globollocks

Last night I watched Citizen Jane, a recent biopic about Jane Jacobs and her long fight against Robert Moses’s plans for New York. Of course, Jacobs was largely correct: Moses’s grand utopian schemes wrecked the ecologies of street and community and eventually produced neighbourhoods worse than the ones they replaced, whilst failing to solve even the problems, like traffic congestion, they seemed best suited to. But being already familiar with the substance of the dispute, and with Jacobs’s great work, *The Death and Life of Great American Cities*, what struck me most forcefully was the rhetoric. On the one hand, there were the self-proclaimed “experts”, on the other, ordinary people with their lived experience, sceptical about whether the “experts” had their best interests at heart (or if they did, whether they shared the same conception of their interests). A great irony of the Jacobs case is that though she was right about Moses and his plans, the net result of her activism has not been, in the end, to preserve those neighbourhoods for the kinds of people who lived there then, but rather to give them an afterlife to be enjoyed by the people who can now afford to live in them.

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In an op-ed in the Financial Times, the economist Branko Milanovic [advocates that](https://next.ft.com/content/2e3c93fa-06d2-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce) in order to fight global poverty, we should introduce explicit systems of differentiated citizenship in wealthy countries under which immigrants (and their children? and their children’s children?) would be entitled only to a reduced package of rights. He argues that we should

> redefine citizenship in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all. Restricting the citizenship rights of migrants in this way would assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries. As happens currently in the Gulf states, migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin every four or five years. They could also be made to pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration. Despite such discriminatory treatment, the welfare of migrants and their families would increase, while native populations would not be made to share their entire premium with incomers.

*Gastarbeiter* with second- or third-class status, perhaps forever. Now, I’ll say one thing for this proposal, which is that it would formalize something that currently exists, since in all wealthy countries there exists a layer of poor people (including many migrants) who enjoy only semi-citizen status (as [Elizabeth Cohen has documented](http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/political-theory/semi-citizenship-democratic-politics) ). And this layer, though many individuals pass through it and come out the other side, looks like a permanent feature of our societies. Up to now, however, few people have thought of this, and the consequent denial of rights to individuals and their vulnerability to domination and exploitation, as a good thing. Milanovic wants us explicitly to abandon the liberal and democratic principles of legitimacy that those who are subject to the laws of a society should (in time in the case of migrants) get to have the right to make those laws. In doing so, he goes far beyond similar proposals (for example [from Martin Ruhs](http://www.priceofrights.com/) that have been explicitly temporary in nature and have largely focused on labour-market rights. Milanovic’s lack of commitment to the norms of liberal democracy also comes across in the fact that he holds up illegitimate and tyrannical states, such as the Gulf kleptocracies, as models for his proposed policy. Part of what’s going on here is the economist’s perspective on policy, which just focuses on net improvements in well-being or utility, with income serving as a proxy, and which doesn’t, therefore, see human beings as possessed of basic rights which it is impermissible to violate. Rather, all and any rights can be sacrificed on the altar of income improvement, just in case someone is poor and desperate enough to make a deal (who are we, paternalistically, to stop them?). The road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements.

“Five years ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/11/rupturerapture/ I linked to a “Bill Emmott column”:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/bill_emmott/2007/04/not_decline_but_rupture_with_t.html on the impending election of Nicholas Sarkozy thusly:

This unashamed mash note from Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollocks on Sarkozy’s victory in France. You don’t need to read the actual column to get the gist; just the Pavlovian dinner-bell talking points that it strings together.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

I don’t see the words “tough,” “clear-headed,” or “reform” anywhere, so it isn’t quite the full bob major, but it’s close.

Now, his successor as editor at the _Economist_ “plays the same tune again, but even more crudely”:http://www.economist.com/node/21553446, deploring Sarkozy’s probable successor.

bq. France desperately needs reform .. .neighbours have been undergoing genuine reforms … deep anti-business attitude … proposing not to reform at all … refusal to countenance structural reform of any sort … resistance to change … hostile to change … Until recently, voters in the euro zone seemed to have accepted the idea of austerity and reform. … would undermine Europe’s willingness to pursue the painful reforms it must eventually embrace.

