Barro on the Great Depression
Here’s a pretty interesting interview with Robert Barro on the Great Depression (HT2MR). He actually makes a distinction that you don’t normally see (and which I didn’t get into in my book). Normally the issue is, “Do we print more money or run higher deficits?” But here is a more nuanced take:
[Browser]: So what is the thrust of [Bernanke’s book on the Great Depression] and why is it important?
[Robert Barro]: It’s focusing on the Great Depression as a credit explosion, not so much the money supply, which Friedman and Schwartz had emphasized, but a somewhat related phenomenon, which is credit availability. That had been imploding from 1929 through to the trough, early in 1933. So it’s really focusing on the credit aspects and trying to measure that, particularly by looking at patterns in interest rates.
Today, for example, if you look at the spread between lower quality bonds – like B-rated corporate bonds, say – and compare those to treasury yields, that’s a good indicator of the extent of stress in the credit markets. And actually the recent period is going back to the kinds of spreads that you saw in the early 1930’s. Well, perhaps not quite as much, but certainly reminiscent of that. So he’s focused on that as a measure of the extent of the credit stress, and on the other side he focused on how what turned things around was when the credit problems were being eased.
This was my favorite part of the interview:
B: And yet neo-Keynesians—which include White House economics adviser Christina Romer–often cite the [Keynesian multiplier] as being 1.5, and you say in your article that the Obama administration is using 1.5 as a basis for its fiscal stimulus policies. How do they come up with that then?
RB: Oh they pulled that out of the air. I have the advantage of having at least a little bit of empirical evidence, as I said, it’s based particularly on military purchases. So even though that evidence is not that great, it’s infinitely better than the alternatives, which are no evidence.
From my limited forays into this area, I think Barro is being completely fair. Tyler Cowen has been asking his readers for one actual historical case of Keynesian pump priming pulling an economy out of recession, and in the comments I think the only case people pointed to was World War II.
Well, Barro’s WSJ article specifically focused on WWII, and he found that the data don’t support a multiplier above 1. (I.e. government deficit spending at that time didn’t seem to boost GDP more than the spending itself.)
In response, did the Keynesians challenge his numbers (which I couldn’t reproduce, by the way, just to warn you)? No, Paul Krugman said we have always been at war with World War II as an example of pump priming. Apparently it was a right-wing strawman that Barro was relying on, and no Keynesian had ever said World War II military spending was an example of stimulus working. (Really, read Krugman’s reaction. I’m not making this up.)
Does Religion Belong in Science and Politics?
In my curmudgeonly post on the Miss California controversy–fired off after a few days of little sleep–I provoked cries for clarification from my readers. So at the risk of digging myself deeper, let me use this Sunday’s “religious post” to elaborate.
First off, I hate the very notion of the government having anything to do with marriage. If I wanted to be glib, I’d say, “I don’t want justices of the peace marrying homosexuals, but I don’t want them marrying heterosexuals either.”
But obviously this is a bit too simplistic. I’m trying to think of an analogy, so here goes: If government schools (aka “public schools”) didn’t allow homosexuals (or Vietnamese or left handed people etc.) I could definitely understand advocacy groups flipping out. And in that context, it would obviously be rather obnoxious for a libertarian to say, “Quit your whining, you don’t have any right to taxpayer dollars for your schooling. We should stop letting in straight WASPs too.”
So if that’s as far as we take the analogy, then yes, I don’t think the government should be singling out particular people as eligible for state-sanctioned marriage. It should go without saying–but I will say it anyway–that private organizations such as churches should still be able to do whatever they wanted, without fear of legal reprisal. But for the government to refuse to marry certain people, especially if that decision emanates from particular religious views, is a very dangerous thing. In that respect, it would be just as troubling as government schools refusing to admit an atheist or a Buddhist etc., and I think even most right-wing Bible thumpers might hesitate to go that far.
