Why Are Progressive Economists So Afraid of Negative Comments?
Believe it or not, I actually agree with Paul Krugman’s harsh assessment of Superfreakonomics. (Before you chalk this up to my evenhandedness, keep in mind that I am still jealous of the success of Freakonomics.) But what the heck? In both posts (here and here), Krugman shuts off the comments from the get-go. His explanation: “Administrative note: I’m going to block comments here, because I know it will be overwhelmed.”
So what if it’s overwhelmed? I realize that’s tough on the guy who has to moderate the comments, but then again you can always turn off the moderation.
Failing that–we wouldn’t want people to get “bad ideas” in their heads–Krugman could allow only the first 100 comments. If a cap will save the planet, why not a blog?
(BTW for those who don’t understand the title of my post, Brad DeLong is notorious for editing/deleting comments on his blog. And we’re not merely talking about jettisoning use of racial slurs. Mario Rizzo got gonged once, for crying out loud.)
Seriously, what is the deal with this? I would have expected tobacco executives and Glenn Beck to eliminate dissent on their websites, not believers in open dialog and democracy. Talking with Iran is the path to peace, but we can’t have a conversation with global warming deniers?
I Don’t Get No Respect, I Tell Ya
For those who are curious, check out Silas Barta’s attempt to use Jedi mind tricks to embarrass me in my challenge to evolutionary psychology. But if Silas read EPJ, he would know that I am similar in many ways to Jabba the Hut.
"Which is what happens when you call the Feds!"
One of my favorite scenes in Firefly–a show that was taken from us much too soon–is from the episode “Ariel” when Jayne tries to collect the reward on the fugitives traveling with them, and the official with whom he had the deal ends up arresting Jayne and trying to collect the bounty himself.
Now I am not 100% sure this is what went down, but I think this is the chronology:
(1) Obama cut a deal with the insurance industry in the spring, where he agreed the government wouldn’t try to limit prescription payments etc., and would have a high fine of non-insured in order to funnel a bunch of new “customers” onto the insurance rolls, in exchange for the insurers running a favorable ad campaign. (Recall that hardcore progressive activists called Obama a “charming liar” after he cut the deal.)
(2) When Wolf Blitzer was amazing (for a CNN reporter) and kept pressing David Axelrod on why the federal government doesn’t break down barriers to interstate competition–if all the government wants is more choices and lower prices for consumers–Axelrod shucks and jives but ultimately offers the reason that the feds don’t want to interfere with state legislation.
(3) For some reason, the deal broke down. This lefty writer blames the insurers for overreaching, though they weren’t crafting the legislative details so that seems a bit weird to me. (I.e. if they were happy at one point with what they thought the deal was going to be, and then as the legislation emerged they were unhappy, I’m thinking it’s because the politicians reneged on the deal.)
(4) The insurers switched gears and instead of funding pro-“reform” commercials, they fund a study saying government involvement will drive up costs. (I haven’t read the study, but I think it could have been one sentence: “Government involvement will drive up costs.” And then there would be a footnote to that one sentence which reads, “See: U.S. history.”)
(5) In response to the scurrilous study based on lies and scare tactics, members of Congress and now Obama himself are threatening to remove the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption–which means overriding state regulations of insurers. (BTW Tyler Cowen has been doing a great job highlighting the sheer outrageousness of this–changing federal law to punish people who publicly disagree with proposed legislation. Read the comments at Tyler’s initial post and see how many “progressives” don’t even get what Tyler is complaining about. Seriously, how can someone not even see the potential problem when the government decides to revisit a regulation after the businesses it holds life and death over, decide to oppose the government? It doesn’t matter if this particular bunch of progressives is sincere or not; they are clueless when it comes to assessing the dangers posed by various sections of our culture, i.e. corporations versus the government.)
Conclusion: As Stewie from Family Guy would say to the insurers: What did you learn?
Assuming a Can Opener?
Something is screwy in the health care debate. Advocates of “reform” keep repeating a point that doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll quote Krugman, but others are saying it too:
As I said, the individual mandate probably should be stronger than it is in the Finance Committee’s bill. But there’s a reason the mandate was weakened: fear that too many people would balk at the cost of insurance, even with the subsidies provided to lower-income individuals and families. So why not address that cost?
