Scott Sumner and I Have a Failure to Communicate
This is really freaky. It’s like with the “top income tax rate in 2013” debacle. Can somebody read the exchanges between Sumner and me in this post–responding to a Sheldon Richman article–and tell me what the heck is going on?
As best I can tell, Scott position is the following:
“You Austrians are nutty for insisting that how the new Fed money enters the economy, can possibly make a difference. Now I admit, if the money enters in one route versus another, of course that makes a huge difference. But what I’m saying is, if you’ll read my post again, is that how the new Fed money enters the economy makes no difference.”
I realize you guys think I’m setting up a strawman. Go read it for yourself.
One More on Epistemic Closure and Conservatives
Last post on this and I will move on to greener pastures… There are two remaining ironies I would like to point out, in Krugman’s high-fiving of Bruce Bartlett for being so open-minded in his denunciation of those close-minded conservatives. (BTW a funny and apropos aside: I pass the Scott Sumner Turing Test.)
(1) Look at where Bartlett’s mea culpa ran: The American Conservative. It wasn’t HuffPo or Slate, it was The American Conservative. I asked the editor, Dan McCarthy, if he had any other good examples of running “hey guys let’s engage in introspection”-type articles, and he suggested this and this. Is there anything comparable on the progressive/Keynesian side? In other words, do progressive/Keynesian outlets ever run articles by former progressives-turned-moderate saying that maybe Dick Armey had a point after all? (I’m not doubting there are such pieces, I just don’t know any off the top of my head.) The only thing I can think of is Karl Smith having doubts about central banks, but even that was a (refreshingly honest) concern about real-world implementation, rather than doubting his underlying theory. In other words, Karl was worrying that maybe he and his Keynesian friends were being naive, not that they were wrong about the economics.
(2) Look at this open-minded Bruce Bartlett, just minding his own business and trying to help the conservatives/GOP. After detailing how he came to reject not just neoconservative nation-building but also “nutty stuff like the Laffer Curve,” and after openly embracing Keynesian demand-side economics, Bartlett then says:
At least a few conservatives now recognize that Republicans suffer for epistemic closure. They were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular.
…
I’ve paid a heavy price, both personal and financial, for my evolution from comfortably within the Republican Party and conservative movement to a less than comfortable position somewhere on the center-left. Honest to God, I am not a liberal or a Democrat. But these days, they are the only people who will listen to me. When Republicans and conservatives once again start asking my opinion, I will know they are on the road to recovery.
So Bartlett rejects everything the modern Republican stands for, calls their ideas “stupid,” embraces their worst enemies, and then says he will only believe they are on the road to recovery when they come to him and ask for his advice. Gosh, I can’t believe this strategy isn’t working, Mr. Bartlett. Why in the world would any think tank want to can a team player like this?
Incidentally, you can be very aggressive and challenge right-wing warhawks. I think Tom Woods did a great job on this; here’s a great speech and a written article, in which Tom confessed to being a recovering neocon warhawk. Tom doesn’t pull punches at all, but I bet he converted more people than Bartlett has done.
Tom Woods Says Secession Is as American as Star Wars
A lot of people have been pooh-poohing the role of secession in the American political/legal framework. Tom Woods certainly argues that the states retained the ability to leave the Union. (He also picked up on my John Wilkes Booth line.) Discuss.
Quick Thoughts on “Pure Reason” vs. Empiricism
I am going to be brief, but there is still much confusion on this grand philosophical dispute, which started when Brad DeLong, as is his wont, said innocently enough about a renowned philosopher: “Thomas Nagel is not smarter than we are–in fact, he seems to me to be distinctly dumber than anybody who is running even an eight-bit virtual David Hume on his wetware.”
I’m not going to recapitulate the whole controversy. But at least some people misunderstood what Steve Landsburg was doing in his response to DeLong. So let me spell out just that subset of the dispute:
(1) In his critique of Nagel, Brad DeLong didn’t merely say, “I find Nagel’s particular argument for the powers of pure reasoning to be a bad example, or to be improperly conducted.” No, he actually said:
Thus Thomas Nagel’s insistence that we need a theory of consciousness that accounts for our reason’s ability to become an instrument of transcendence that grasps objective reality–that insistence falls apart like an undercooked blancmange…Any theory that provided such an account of reason becoming an instrument of transcendence and offering guarantees of grasping objective reality would be hopelessly, terribly, laughably wrong….
And I cannot help but think that only a philosophy professor would believe that our reason gives us direct access to reality. Physicists who encounter quantum mechanics think very differently… [Bold added.]