Unfortunately, things aren’t so simple. If you are someone who takes the Christian Bible seriously, then the difficulty is that marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman. So to return to our analogy–and don’t flip out on me in the comments, please, but I need to make this point–what if someone wanted his poodle to go to 3rd grade to learn the times tables? We wouldn’t have a problem if school officials said no.
To take it closer to the actual controversy, suppose some spinster wants the justice of the peace to marry her and her favorite cat. Presumably we wouldn’t chalk it up to pure hatred and bigotry if the government officials said, “Uh, no, marriage is between two homo sapiens.”
So this whole issue is extremely complicated. I actually don’t think there is a resolution, save to get the government out of marriage altogether.
OK I also implied in the last post that the typical banishment of God from science is mistaken. What did I mean by that? Surely I don’t think particle physicists should be citing cyclotron data as well as Deuteronomy, right?
Of course they shouldn’t do that. And anyone who has read my formal journal articles would know that I “play the game” within the rules established by a scholarly group. I can write journal articles intended for mainstream game theorists without bringing up libertarianism–even though I believe in liberty very strongly–and by the same token a devout Christian who is a chemist doesn’t need to bring up the Bible in his professional work.
But that’s not the type of thing I’m talking about. I was referring to this desire by many atheists to reduce God to a harmless personal preference. So in this worldview, to say, “I believe in Jesus Christ” has just as much signifance and impact on your daily life as saying, “I like Disney movies.” Yes, you spend time in church on Sundays if you have the former preference, and you spend time in particular movie theaters if you have the latter. But your Disney tastes don’t affect your views on evolution or who would make a good president, and neither should your religious preferences. (So goes the typical view.)
But that’s crazy. Suppose for the sake of argument that a powerful being really did create the earth and designed all of its life forms. Well, that would be a physical fact and would have all sorts of implications that would influence the observations of the natural sciences.
I don’t have a good quote to illustrate the view, but some of the more extreme anti-Intelligent-Design arguments almost say, “Even if there were a God and even if he did invent all life forms, it would be unscientific to entertain this hypothesis so we should assume that’s not what happened.”
Now let me be clear: I AM NOT SAYING BIOLOGISTS SHOULD BRING UP GENESIS IN THEIR PAPERS OR CLASSROOM. By the same token, when I taught at Hillsdale I never brought up the Bible, except to use an analogy that I thought most of the students would understand. I didn’t bring it up because I was teaching economics, and economic science per se does not rely on the validity of the Bible.
Devout Christians are supremely confident that there is a God; in fact many of them have what they would describe as a personal relationship with Him. So they are in a position analogous to a researcher who was abducted by aliens and now is working on SETI (search for extraterrestrial life intelligence). Some of his colleagues might write scathing critiques saying, “We’ve been searching the cosmos for signs of intelligence for decades, and nothing. This is fruitless.”
In response, the guy who was abducted can’t say, “I know they exist! Look at this probe scar!” The reason he can’t say that is that it’s not a valid scientific argument; it is not reproducible (or at least we hope not). But the point is, the existence of aliens is itself something that can be approached with the tools of science.
So in particular, if there are non-believers in aliens who publish “proofs” of their nonexistence, this guy knows those papers CAN’T be right. And using the tools of science, he should be able to show what the flaws are. Through it all, he is guided of course by his personal experience, but he still needs to communicate with the commonly accepted tools of his colleagues.
In conclusion, it’s the same for Bible-thumping biologists. They KNOW that God ultimately designed all life forms. Now perhaps His design manifests itself through common descent. In fact it would be very elegant if God imparted the “information” stressed by Dembski in the lifeless environment, such that “random” mutation and natural selection “just so happened” to give rise to humans, and then eventually to the birth of Jesus Christ–and through it all, each individual atom obeys a very sparse set of physical laws. That is absolutely amazing to comprehend, if that’s how it played out.