Aside from making the subsidies larger, which they should be, there are at least two changes to the legislation that would help limit costs…
OK Krugman didn’t say the point as clearly as I’ve heard others doing it on radio. The argument goes like this: We need to get more people paying into health insurance, to make it viable. Otherwise the system is going to go broke. But, a lot of the people who aren’t currently insured, can’t afford the premiums that we’d need to charge them in order to make the system viable. So, we’ll have to subsidize them.
Am I missing something? That doesn’t make any sense to me. How do you make a system viable by bringing in people that you have to subsidize?
I suppose it’s a form of price discrimination, where really the government is still extracting a net payment from the currently uninsured. I.e. we’re going to fine you $1000 unless you pay your $2500 premium for the public option, but oh if you’re too poor then we’ll spot you $500.
So really, it’s just a fancy way of saying, “If you’re poor you can pay $2000 for the public option, or get fined $1000.”
Yet that’s not the way it’s being framed, at least on public radio. There they are talking as if giving subsidies is a magic way to reduce costs.
Wow I Must Annoy Bryan Caplan
When it comes to his observations on children, I simply refuse to believe his two counterintuitive claims:
(1) Parents don’t matter.
(2) Children were never a good investment, even for families in traditional agricultural societies.
As I say, Bryan must be incredibly frustrated with someone like me who basically says, “I don’t care what data you point to, Bryan, how can you possibly believe that?”
But really, Bryan, how can you possibly believe those statements? #2 I suppose is not patently absurd, just highly unlikely. But #1?!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Bryan should abandon this topic as pointless. Rather, I’m suggesting that he says, “Hmm, you would think parents would matter in this way, but the evidence says they don’t. So let’s refine our intuitions to make them more accurate.”
The Pot Calling the Kettle a Pot
Paul Krugman, Oct. 16, 2009:
For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous…
Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study…you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.
Paul Krugman, Dec. 15, 2008:
Right now the world economy is in a nosedive, and understanding what I call “depression economics” — the weird world you get into when even a zero interest rate isn’t low enough, and a messed-up financial system is dragging down the real economy — is essential if we’re going to avoid the worst.
The key thing, when you’re in a situation like this, is realizing that normal rules don’t apply. Ordinarily we’d welcome an increase in private saving; right now we’re living in a world subject to the “paradox of thrift,” in which private virtue is public vice. Normally we want to be careful that public funds are spent wisely; right now the crucial thing is that they be spent fast. (John Maynard Keynes once suggested burying bottles of cash in coal mines and letting the private sector dig them up — not as a real proposal, but as a way of emphasizing the priority of supporting demand.)
The big test for the next few months will be whether policymakers here and abroad can wrap their minds around this Alice-in-Wonderland world. If they can’t, nobody knows how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Bullet Points
* On a recent trip in a Buddy Holly plane, Nature called so urgently that I actually had to go in the prop jet’s bathroom, which had roughly the volume of a basketball for the WNBA. I wasn’t particularly nervous about the talk I was going to give, so I concluded that it must have been something I ate. Then it occurred to me, “Are pilots forbidden from eating at the same restaurant?” After all, if the two pilots had had the same batch of food as me, and were in the same condition, we would have been singing La Bamba on the way down. (I later asked a woman–yep–who was a commercial airline pilot, and she said that pilots eat together in airports all the time.)
* Is anybody else a little weirded out by Carbonite? The Big Three radio guys tout it all the time. But it seems that on the road to serfdom, one neat step would be for everyone to arrange for his hard drive to automatically get uploaded to a central location every time a connection is made to the Internet. (BTW before you roll your eyes and say, “C’mon this is just a market solution to a legitimate problem,” let me ask if this freaks you out at all.)
* Do you think the number of normal illnesses will be way down in 2009, because everyone is washing his hands etc. in fear of H1N1? The first year after my son’s birth, I literally did not even catch a cold–despite the fact that he subjected us to a sleep-deprivation experiment–presumably because I was so fastidious in washing my hands.