(2) Steve Landsburg took the above passages to mean that DeLong was claiming “that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge,” and Steve explicitly said that perhaps that wasn’t DeLong’s claim. (However, looking at the block quote above, where DeLong is saying we need to run things by the physicists first, he sure does seem to believe that there’s no such thing as knowledge about objective reality, that you can access via pure reason.) So, if that were indeed DeLong’s claim, Steve refutes him thus, with a list of facts about objective reality that you can only obtain via pure reasoning:
1) The ratio of the circumference of a (euclidean) circle to its radius is greater than 6.28 but less than 6.29.
2) Every natural number can be uniquely factored into primes.
3) Every natural number is the sum of four squares.
4) Zorn’s Lemma is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice (given the other axioms of Zermelo-Frankel set theory).
5) The realization of a normally distributed random variable has probability greater than .95, but less than .96, of lying within two standard deviations of the mean.
…and so on.
Those who are familiar with the methodological works of the Austrian School will recognize that we are here butting up against Immanuel Kant’s categories of knowledge. (Here’s a link that lays out the basics, though I haven’t read it carefully so maybe the writer here is sloppy. But upon a quick glance it looks OK.)
Kant’s system had a two-fold distinction, between analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori. Here are my dumbed-down paraphrases, which a real philosopher in the Kantian tradition may not like: “Analytic” means you can determine the truth or falsity just by analyzing the terms and their definitions. “Synthetic” means the truth value corresponds to something about objective reality, something “out there” and not just coming from human conventions in terminology. “A priori” means you don’t need in your proof to appeal to experience. “A posteriori” means your argument for the bit of knowledge does make an appeal to past sensory experience. Here’s a quick example of how *I* (not necessarily all philosophers and presumably not Brad DeLong) would populate the categories:
Synthetic A Posteriori statements: The sun is hot. (True.) Brad DeLong is very civil. (False.)
Analytic A Posteriori statements: [Empty set. I thought I came up with an example when I was teaching at Hillsdale but David Gordon vetoed it.]
Analytic A Priori statements: A bachelor has no wife. (True.) A bachelor has a wife. (False.)
Synthetic A Priori statements: Every natural number is the sum of four squares. (True, since I trust Landsburg.) All true statements in arithmetic can be proved within an axiomatic system. (False, and I’m sure Landsburg will bite my head off for saying this ungrammatically.)
In Human Action, Mises said economic principles were a priori. However, I don’t think he actually took a stand on whether they were synthetic or analytic. Hans Hoppe in this essay (which I think is really powerful) said they were synthetic, and that Mises’ action axiom solved the mind-body problem. (The guy was productive, what can we say. That’s why they named an Institute after him.)
Was Jesus Funny?
I have been reading–and adoring–a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton (Heretics). In “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity” he writes:
Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else….Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German….Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.
The whole collection is like the above. I literally had to stop writing “WOW” in the margins because it was getting redundant. I honestly can’t think of any essayist who has struck me as so profound, ever.
Anyway, in this essay Chesterton claims that the Bible shows that God laughs and winks. But he doesn’t provide an exact citation, and I’m not sure what he means. I would love to believe Chesterton is right–since, after all, I call myself a Christian and others no doubt call me a wiseguy–but I’m not so sure it’s explicitly in the Bible.
Ironically, I am more confident that the God depicted in the Old Testament was “a funny guy” than Jesus in the gospels. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but the stuff in the Old Testament is hilarious the way Dr. Strangelove is hilarious. The nation of Israel is so petty and childish, it’s laugh out loud funny. Try reading the book of Jonah and picture Woody Allen as the main character, and you’ll see what I mean.
(Of course, if I wanted to be a wiseguy, I could say, “Of course God has a sense of humor. He picked the Jews as His chosen people!” But this is a serious blog post.)
But if I’m hard-pressed to find a smoking gun of the God of the Old Testament being funny, it’s even harder to find textual support that Jesus was. The gospels famously tell us, “Jesus wept,” but they never say, “Jesus laughed.” They clearly depict Him as being superbly witty, but was He actually funny? It’s possible that when He chastised the scribes that the common folk were laughing–that could explain why they killed Him. But the Bible doesn’t ever come right out and say that.
So I have three theories. Maybe some of you have others.
(A) Jesus really wasn’t funny.
(B) Jesus was a riot at times–the guy turned water into wine so people could keep drinking at a wedding feast–but the gospel writers didn’t think those were the important things to write down.
(C) Jesus/God the Father are funny, but they are so much smarter/wiser/moral than everyone around them, that their humor is totally deadpan. God could say, “You’re wondering if I’m funny?! Did you open your eyes and look out the window today?”
To put it another way, I think we can all agree that someone who goes through this world with a wonderful sense of humor, is much better off than someone who never smiles. Wouldn’t it stand to reason, then, that the Being who designed this world, understands the importance of humor?
Scott Sumner Devastates Paul Krugman on the Liquidity Trap
[UPDATE below.]
