In a really quite lovely essay, James Galbraith names some of the people who got it right (or at least, less drastically wrong), while pointing out that in many ways, the much-vaunted “freshwater/saltwater” divide is a dialogue between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I don’t think that’s entirely fair, as with regard to stimulus policy there are clear differences between the New Classicals and the New Keynesians, and it’s clear that Tweedledee is right and Tweddledum is making obviously mathematically inconsistent statements. But the central point is exactly right that an important practical consequence of shutting out heterodoxy was that rather than having a few people to point to who predicted the crisis, the economic profession was left claiming that its true triumph was to be able to explain exactly why economists had been unable to predict it.
And of course, the old Peter Cook line has never been so relevant as it is to the economics profession now (“Sir Arthur, do you feel you have learned from your mistakes?” “Yes, and I’m confident that I could repeat them exactly”). All the people cited in James’ essay are exactly as far away from the mainstream of economics as they were three years ago, and field reports from the American Economic Association meetings suggest that it’s back to business as usual. I asked a while ago in comments to this post whether ” after this experience, can the Berkeley/Princeton/Obama economists ever really go back to a state of polite terms with the people who have done this to them?”, but apparently they can.
As I said in that linked post, the production of more or less mendacious intellectual smokescreens for policies which favour the interests of rich and powerful men isn’t a sort of industrial pollution from the modern economics profession – it’s the product. James finds a quotation from Keynes saying more or less the same thing much more eloquently and explains why it is that “zombie” economic ideas, in the sense of John’s book title, are so difficult to kill:
It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.
I’m on the final chapter of my long-promised Zombie Economics, dealing with ideas refuted by the Global Financial Crisis. My target this time is privatisation – more precisely, the idea that privatisation will always yield an improvement over public ownership, and, therefore that market liberalism is an advance on the mixed economy that developed in the during the post-1945 long boom.
As always, comments, criticism and suggestions much appreciated.
Updated In response to comments, I’ve added a bit more material on the 1970s and the background to privatisation.
For me the big change that came with the last decade was blogging. I started in 2002, and it’s been a big part of my life (sometimes too big) ever since. So, when it came to review the decade, the obvious place to look was the Wayback Machine, which captured my old blogspot blog on 27 July 2002. Looking at the blog as it was then, two things jump out at me
* Looking at the blogroll, I feel like the last of the Mohicans. The bloggers of those days have nearly all retired, and hardly any has a solo blog anymore. CT is something of an exception – quite a few of us still keep our personal blogs going. Mine is here.
* I’m singing the same song now as I was all those years ago. The top post on the page is about how the financial crisis has discredited the efficient markets hypothesis, trickle down economics, privatisation and so on. Of course that was the dotcom financial crisis of 2000-01. I think a few more people are paying attention this time around, but we will have to wait and see.
John’s Shakespeare thread, featuring George Scialabba’s somewhat idiosyncratic opinions on the playwright, has reached the point where comments are closed. Not that I specially want to open them. But I was reminded of George’s deployment of Shaw earlier today when reading Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste”. Here’s Shaw, as quoted by George, seeking in his poets a kind of will to moral improvement:
bq. All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: ‘Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.’ The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this; to turn from it to ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ and ‘The rest is silence,’ and ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep’ is turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.
And here’s Hume:
bq. Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. Though there may be found persons, who give preference to the former authors; no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous
The “Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7bdcce10-f3e0-11de-ac55-00144feab49a.html
Among the wave of reality board games to have hit the Argentine market in recent years, Eternal Debt has remained a niche favourite among those who still blame the IMF for leading the country into a nearly $100bn default eight years ago. The game, by local manufacturer Ruibal, involves taking Latin American raw materials, turning them into industrial products and selling the finished goods in world markets, using IMF capital.
Also available is Bureaucracy, which exploits locals’ disenchantment with the country’s notoriously cumbersome civil service. … The game is designed to elicit groans of recognition to anyone who has ever spent hours grappling with regulatory issues in public offices in Argentina. The game, made by toymaker Habano, cheerfully invites players “to waste time and lose their patience” as they move across the board with a lengthening list of documents to procure and departments to visit in their quest to complete a simple piece of paperwork. It is a game “where everyone loses”, crows the box.
Other suggestions for topical boardgames, in Argentina, the US or elsewhere, welcome in comments.
Perhaps the recent “terrorist outrage in the skies”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27terror.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1261890636-QVFR8dRHo8PyDIMOJsWiaA will bring the delusional opponents of group profiling to their senses. But I fear not. It should be a cut and dried case. A “member of a group”:http://www.google.com/search?q=Abdulmutallab+engineering&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a that is “notoriously”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ “associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs”:http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf tries to set off a bomb in a plane and only fails because of sheer luck. The nabobs of political correctness will try to convince us yet again that there are many strains of thought among these people, that most of them are non-violent, that compulsory cavity searches will alienate them and so on, and on, and on. But the PC mafia will be ignoring these people’s plans to “build temples that dominate our major cities”:http://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/completed/completed.html, and “actions taken deliberately to flout our common norms”:http://hacks.mit.edu/. A strong country has a strong culture that it is willing to defend against the enemy – and a willingness to ignore the natterers of multiculturalism when its citizens’ lives are in danger. We were lucky this time. We may not be so lucky the next.