Now some secular humanist biologists will tell you, “That’s fine, you can have whatever background story you want, the important thing is that you agree it was most likely common descent arising from mutation and natural selection.” But no that’s not really true. Most evolutionists will tell you that if you think evolution has a goal or a plan, or that humans are a higher form of life, THEN YOU ARE WRONG AND YOU HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD DARWIN’S THEORY.
See? Today’s Darwinists are not simply making claims about natural science. They are going further, and making (anti-)teleological claims about reality and the purpose of life. This is what scares those simplistic Christians who view Darwin as the devil.
Murphy on G. Gordon Liddy Show
I am going to be traveling all week. On Monday I will be participating in a Heritage Foundation event on “green jobs,” but while in DC I will be on (in studio) the G. Gordon Liddy show.* (You can check here to see how to listen live.) Obviously I’ll put a link to it after I get back in town, as well as to some of the other shows I’ve been doing since the book launched.
Later in the week I will be in Houston to do two book talks; details here.
* To anticipate wisealeck suggestions in the comments: No, I’m not bringing up Watergate. I really wish I knew somebody who had done his show before….
Cost of Cap and Trade
At Townhall today I have a slightly more user-friendly version of the controversy over the $3,100 “phoney GOP statistic.” (Note that some of our friends on the other side of the issue are engaging in scholarly debate over the matter. I tried to post AEA’s clarifying article about why we continue to push that $3,100 figure on TPM, but I never got the confirmation log-in from the site after signing up.)
I’m So Glad I Don’t Have a TV
Whenever I travel, I am reminded of how awful TV is. Like a bag of circus peanuts, TV would be great if you had the willpower to just sample it. But no, I eat the circus peanuts until I want to jump off a bridge, and I flip through TV stations in a hotel room until my IQ breaks below 70.
During my recent trip to Memphis for ALEC’s Spring Task Force, all of the “political” shows were in a tizzy over Joe Biden’s alleged gaffe on swine flu, and Miss California’s alleged bigotry.
On Biden: Does it matter that the question was, “What would you tell your family?” If the question had been, “Are you recommending that all Americans stay in unless absolutely necessary?” then OK you could get mad if what he said contradicted the views of objective medical experts. But that wasn’t what the question was. Yeah yeah, I know that our country interpreted the answer in the same way, but that’s a reflection on what a bunch of fools live in this country. Do you really care what Joe Biden tells his family about anything? “Hey Mr. Vice President, my daughter is writing a paper for her law school class. What tips would you give your kids in comparable circumstances?”
I think it is always best to assume that government officials tell you the EXACT OPPOSITE of the truth. So, the Obama Administration is telling us: (a) this is a potentially serious worldwide emergency, and (b) it is too late to close the border with Mexico because there are already some U.S. cases.
That leads me to suspect: (a) This is not a potentially serious worldwide emergency, and (b) if it were, it would make a lot of sense (from a medical perspective) to close the border with Mexico.
The other big thing was the flap over Miss California. (Of course I think the main reason for the story was that all the shows–including those sympathetic to the exploitation of women like Keith Olbermann–showed clips of her in a bikini before going to commercial break.) I promise you I do not follow this stuff; I actually thought “Perez Hilton” was Paris Hilton, and that the bloggers were intentionally misspelling the name to be hip like “teh.”
But this particular quote (if accurate) coming from Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California pageant, was absurd:
I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss California believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman….Religious beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss California family.
So if a contestant said the biggest social problem in the world was the human trafficking of girls in Africa, and then later on it turned out she thought everyone was a child of God and hence deserved freedom, would Lewis have been upset?
Actually he probably would be, now that I think of it. Basically, the little box in which religious beliefs are now permissible has shrunk even more. We already know you can’t bring God into science, but now you can’t bring him into your views of politics either. It’s fine if you nutjobs want to go to church every Sunday, but that’s where the madness stays.