Whoa, Bob Wenzel tipped me off to this one… Sumner absolutely destroys Krugman in this post. (Also, I have street cred for making such a call–when Scott ignored Krugman’s writings on Japan in order to score a blog point, I called a foul.) I had never seen these passages that Scott dug up from a 1998 Krugman paper on the liquidity trap. So to be clear, the below words are from Krugman:
The point here is that the end of the Depression – which is the usual, indeed perhaps the sole, motivating example for the view that a one-time fiscal stimulus can produce sustained recovery, does not actually appear to fit the story line too well; much though by no means all of the recovery from that particular liquidity trap seems to have depended on inflation expectations that made real interest rates substantially negative.
If temporary fiscal stimulus does not jolt the economy out of its doldrums on a sustained basis, however, then a recovery strategy based on fiscal expansion would have to continue the stimulus over an extended period of time. The question then becomes how much stimulus is needed, for how long – and whether the consequences of that stimulus for government debt are acceptable.
…
The political point is that Japan – like, we might note, the United States during the New Deal – appears to have great difficulty working up its political nerve for a fiscal package anywhere close to what would be required to close the output gap. Exactly why is an interesting question, beyond this paper’s scope.Does this mean that fiscal policy should be ignored as part of the policy mix? Surely not. On the general Brainard principle – when uncertain about the right model, throw a bit of everything at the problem – one would want to apply fiscal stimulus. (Even I wouldn’t trust myself enough to go for a purely “Krugman” solution). However, it seems unlikely that a mainly fiscal solution will be enough. [Bold added.]
Does everyone see the absolute stunning beauty here? Christmas is early this year. Back in 1998, Krugman referred to a “Krugman solution” as being: You get your economy out of a liquidity trap by relying exclusively on monetary policy, not at all on fiscal policy.
BTW, Scott anticipates the obvious objection to his gotcha:
I can already anticipate commenters telling me that Krugman has a right to “change his mind.” Yes, but the 1998 liquidity trap paper was written after he changed his mind about liquidity traps. This is the paper he frequently cites in his blog as representing his current views. [Emphasis in original.]
Feeling like I needed to do my part to help the cause, I said this in the comments:
Scott, wow, this was awesome. I wasn’t aware of the “Krugman solution” phrase before; absolutely amazing.
Scott we need to come up with rhetorical tricks analogous to “invisible bond vigilantes” and “confidence fairy.” I propose that from now on, we use the term “Krugman solution” to mean someone ripping the crap out of people who say the same thing you yourself said in the past, but now is inconvenient for your political views.
UPDATE: OK in the comments there is more confusion than usual, and this was my fault. I didn’t want to overload you guys with a bunch of block quotes, so in the main post above, I didn’t give you the context for Sumner’s quoting of this 1998 Krugman paper. What happened is that Tyler Cowen and that Alesina (?) both recently said things that were in favor of fiscal austerity (I didn’t follow the links, I’m just taking Krugman’s word for it), and Krugman said they were ignoring Macro 101 (his term) and said something like, “These people aren’t dumb, so what’s going on here?” It was incredibly patronizing. So, Scott pointed out that they could have justified their statements quite nicely by citing Krugman 1998. There’s no two ways about it, that is just plain weird. You can’t call people ignorant of Macro 101 if they are saying what you yourself argued in a paper in 1998, and moreover the very paper that you now cite as your epiphany on the liquidity trap!
Epistemic Closure: The Pot Calling the Kettle Krugman
Paul Krugman November 30, 2012:
I gather that philosophers are upset over the use of the term “epistemic closure” to refer to the closing of the movement conservative mind – that’s not what they mean by the term. Never mind: that’s the term everyone is using. And recent reports are a reminder of just how closed that mind really is.
Start with Bruce Bartlett, who mentions in his mea culpa that when he asked conservative colleagues what they thought about some politically incorrect remarks quoted in the New York Times, it turned out that they were completely unaware of the whole thing – they didn’t read the Times, not even to find out what their enemies were saying.
Paul Krugman March 8, 2011:
Some have asked if there aren’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no. I will read anything I’ve been informed about that’s either interesting or revealing; but I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know we’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they don’t. The parties are not equally irresponsible; Rachel Maddow isn’t Glenn Beck; and a conservative blog, almost by definition, is a blog written by someone who chooses not to notice that asymmetry. And life is short …
At this point I posit the Krugman Trilemma:
(1) Krugman has a cruel sense of humor.
(2) Krugman has no shame.
(3) Krugman has no memory.
David Friedman on Anarcho-Capitalism
A neat little interview (HT2 David R. Henderson). The interviewer asked him what Milton Friedman thought about it. I would never have had the courage to do that, thinking that he might be sick of people asking him about his dad.
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