Potpourri
==> Are people criticizing Trump for the same reason that Bible-believing Christians speak out against the corruption of the world? I.e. just to say they officially tried even though the know it won’t change the (near-term) course of history? I’m being serious, I saw this HuffPo piece on Facebook and it has 110k views. It is simply a guy saying Trump is a racist and sexist, and shame on you for supporting him. What is the point of writing this? The guy can’t possibly think it will do anything except make Trump supporters possibly brainstorm about how they can vote twice for the guy on Election Day.
==> Likewise, these conservative pundits who are going after Trump with everything they’ve got. I’m baffled by it. They are only helping him. Suppose it turns out that Trump is only worth $300 million. You don’t think he can spin that to his advantage? “Wow, he’s had success and failure in the business world. He’s not an elitist billionaire after all.” The fact that MITT ROMNEY brought this up doesn’t help. To anticipate what I said on the latest issue of Contra Krugman (which hasn’t run yet): We see a similar phenomenon on the Left. Do you really think the rank-and-file Bernie Sanders supporters care that guys like Krugman and Austan Goolsbee say Gerald Friedman improperly used multiplier analysis in the out-years of his forecast? Are you kidding me?
OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: I do not support Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump for president.
==> If you want to actually read an interesting analysis of the Trump phenomenon–which totally took me by surprise, I have no problem admitting–check out this very prescient post from last August by Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator. (HT2 Tyler Cowen)
==> Since I’m on a roll, let me go ahead and say I think Nick Rowe is being really slippery here too. (Just read our exchange and you’ll see what I mean by that.) But I give him the benefit of the doubt: I know it eats away at your mind when you start supporting NGDPLT. You end up denying the existence of objective truth. (NOTE: I’m still not sure if Scott Sumner actually embraces this position, or if he just flirts with it at the school dance.)
*they know
Scott Adams links to an analysis of an interview with Trump; The analysis refers to a Twitter comment [sic] saying that Trump was literally glistening with sweat.
But only chicks glisten.
The error is assuming pundits argue to change minds.
Coincidentally, I wrote a 1500-word post on Trump just yesterday:
https://goo.gl/8KPsXQ
I think I can try my hand at answering these questions:
“Are people criticizing Trump for the same reason that Bible-believing Christians speak out against the corruption of the world?”
-Yes. Most Christians and most enemies of Trump are adherents of slave-morality. A willful practitioner and adherent of master-morality scares them both. That’s why Trump didn’t win Iowa.
“I’m baffled by it.”
-They’re trying to paint Trump as weak, as vulnerable, as in danger of losing. It doesn’t work that much, of course, because Trump is the most cost-effective campaigner in this race for the Republican nomination. The absolute number of dollars Trump has is not important.
“Do you really think the rank-and-file Bernie Sanders supporters care that guys like Krugman and Austan Goolsbee say Gerald Friedman improperly used multiplier analysis in the out-years of his forecast?”
-Not at all. They do care that the powers that be disapprove of him and might destroy every opportunity Bernie has to implement his policy proposals, even if he wins the Presidency. That’s the signal Krugman and Goolsbee are sending Berniebros: “Don’t vote for Bernie. If you do, we’ll destroy him”.
BTW: here’s the real scary guy in this race:
marcorubio.com/issues-2/marco-rubio-russia-policy-position/
Orders of magnitude worse than the Donald.
“I know it eats away at your mind when you start supporting NGDPLT.”
-Nah, Bob, our brains are fine. And Sumner probably came up with his philosophical ideas before he started advocating NGDPLT.
Rowe’s argument will work with approximately 0.01% of Rust Belters.
Agree with you on Rubio.
A vote for Rubio is just an attempt to put the whole neocon crazy team back into the driver seat. Rubio will do exactly what they program him to do.
In comparison, Hillary is just good honest wickedness which is what we are all used to.
Jeb! is a waste of time and finally he admitted it, but deep down I expect he will surprise everyone by popping up at the Republican convention with more delegates than anyone else.
You know, I’m starting to think this election will be the most important one since at latest 1980. Maybe since 1964.
I wish you had hat tipped me. I think Tyler got it from me.
Really; everyone has known and has been talking about Adams’s Master Persuader thesis since August. Another blogger had an earlier and even more persuasive explanation, but I’m afraid to mention him here because Bob’s promising to keep everything solidly PC around here and I don’t wanna be seen as too un-PC for Bob’s refined tastes.
David I’m not at Texas Tech and I haven’t seen every EconLog post lately; I missed yours. And Tyler didn’t mention anyone.
Also, I mentioned Scott Adams on Trump in January; I realize my post today made it sound like it was the first time I’d heard about it.
Re: Rorty,
As Rothbard once remarked, “The natural law always buries it’s undertakers”, those who deny objective truth can be known always bury themselves. For any claim to what can and cannot be known by the human mind, is itself a claim of the objective truth of the human mind, and thus a claim of the objective truth of reality, as our minds are a part of reality.
Rorty’s philosophy is self-contradictory.
It is no rebuttal to this to concede that it is self-contradictory, but then salvaging it by insisting it is nevertheless “useful.” For even calling a theory useful or not useful is ALSO a tacit claim to a truth of objective reality, namely, that objective reality is such that thinking “this” way can allow a human being to better achieve their goals, whereas thinking “that” way does not, or less so.
