patrick:

“If we’re trying to cultivate here in Massachusetts an energy-smart economy, then the notion of relying for additional revenues on something we’re trying to break our dependence on doesn’t seem to me to be a formula for long-term success.”

Mankiw’s response:

Okay, let me get this straight: It is important that we reduce our consumption of oil. Therefore, we should not tax it.

Hmmm….Governor Patrick was Harvard class of 1978, and it’s a good bet that he took ec 10. I wonder what they taught about the slope of demand curves back then.

There usually isn’t much need to remind well known right-of-center economists of the importance of incentives, but it looks to me as though Mankiw is misreading an on-the-face-of-it-quite-reasonable claim here. Patrick is suggesting, as far as I can see, that if we want to move away from a petroleum based economy, it may be a bad idea _ex ante_ to make gas into an important source of tax revenues for the government. If the Massachusetts state government comes to rely on a gas tax as a significant source of income, then it will have an incentive over the longer term not to want to lower tax revenues, say, by introducing non-tax regulations that make hybrid vehicles more attractive and gas-guzzlers less so. It will have created a long term constituency that favors the status quo, and that is likely to resist vigorously attempts to move away from it that would threaten funds going to this or that favoured project.

This kind of feedback loop, in which policy shifts create and provide resources for new constituencies which then push for the maintenance of that policy, has been explored at length by Paul Pierson and others (see here for a nice and reasonably brief overview). Now it could be that this effect is swamped by the substitution effects and so on described in basic micro textbooks. But it also could be that it isn’t swamped – and I can’t think of any very good way empirically to test for which effect is likely to prevail under which circumstances. Mankiw and Patrick are on different sides of an argument about the appropriate instruments for changing incentives. But this in no sense means that Patrick is an economic illiterate.

I’m buried in grading at the moment (like, I suspect, many of our readers), and not up to writing any longwinded posts. But I did come across something that I thought might make for an interesting discussion for the academic types who want to take a few minutes out. A vanity search on Google Scholar revealed that a piece (PDF) that I co-wrote with Jack Knight a few years back had been cited in an article by Pieter Tierhost for the _Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie_ on “The Scaling of the Dutch Vegetables-Under-Glass-Cluster: Sweet Peppers, Tomatoes and Cucumbers.” Now it isn’t quite as odd as it might sound that Tierhost would cite an article by a political scientist and political theorist; there’s an actual connection there (and Tierhost’s article looks like an interesting and valuable take on industrial clusters for those who follow these debates). But I certainly never thought that anything I wrote would be of interest to scholars debating the cooperation strategies of Dutch vegetable-growers. Which leads to a point for discussion by those of our readers as gets cited occasionally – what’s the most surprising venue/field/article that you’ve been cited in?

The FT has two great articles (behind the paywall unfortunately) on how a deliberately fostered culture of corner-cutting at BP led to disaster. Some highlights below the cut. [click to continue…]

I’m on bloggingheads again with Dan Drezner. Dan and I had a long discussion about Krugman and whether or not academics should get engaged in broader political debates, dipping into Krugman’s recent piece on inequality as we went along. One of the things I mentioned was the bit in Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity_ where he talks about the way in which people can cherry-pick economic statistics in order to prove what they want to prove. Krugman is talking about aggregate growth statistics, but nonetheless the point travels.

by choosing your years carefully and talking a good game, you can seem to prove whatever conclusion you like … We learn that a clever propagandist, right or left, can always find a way to present the data on economic growth that seems to support her case. And we therefore also learn to take any statistical analysis from a strongly political source with handfuls of salt. Someone once said about partisan analysis that they use economic data the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination (Peddling Prosperity pp.110-111).

Cue Alan Reynolds in comments at Mark Thoma’s place, defending a rather dubious-sounding WSJ editorial attacking claims that income inequality has been growing since _1980._

there is no clear evidence of a sustained and significant increase in inequality since 1988 by any other measure. I very carefully did not say there was no such evidence about 1981-87.

Indeed.

Reynolds goes on to defend his choice of periodization, but it would appear that he has a bit of a track record (to extend Krugman’s metaphor) for employing lampposts not only to provide support, but to meet those other needs and imperatives that drunks are subject to while weaving their way home after a convivial evening.

(Note by the way that Krugman’s criticisms come in the midst of a longer discussion of how chancers at think tanks rather than proper economists have come to dominate debate; while academic peer review doesn’t serve as a perfect protection against this sort of cherry picking, it does make it considerably more difficult to get away with).

We’ve posted before here about the horridness of Christmas Music. Ian McDonald has the antidote.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’ve been away without ordered leave from the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks – the joys of end-of-semester committee crunch and grading. But two things that I’ve wanted to link to:

Greg Bloom has another series of posts on the ways in which the Fund for Public Interest Research has resisted unionization efforts. The way in which many purportedly lefty organizations refuse to let their workers bargain for decent conditions is pretty shameful.