I’ve no idea what Hollande is going to be like (except that he’s certainly going to be disappointing). But I do know that this is one of the most exquisitely refined examples of globollocks that I’ve ever seen. It’s as beautifully resistant to the intellect as an Andropov era _Pravda_ editorial. A few more years of this and the _Economist_ won’t have to have any human editing at all. Even today, I imagine that someone with middling coding skills could patch together a passable Economist-editorial generator with a few days work. Mix in names of countries and people scraped from the political stories sections of Google News, with frequent exhortations for “Reform,” “toughminded reform,” “market-led reform,” “painful reform,” “change,” “serious change,” “rupture,” and 12-15 sentences worth of automagically generated word-salad content, and you’d be there.

I wonder whether even the writer of this editorial would be able to define ‘reform’ or ‘change’ if he were asked, beyond appealing to some sort of ‘social protection bad, market good’ quasi-autonomic reflex embedded deep in his lizard brain. I also wonder whether the people in there are as cynical about their product as Andropov-era journalists were, or whether they actually believe the pabulum they dish out.

Matt Yglesias “notes Tim Lee’s editing rule”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/11/293442/breakfast-links-august-11-2011/ that you should never use the prefix ‘cyber’ unless you’re William Gibson. A cyber-rule aptly illustrated in the cyber-breach by “this particular cyber-contribution to cyber-knowledge”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/opinion/23iht-edbremmer23.html from Ian Bremmer and Parag Khanna.

bq. Cyberteeth bared

bq. 2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem. … Yet WikiLeaks was far from the only big cyberstory in 2010. … We also learned that cyberattacks are no longer simply a weapon for petty criminals and teenagers. …In fact, WikiLeaks showed that a cyber-villain can prove just as elusive and decentralized as Al Qaeda. … Julian Assange, will probably have many days in court. If he is prosecuted in the United States, some will cast him as the world’s first cybermartyr. … will defend that freedom with more acts of cyberrevenge. … In the past, corporate willingness to provide the U.S. government with sensitive data hasn’t been hugely consequential for these firms, because they didn’t yet face a powerful cyberenemy capable of launching sophisticated attacks.

In fairness to the authors, they can’t be blamed for the “Cyberteeth” headline, which one can only imagine was a subtle act of revenge by whichever poor misfortunate bastard of a sub-editor had the grim task of polishing this cyberturd. The rest is all theirs though.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/the-luck-of-the-irish/ on the horrors of the Irish economy.¹

bq. Today of course Ireland is a total disaster. I wouldn’t try to blame their property crash on low tax rates. But by the same token a frightening number of pundits went “all-in” on the idea that Ireland’s conserva-friendly tax policies were behind a boom that was in fact driven by a real estate bubble.

I personally _would_ try to blame a fair chunk of Ireland’s property market crash on low corporate tax rates.
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Sometimes an _ad hominem_ attack just seems right. Such is the case with George Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt Ridley, the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s _The Rational Optimist_ :

bq. In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles free enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody. What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But it’s not just Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite to mention it.

Definitely worth a short post at CT, then, to make this connection more widely known.

Tyler Cowen has a “couple”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/should-you-bet-your-views.html of “posts”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/should-you-bet-your-views.html arguing that columnists (and others) should not be required to bet their views. I’ll confess to having mixed feelings on the underlying question – which is whether you should make cheap talk on politics etc more expensive. On the one hand, if you view public opinionators as political actors (as they surely are), then they ought to be held accountable for their screw-ups. A certain degree of epistemological caution is entirely warranted, for example, when advocating major wars and the like, and I’d dearly love to see people who screwed this up (for what were at the time entirely obvious reasons) held properly accountable. On the other hand, if you view public opinionators as providers of novel heuristics etc, there may still be some value to their arguments even if they are wrong much or most of the time, as long as they are wrong because of ways of viewing the world that are (a) under-represented in public debate, and (b) help one grasp features of situations that are not immediately obvious given other heuristics. In other words, even if these ways of viewing the world are usually wrong, they can potentially supplement and improve other ways of viewing the world that are more usually correct. How to calibrate the balance between these two desiderata is not immediately obvious to me. One can still say that in an ideal world, one would see people who are _both_ more likely to be right than not _and_ provide relatively novel and interesting ways of viewing situations enjoy a prominent place in public debate. The continued prominence of e.g. Thomas Friedman (who is both often wrong _and_ the Davos Consensus Made Flesh, and Dwelling Amongst Us) suggests that the real world incentives don’t run in this happy direction.