For those who are (a) not suffering from holiday hangovers, and (b) do not have something better to do tomorrow morning, I’ll be on C-Span from 9am to 9.30am discussing the differences between liberalism, socialism, fascism. I’m anticipating some lively callers to the show …
It looks like Jonathan Coulton has gotten shout-outs in CT comments before and we even had a link to this specific video a couple of years back on Harry’s Favorite Christmas Songs post, but I missed it then. Today, I had to watch it to solve a puzzle for a game. The timing was rather appropriate to pull up this video so I thought I’d repost it here. The part about what happens to Santa is a bit harsh and may be inappropriate for children under a certain age (oh, I don’t know, 102?).
Kevin Drum is amused, and rightly so, by this bit from the Corner’s Mike Potemra:
I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility).
Kevin notes it is not every day you get conservatives to admit they oppose (or at least dislike) peace, tolerance, due process and progress. But the hole Potemra digs is deeper, and I think there’s actually a (semi) serious point to make here. Poterma forges on: “I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show’s appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there’s something to that: Patrick Stewart did indeed create, in that character, a believable and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness.”
But surely the proper conclusion to be drawn, then, is that being an ethically upright and generally virtuous person is, however surprising this result may be, consistent with being tolerant, peace-loving, even with upholding due process. And there is no particular difficulty to the trick of being in favor of progress while being skeptical about human perfectibility. I say this is a semi-serious point because I think, for some conservatives, the main objection to a somewhat vaguely conceived set of liberal values really is a strong sense that they are inconsistent with a certain sort of hardassery in the virtue ethics department. End of story. But then Star Trek TNG ought, by rights, to be the ultimate anti-conservative series. At least for the likes of Potemra.
Potemra then pens a sort of Hail Mary follow-up post in which he asserts, if I have understood him aright, that basically Burkeanism is equal to a kind of (Spinozist?) view sub specie aeternitatis, all of which again redounds to the credit of conservatism and the good captain. And they all lived happily ever after in an old village in France. (I remember that episode.)
Some work of mine on presumed and informed consent for organ donation has been picked up by Catherine Rampell at the New York Times’ Economix blog. It’s a good summary of the paper. We’ve had some discussion before about this stuff on CT, in the context of the possible introduction of a presumed consent rule in Britain.
Let’s try and put ourselves in the shoes of a member of the John Birch Society, circa 1968. What would the basis of such a person’s political worldview be? Basically, that the USA was ruled by a small cabal of educated elites, who were systematically undermining the USA’s advantages against Soviet Russia, and sabotaging the efforts of the military to protect the USA from the danger of Soviet attack. This person might also believe that the truth about the Kennedy assassination was covered up by this same elite cabal.
Watched the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer X-Mas special with the kids last night. I wonder: was such a message of tolerance, across color lines, considered faintly radical in 1964? (Did anyone object to this X-Mas special when it came out?) Well, anyway, Zoë (the 8-year old) was disturbed by the fact that Santa was morally in the wrong for most of the show, incapable of distinguishing naughty from nice. She expressed concern about the integrity of the system by which she is to receive her due. If Santa thinks it’s ‘nice’ not to let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, etc., until he needs the guy, he might “give all her presents to some racist.”
Sunnyside by David Glen Gold is the best book I’ve read this year. Gold’s first novel was the magical Carter Beats the Devil, a lean and muscular piece of plotting. Sunnyside is a fat, thumping tome set again in 1920s California and bursting out with living characters, zany but true events and a wry and humane take on the meaning, if any, of the examined life. It had me gasping out loud, talking back to the characters, marveling at the sheer craft but never awakening from the spell.
It begins with a thrilling set piece; a real-life episode of mass hysteria that caused hundreds of simultaneous sightings of Charlie Chaplin across America. This sequence is a first cousin to DeLillo’s Underworld opening baseball game of Giants v Dodgers in Dodger Stadium the Polo Field, and Pynchon’s Against the Day visit to the Chicago World’s Fair. Each of the trio evokes a perfect moment of twentieth century Americana, and announces straight off a big book that will not be about small things. (And just as J. Edgar Hoover is the G-man Greek chorus of Underworld’s themes, Gold’s Treasury Secretary McAdoo stands in for the reader, trying to make sense of Chaplin’s Hollywood and what movies mean for the world.) [click to continue…]
The single most important thing you can say about a work of art is that it is real, that the artist to whom it is attributed made it. Until you are certain that a work of art is authentic, it is impossible to say much else that is meaningful about it.
Is this a reasonable claim about art in general? How important is authentic attribution in, say, literature or music? [click to continue…]