Man versus Beast
I am a pacifist when it comes to interpersonal relations, but not when there is a showdown between humans and the lower creatures. We have these ginormous carpenter bees that find our wooden house delectable. So last Sunday I took a tennis racket and slew 15 of them (as well as a wasp that chose its flight path poorly).
Today I was packing the car for my short trip to Memphis (for the ALEC Spring Task Force). A carpenter bee moseyed on up to me. Alas, my trusty weapon was 15 feet away, and behind a door to boot. (Otherwise I just would have used the force to retrieve it.)
So what did I do? Did I run into the house squealing like a little girl?
No sir, I cupped my right hand and served that bee right into the concrete. BAM! That’s what I’m talking about. A light tap from my sandal put the reckless insect out of its misery. Let that be a lesson to other carpenter bees.
OK I had an epiphany. I recently watched the clip of Winston in Room 101 (it had to do with the Bush torture memos and how they basically were trying to do Room 101 for their prisoners–i.e. come up with “the worst thing in the world” after a psychological profile).
So I was trying to think if it were possible that Winston could have extricated himself from that predicament without giving in. And I know it’s a long shot–it actually would probably work for one rat, not sure about two–but hear me out:
When they lift the partition and the rats come at your face, you offer them your tongue. I think that would be a nice fleshy thing for them to sink their teeth in. Then once they’re latched on, you retract your tongue back into your mouth and CRUNCH you bite their heads as hard as you can at the neck, decapitating them if you can but at the very least killing them.
If you did that, I think even Big Brother might be tempted to let you go. Or at the very least, he’d have the decency to shoot you.
Will Wilkinson Inhaled
WW comes out of the closet at Cato. I know I know, this raises an obvious question for me as another prominent blogger who can sway public opinion: For the record, I have never smoked pot with Will Wilkinson.
Potpourri
* During the debate over cap and trade, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth–including a “worst person in the world” designation from our national moralist–about the Republicans’ use of an MIT study to say the average American household would pay $3100 per year, once the program really kicked in. The MIT professor said that was crazy, and you can guess what ensued. I was the lead author in this American Energy Alliance piece explaining the controversy. (And yes, some other members of the team jazzed it up for Beltwayese.)
* I meant to blog this a few days ago when it ran… The WSJ had a great editorial showing just how underhanded Paulson and Bernanke were with Bank of America.
* If you are interested in the torture debate, here’s Glenn Greenwald teeing off on David Broder. Sometimes GG is a bit shrill for my taste, but when he’s in the zone he really hits it out of the park. (Or if you prefer, “he’s on fire.”) I think GG missed two of the most outrageous elements of Broder’s piece however, which I put in bold in the excerpt below:
Obama is being blamed by some for unleashing the furies with his decision to override the objections of past and current national intelligence officials and release four highly sensitive memos detailing the methods used on some “high-value” detainees.
Again, he was right to do so, because these policies were carried out in the name of the American people, and it is only just that we the people confront what we did. Squeamishness is not justified in this case.
But having vowed to end the practices, Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats.
This is not another Sept. 11 situation, when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. We had to investigate the flawed performances and gaps in the system and make the necessary repairs to reduce the chances of a deadly repetition.
First of all, since when does something become “what we did” just because the people doing it claimed to be acting “in the name of the American people”? If you want to say, “The American people re-elected George Bush, knowing full well what his policies entailed, and so it’s a bit self-serving to now indignantly claim to be shocked! shocked! by it all,” then OK that would be a decent argument. But that’s not what Broder is arguing above. He smoothly flows from “done in our name” to “what we did.” Huh?
Second of all, look at the sheer monstrosity of the second part in bold. Broder doesn’t spell it out, but what he’s saying is, “After 9/11, we needed a commission because those were some serious mistakes–American people died, for heaven’s sake. But this stuff with the torture, well, it was just a bunch of Arabs getting tortured, so no big deal. If it happens again, well, we’ll all have to feel bad again for a few months.”
That sounds eerily similar to the infamous dialog that got Huckleberry Finn banned from some schools.
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