* Here’s something I’ve noticed: Many Austro-libertarians (like me) are very worried about runaway price inflation, while we are not worried about catastrophic climate change. On the other hand, many Keynesian interventionists (like Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman) are very worried about climate change but they are not worried about price inflation. Of course if you ask me, I will give you what I think are good reasons for why I come down on the sides that I do. But I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Theists Don’t Get No Respect, I Tell Ya
I am responding to posts by secular Austrian fellow travelers, so this doesn’t violate my policy of only bringing up religion on Sundays. And I will keep this a broad issue of theism vs. atheism; no J-word.
Example #1: Gene Callahan acts in his typical fashion of winning hearts and minds. (A choice quote: “Oh, and I’m not going to bother reading [Dennett’s] criticisms of Dupre. If I read several things by someone and they are universally rubbish, I really can’t be bothered to keep going through the rubbish heap.”) The original point of Gene’s post was to praise a book by John Dupre, in showing the weaknesses of evolutionary psychology. People asked Gene for a specific example of what the EPs do wrong, and Gene quoted Chomsky who said:
“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.'” [Note that I reversed the single and double quotation marks at the end; the way Gene had it, Chomsky would be saying everything Gene ever typed for the rest of his life, and moreover Chomsky would have been quoting someone else quoting someone else, to boot.]
In his sparring with Gene, Roger Koppl admitted that sometimes evolutionary psychologists offer untestable assertions to “explain” things and then call it science, but he thought some results were meaningful. For example, Koppl said:
It turns out, for example, that young children everywhere prefer landscapes like you see on the African Savannah and grow less likely to do so the older they are. These and other related results suggest a kind of pre-programming for what’s a good place to be.
I would have to go look up the original study to see just what the result was, but on the surface of it this seems like yet another example where believers in the standard Darwinian account see “confirmation” where the evidence is just as consistent with the opposite interpretation.
What exactly is the story that goes along with this finding? Back when homo sapiens emerged as a separate species, some found the savannah appealing and so stayed there, whereas others who preferred a cityscape capped with skyscrapers ended up dying from high taxes and muggers? What if researchers showed children pictures of the different planets, and asked them which was the most beautiful? If most people said Earth–as I bet they would–would that be another feather in Darwin’s cap?
And then, why the added “confirmation” that the preference fades with age? If you wanted to make a fitness story, wouldn’t it be the exact opposite? A young child has no influence over where the family / tribe sets up camp. If you wanted to give a bunch of ignorant apes an advantage, and could only program a preference for the savannah at a certain age range, then I’d stick it in the 13 – 25 year olds, not the 0 – 12 year olds.
Now of course, Koppl could come up with eighteen different explanations for why the result is perfectly consistent with the Darwinian story. But that’s not the issue. The issue is, Roger seemed to think that this experimental result was further evidence in favor of his view, when I hope I’ve shown that it’s arguably the opposite.
Example #2: In praising Superfreakonomics–for a scathing review, see Joe Romm, and for a harsh review of the original, see me–Bryan Caplan quotes Levitt and Dubner who write, “There is a long list of cancers for which chemotherapy has zero discernible effect…”
Caplan then says: “They might have gone a step further and said, ‘Overall, prayer is better than chemo. At least prayer causes no pain.'”
Now I confess I haven’t delved into the literature to make sure the studies controlled for hidden variables blah blah blah, but I know there are empirical results claiming that prayer really does have a significant explanatory impact on recovery from an illness or surgery. Has Bryan read those results and found flaws in them (like this critic)–or was he just cracking a joke because he knows in his bones that prayer is absurd? (Later in the post he linked to an Onion article ridiculing the idea of killing for Allah and then getting a bunch of virgins as a reward in the afterlife, so I don’t think I’m conjuring up attacks where none exists.)
Let’s not forget that Caplan is happy to discuss with Robin Hanson whether the matter within a radius of one million light years contains enough atoms to support enough people living in a virtual reality machine conferring on them a standard of living that Caplan had suggested was possible. It’s not as if Bryan is afraid of daring hypotheses. So why is it so ridiculous to think that maybe there is an intelligent Being behind the material world in which we find ourselves?
Last point: If my sensitivities have misled me, and Roger or Bryan is a devout believer in God, then my sincere apologies.
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