… But this is perhaps taking it a bit too far.

Kieran, would you mind popping down the corridor and telling Councillor Thompson that I’d like a word with him about the changes to residents’ parking at the end of my road? Thanks

(yes yes, I know he doesn’t work there any more, but that would have spoiled the joke, wouldn’t it?)

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”

MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”

He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.'” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”¹
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Tonight’s selection goes with last night’s. Late 1860’s US SF. Ergo, for fun, another Lulu edition.

"No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."

Along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Three Little Pigs, Edward E. Hale’s "The Brick Moon" (1869) is one of the three great brickpunk classics of world literature.

Sandemanian technopreneurs look to the bold, bricks & mortar future, with a flywheel-launched, satellite-based global positioning system; but learn valuable life lessons instead.

Brick. It’s awesome stuff.

"The Brick Moon" was originally serialized in The Atlantic Monthly. And there is an interesting thematic connection with the Steam Man, above and beyond the nigh simultaneous publication. Apparently the inspiration for the Steam Man was – the BigDog of its day – this. "However, by observing carefully the cause of failure, persevering and perfecting the man-form, and by substituting steam in place of the perpetual motion machine, the present success was attained." Words to live by.

As I was saying, in "The Brick Moon", our protagonists are likewise weaned off unreal dreams. "Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough." Then, having put away childish things, they are soon enough hyrodynamically flywheeling tons of bricks into the lower atmosphere.

Here’s a free PDF.

Arguably, this version of the three little pigs is even better.

If you are more old school, here’s Gilgamesh: "Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly. Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?"

Brick. Awesome.

Same magazine, different universes. First, Jon Friedman of Marketwatch in a “two”:http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/economist-beating-odds-us/story.aspx?guid=%7BB5854A4F%2D351B%2D4789%2D9BFC%2D142771E14DC8%7D “part”:http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/you-smart-enough-enjoy-economist/story.aspx?guid=%7B7EAFBA87-8D29-4109-B43E-D47F03200791%7D story (I’ve stolen the title of this post from Part II).

Although I view Time and Newsweek (not to mention U.S. News & World Report and the Week) as sophisticated and worthwhile in their own right, the Economist is the smartest weekly magazine around. Still, the class brain is seldom also recognized in the school yearbook as the most popular kid in the class. … The Economist may be too sophisticated for its own good. I sure don’t want the magazine to dumb down its content for the U.S. audience. I hope it can resist the temptation. The Economist has the goods, all right, to have lofty growth plans in the U.S. The only problem, though, is that there may not be enough smart people around who will want to read it.

Then “Dani Rodrik”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/03/should-i-start.html who is … Dani Rodrik.

Am I the only economist who does not read The Economist? Well maybe the first one to confess to it. … Call it a one-man boycott of ideology that masquerades too often as journalism. … I realized that the more I knew about a subject, the less The Economist was making sense. It’s one thing to be opinionated, another to be misinformed and arrogant at the same time. After one too many articles in this mold, I simply stopped picking up the magazine.

Dani does note in the magazine’s defence that he was recently told to look at an _Economist_ piece which quotes him, and which was in his opinion quite good on the complicated relationship between institutions and economic growth.

Dsquared had some sharp words a while back (I can’t remember where) for people who made the grievous error of confusing an acquaintance with the contents of the _Economist_ with real understanding of what is happening in other countries. There is, even so, an underlying truth in the Friedman piece. The _Economist_ succeeds in part by delivering a particular party line that accords well with the prejudices of many of its readers (Friedman quotes an acquaintance as saying that he loves the ‘unpredictability’ of the _Economist_ which is quite odd; by the time I gave up on it, I could tell nine times out of ten what the magazine was going to say on a topic by looking at what the topic was). But it also serves as a kind of aspirational good. The _Economist_ flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it. Thus, we get articles like Friedman’s, which are less about the state of the US magazine market than about how Friedman and his friends are smart, unconventional and edgy because they read the appointed magazine for smart, unconventional and edgy people. And if that magazine plays its cards right, it can expand its readership to the smart, unconventional and edgy masses. A nice market niche if you can get it, I suppose.