Even further, Rorty’s own statements could not consistently be regarded as statements that mean anything, for meaning implies an inter-subjective, i.e. objective, standard.
What Rortyians are really saying is “Believe what I say to be objective truth because my mind is superior, and don’t trust your own minds because your minds are inferior”.
Such philosophies are attractive fodder for socialists like Sumner. You won’t see Rortyians among libertarians.
Even further, for the claim “truth becomes Truth when it becomes generally accepted”, how could the Rortyians claim to know whether this criteria is even met? To be consistent he or she would have to say that THAT claim is not truth until it becomes generally accepted. And so on in a regress.
In other words, the Rortyians cannot by their own account be saying anything true about any part of reality. Their words would have to be regarded as meaningless symbols and random sounds.
“$ Income will grow at 5% regardless, but buying cheapest keeps inflation low!”
That is a brilliant way to describe the merits of NGDPT ! Why is it slippery? Free trade means that a greater proportion of NGDP growth will go to RDDP growth rather than inflation – which is a great way to market the idea.
You say “But if auto worker ends up bussing tables because cheap imports, NGDPLT wont’f fix that”, but Nick Rowe isn’t saying it will, so (again) I don’t get the slippery bit.
Transformer, the typical person who objects to free trade thinks either that it will hurt domestic jobs in general, or (more sophisticated) that it will cause unacceptable losses to particular groups of workers. NGDP targeting doesn’t fix either of those.
Put differently, even if Fed targets price inflation, it is still true that lowering tariff barriers “means that a greater proportion of NGDP growth will go to RGDP growth rather than inflation.” So there’s nothing special about NGDP targeting here; it’s free trade doing all the work.
Since you and Nick make it sound as if NGDP targeting is adding something, it’s a slippery argument.
If you guys are right, the virtue of NGDP targeting is that it avoids recessions. That’s great, but it’s not really about making free trade more palatable to its critics.
Bob is totally right on this. Transformer is totally wrong. Rowe’s argument is ridiculous on its face to any common American.
And, Bob, how long is my email going to be blocked for?
E. Harding I never took any active measure to block your email, and when you first complained about it I tried a few things to diagnose the problem. At this point you can hope that President Trump makes a deal with me to fix it.
OK, I think I see your point.
If you are opposed to free trade, then pointing out how free trade might minimize the amount of inflation you get under an NGDPT regime is going to be somewhat of a side issue to you.
However I take Nick Rowe’s point to be that it will be easier to sell the idea of free trade if you can frame it within a monetary policy that leads to productivity gains being maximized, and demand-shocks being minimized , as the effects of free trade kick-in – and consequently the pool of anti-free-trade people who won’t care about the benefits of NGDPT to free trade will be reduced..
Hey, I’m just taking this point off to one side here.
Agree that NGDP targeting is not addressing any of the key issues on people’s minds, at least not directly. Possibly if it worked as advertised (I think it does not) then some overall boost to the economy might get more young people into jobs, at some future stage.
Anyhow, in terms of things like open borders immigration (importing vast numbers of low wage low skill workers, many of whom work illegally, bypass minimum wage and safety regulations, etc) and also in terms of offshoring lots of manufacturing jobs to low wage Asian and Indian factories… clearly this does harm some Americans (and Australians, but not as much I think). I cannot believe we still have so many libertarians following the simplistic approach that no one anywhere is harmed by this. It just makes the whole liberty movement look silly, to keep waving an ideological model and ignore real people around them. It’s playing into the tone-deafness that our critics constantly accuse us of.
So the first step is to force people to actually have the discussion, at all. Stop pretending it’s all good and people are too stupid to recognize what’s in their best interests.
Now Bob uses the criteria “unacceptable losses” which is fine, because it admits that some trade-off involved. Some people are better off (not the least to say, in China they now have a massively upgraded infrastructure and technological base, mostly because of imported know-how from Western nations, so the Chinese are significantly better off)… while other people are worse off (like all the young people in the USA largely given up on the workforce). The problem is now we are in the realm of interpersonal utility comparison, and there’s no way out of that.
So once we get far enough down the track to have this discussion at all, then we hit the wall because what is “unacceptable” to some is perfectly reasonable to others. It comes down to preferences, and also comes down to convenience. If you own a mid-sized company that employs a lot of labour, well it’s unlikely that a flood of illegal immigrants is going to make you worse off. If you are some Washington insider with a lot of key family connections that can get you through a lot of doors, hmmm, unlikely they are going to import what you do from some factory in India (what do those people do? no one knows, that’s why the Indians don’t make it in their factories). You see why this is a difficult discussion.
Now I accept that by our standard legal tradition, no one actually owns their trade. In some cases a freak scientific discovery could come along and replace a whole class of occupations with robots. Over time this happens more and more often. Thing is, people do invest a lot in their education, experience and skill sets. Thus we have a disjoint between investment time, money, effort and ownership of the product of the investment (i.e. high risk for anyone who wants to actually have a vocation).
Do you see what I’m getting at? If people feel that learning job skills will get them ripped off, they won’t do it. Young Americans just aren’t doing it, they figure it’s better to use the political process instead, because they get a more reliable return on effort that way.
Really nice article about Trump from Adams. Thank god that he is no economist. An economist with these kinds of persuasion skills is really dangerous.