Alexander Mueller, fresh from porting over Susanna Clarke has translated the China Mieville seminar into German too. Great stuff.

Finally, I’ve been meaning for a while to link to this Nir Rosen piece, which is the best and most detailed on the ground discussion that I’ve seen of Iraq’s descent into civil war. I see via TPM Muckraker that Rosen is venturing into the blogosphere.

For all you game theorists out there, Hammad Siddiqi (2006): The social norm of leaving the toilet seat down: A game theoretic analysis. Unpublished (available here as PDF). Don’t bother with the obvious jokes about trembling hand equilibria – the author has made them already. Via Mark Thoma.

A quick question about the Social Security debate last year that CT readers may be able to help me with. I remember some newspaper somewhere publishing an article in which un-named Democrats thanked bloggers like Josh Marshall for helping corral the mavericks during the Social Security debate. Does anyone remember where that article is? More generally, actual evidence on whether bloggers did or didn’t influence this debate would be helpful (I’m pretty sure that they did, but hard evidence on this is difficult to come by).

Tom Bartlett at the _Chronicle_ sat down Michael Bérubé and David Horowitz for lunch a couple of weeks ago. The results are here. It’s interesting and enjoyable; Horowitz clearly doesn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with an interlocutor who doesn’t take him Very Seriously. All in all, Horowitz doesn’t seem particularly bright.

Two interesting arguments about the press and the 1960’s backlash against civil rights.

First, David Greenberg in a book review in _The American Prospect._

If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism’s finest hours, it carried a cost. It’s a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don’t explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today’s right-wing bogeyman of “the liberal media” originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story. … Roberts and Klibanoff also detail more subtle ways in which hostility toward the national media was voiced. In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South. Ultimately, politicians — notably Alabama Governor George Wallace — capitalized on this resentment. Wallace cited journalists alongside pointy-headed intellectuals and the Supreme Court in his litany of elitist villains who were screwing the little guy. Richard Nixon, too, picked up the strategy, which he bequeathed to men like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

Second, Rick Perlstein (free reg required) in _TNR._

Since the late ’60s, however–not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame–a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees “were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten.” Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn’t imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite’s show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: “Many of them are hippies themselves. They’re part of this movement.” Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, “Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America.” That air of alienation–that helpless feeling that we have no idea what’s going on out there–has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what “the great mass of ordinary Americans” supposedly believes–much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically–became reified. Pundits like Kraft–a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway–learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them–say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics–they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

Now the historical origins of a set of institutions and practices don’t necessarily dictate their current content. Much of the discourse around social welfare in the 1930’s had an unpleasant racist edge. But there does seem to be some continuity between what Greenberg and Perlstein (both of whom are excellent historians who are intimately familiar with their source material) document, and the ways that journalists tiptoe around the political importance of racism in the South today. Comments?

Orson Scott Card’s new ‘American libruls start a new Civil War’ novel has been provoking well deserved hilarity. Scott Lemiuex quotes one of the choicer descriptions of the Evils of Leftist Professors.

He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

But for my money, John Ringo and Tom Kratman’s forthcoming current Watch on the Rhine (die Wacht am Rhein), billed by Baen Books as “The Most Un-PC Book of the Year,” sounds even juicier.

A man-eating Posleen horde invades Earth and Germany is forced to rejuvenate its most reviled warrior caste: the Waffen SS. With peacenik and under-prepared modern Europe reeling, it’s up to these old soldiers to reforge the steel of hard regimen and redeem their honor as warriors. It’s a chance for Europe’s fighting spirit to reawaken, weed out the lingering rot, and fight for the survival of humanity itself. Politically correct? No way! Thoughtful and action-packed? Absolutely!

“Und so weiter” to use what I suppose is the appropriate phrase under the circumstances. All the book needs is a blurb from Glenn flat out racist Reynolds. “Is Europe going to revive the Waffen-SS to stiffen up its drooping manliness in the face of invasion by cannibalistic aliens? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer John Ringo thinks that we’re in enough danger that he’s co-authored a cautionary tale that’s set in more-or-less present times.”

I suspect these two books are the first blossoms of a sub-sub-genre of revanchist sf warporn that will develop over the next couple of years to console warblogger-types and to tell them that they will be justified by history when the cyber-empowered Islamo-Nazis/man-eating aliens/liberal-comsymp-guerillas come marching over the horizon. There’s sure to be a dissertation in here somewhere for some hard-working grad student.

Sean Carroll writes about his miserable experience with Orbitz customer service, comparing it to the Hell’s Embassy scene in _Perdido Street Station_ where the suave tones of the demonic ambassador are accompanied by a disturbing echo from below “in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture.” Which reminds me that I promised myself last week, after enduring 2 hours in customer service hell with MCI, that I would blog about it so as to warn anyone else considering signing up with the company to avoid them like the plague. [click to continue…]