Update: see also “notsneaky’s guide”:http://notsneaky.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-read-economist.html to how to read the Economist.

Update 2: As Kerim Friedman points out in comments, there’s an uncanny similarity between the views of Jon Friedman and those of “Glen Schraft”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34138.

Some of the things that are most interesting to international political economy scholars such as meself are notoriously difficult to measure. To take one example, there’s a lot of muttering in the US and elsewhere about international trade, whether multilateral and bilateral trade deals are good or bad for the US economy, and so on (these debates also have close equivalents in Europe and elsewhere). But how to cut through the hype to figure out whether or not there is a real likelihood of change in the current regime or not? The usual approach is to look for an indicator variable of some variety that will allow you to track underlying processes that you can’t directly measure. I think I’ve found one – and it’s _at least_ as good as the Economist’s famous Big Mac index for figuring out shifts in PPP. My claim is that the degree of rhetorical overkill in Jagdish Bhagwati’s op-ed fulminations on trade is a very good indicator of what the free trade establishment actually thinks about the underlying risks or threats to the existing regime, and (to the extent that this establishment is politically plugged in) a plausible leading indicator of what’s likely to happen in the future. I’ll endeavour to test this hypothesis by keeping track of the Bhagwati Blood Pressure Index (or BBPI) over a period of time, and testing whether it maps well onto the expected outcomes.

Bhagwati’s piece in today’s “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24fa1c4-e92b-11dc-8365-0000779fd2ac.html is a good place to start. Those unfamiliar with his writing style might think that language such as “faintly ludicrous,” “denigration of freer trade,” “witless fear of trade,” and “disturbingly protectionist” indicates a BBPI that is alarmingly high, both for free trade and for Professor Bhagwati. Comparative analysis with previous op-eds and writings would suggest, however, that these criticisms are almost genial by historical standards; at worst they’re love taps. By my reading, the BBPI has dropped quite significantly since mid 2007 or so, suggesting that the free trade establishment believes that the current fervor over free trade is froth that will mostly disappear after the primary season. On the evidence of this article, we may expect the BBPI to drop still further if Barack Obama is elected President (one presumes that Bhagwati believes Austan Goolsbee’s representations to the Canadian government), but to rise substantially in the unlikely event that Hillary Clinton snatches the crown. Also of interest is the evidence that the article provides on the mental modelling processes that underlie these empirical predictions:

whereas Mr Obama’s economist is Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD at Chicago Business School and a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade, Mrs Clinton’s campaign boasts of no professional economist of high repute. Instead, her trade advisers are reputed to be largely from the pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO union federation.

Clearly then, your soundness on trade depends on the extent to which your campaign employs economists whom Professor Bhagwati approves of. I suspect that Hillary’s campaign is doubly damned because it’s supported by Paul Krugman (whom professor Bhagwati condescendingly refers to as an apostate ‘former student’). Nor had I hitherto realized that the economists of the ‘pro-union, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute’ were unprofessional economists of little repute; silly me.

Update: “Megan McArdle”:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/a_fair_trade_index.php suggests that a basket of pundits would be preferable.

This “piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f03314e-bd3e-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html by Stefan Theil in the _FT_ today on the biases of French and German high school economics textbooks is pretty bad, but it turns out to consist of edited extracts from an “even worse essay”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095 that he’s published in _Foreign Policy._ [click to continue…]

This “unashamed mash note”:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/bill_emmott/2007/04/not_decline_but_rupture_with_t.html from Bill Emmott, former editor of the _Economist_ presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollocks on Sarkozy’s victory in France. You don’t need to read the actual column to get the gist; just the Pavlovian dinner-bell talking points that it strings together.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

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