Piketty Makes “Typos,” Bryan Caplan Cites “Noise”
This is odd. Bryan Caplan apparently wrote in his book on irrational voters:
There are countless issues that people care about, from gun control and abortion to government spending and the environment… If you know a person’s position on one, you can predict his view on the rest to a surprising degree. In formal statistical terms, political opinions look one-dimensional. They boil down to roughly one big opinion, plus noise.
So Weeden and Kurzban decided to test that out, and claimed Caplan was wrong.
Now the odd part. Here’s how Caplan responded: “Just one problem: I’m well-aware that the data aren’t tidy. Accurately predicting individual opinions is hard. I deliberately included the words ‘plus noise’ to ensure that readers knew I was not claiming great predictive powers” (emphasis original). Caplan concluded his post by saying, “If Weeden and Kurzban really wanted to dispute the one-dimensionality of political opinion, they should have been correlating specific issue views with ideology, not specific issue views with each other.”
I was going to expound on just how crazy this was, but in the comments Weeden himself chimes in:
This is just getting weird. You explicitly said of individual issues that “If you know a person’s position on one, you can predict his view on the rest to a surprising degree.” And we ran a test of that proposition, showing that it can be pretty weak stuff, depending on the issue pair. (I’ve got a blog post showing similar points here:http://www.pleeps.org/2014/06/30/if-being-routinely-liberal-or-conservative-is-a-human-universal-why-is-it-true-only-of-recent-college-educated-whites/)
But now you’re saying we should have known we were testing wrong thing! We shouldn’t have tested the thing we quoted you as having said, but, instead (obviously!) we should have tested something else…
Potpourri
==> Curious what you guys think of this blog post urging Austrians to study math. (I disagree with the author’s opinion of the actual attitude toward math among self-described Austrians, which is mostly why I’m asking.)
==> Contra Krugman, Daniel Kuehn wants to make sure Keynesianism wins fair and square.
==> A neat blog post from Mark Sisson explaining why “take in fewer calories than you burn” is not really a good guide to weight loss.
The FDA’s Vioxx Scandal
I’m co-authoring a book on US health care and we deal with the Vioxx scandal. This is a great example of a major shortcoming in the standard economic argument against the FDA. Typically, libertarian economists will say that the FDA faces incentives such that if it approves a drug that kills people, the FDA will be blamed, whereas if the FDA refrains from approving a beneficial drug, the people who end up dead will be attributed to the disease. Hence, the FDA errs on the side of caution.
This argument is correct as far as it goes, but it ignores mountains of evidence that the FDA approves very dangerous drugs and then doesn’t respond when later evidence documents the risks. For the rest of my post, let me quote from a 2005 interview of Dr. David Graham, then a 20-year FDA employee. He had led a study showing that Vioxx was extremely dangerous (perhaps causing 60,000 fatalities), and claims that his superiors at the FDA tried to suppress the study. Here are some key portions of the interview:
DR. GRAHAM: Since November [2004], when I appeared before the Senate Finance Committee and announced to the world that the FDA was incapable of protecting America from unsafe drugs or from another Vioxx®, very little has changed on the surface and substantively nothing has changed. The structural problems that exist within the FDA, where the people who approve the drugs are also the ones who oversee the post marketing regulation of the drug, remain unchanged. The people who approve a drug when they see that there is a safety problem with it are very reluctant to do anything about it because it will reflect badly on them. They continue to let the damage occur. America is just as at risk now, as it was in November, as it was two years ago, and as it was five years ago.
MANETTE: In that same PBS program, you were also quoted saying, “The organizational structure within the CDER is currently geared towards the review and approval of new drugs. When a serious safety issue arises at post marketing, the immediate reaction is almost always one of denial, rejection and heat. They approved the drugs, so there can’t possibly be anything wrong with it. This is an inherent conflict of interest.” Based on what you’re saying it appears that the FDA is responsible for protecting the interests of pharmaceutical companies and not the American people. Do you believe the FDA can protect the public from dangerous drugs?
DR. GRAHAM: As currently configured, the FDA is not able to adequately protect the American public. It’s more interested in protecting the interests of industry. It views industry as its client, and the client is someone whose interest you represent. Unfortunately, that is the way the FDA is currently structured. Within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research about 80 percent of the resources are geared towards the approval of new drugs and 20 percent is for everything else. Drug safety is about five percent. The “gorilla in the living room” is new drugs and approval. Congress has not only created that structure, they have also worsened that structure through the PDUFA, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, by which drug companies pay money to the FDA so they will review and approve its drug. So you have that conflict as well.
Potpourri
==> I wonder if this is fake, but if it’s real, it’s pretty hilarious. Apparently Jimmy Fallon had a shot with Nicole Kidman but he blew it. (You just need to watch the first 3 minutes.)
==> My article in National Review Online (my first ever?) on why conservatives shouldn’t flirt with a carbon tax.
==> This story has been making the rounds: Apparently Harvard professors are upset at the consequences of ObamaCare.
==> David R. Henderson on the NYPD’s “reverse Washington Monument strategy.” In the end, it all makes perfect sense if the cops are focusing on the politicians, rather than the public.
==> Scott Sumner busts Kevin Drum.
Fiat Money and State Power
In my latest FEE article, I clarify the definition of “fiat money” and I also explain that the State doesn’t have the power to make something money “by fiat.”
On social media, people have been pushing back against me, citing (e.g.) legal tender laws. I specifically addressed this in the article, but let me be clearer here: Of course such regulations are relevant (otherwise the State wouldn’t implement them). But they aren’t sufficient. In the historical episodes where a State-issued currency collapsed (like Weimar Germany or modern-day Zimbabwe), it wasn’t because the governments foolishly repealed a pre-existing legal tender law.
Piketty Gives the Frenchie Response
Recall Jon Lovitz’s character “Frenchie” from SNL, who would say outrageous things and then say, “Oh I’m sorry, didn’t mean to offend anyone!” That is quite apropos for Thomas Piketty’s response to FoxNews when they asked him about the accusations Phil Magness and I made in our recent paper.
“I am really sorry if I attributed one specific tax decision to FDR instead of Hoover, etc.; many readers do mention typos of this sort, and of course they will be corrected in future editions; but I really do not see anything here that’s affecting any conclusion,” Piketty told FoxNews.com.
Say what you will about the passages in question, but they weren’t “typos.” If Piketty said, “I was drunk when I wrote those paragraphs” or “You know, we were using a French data base of US tax records and I have no idea what the hell those people were thinking,” or something like that, then OK I would still have been suspicious, but fair enough. But to dismiss them as quibbles over “typos”? Give me a break.
And then when Auerbach and Hassett say inequality peaked in 1995 with a corrected graph, Piketty says even if they’re right, this wouldn’t affect his conclusion.
In a way, I agree with him: Piketty knew what his conclusion was–calls for massive income and wealth taxes on the rich–before he constructed his graphs.
Potpourri
==> Steve Landsburg has a good post explaining why falling oil prices don’t affect the case for a carbon tax.
==> Gerald O’Driscoll applies standard arguments for rule of law to Fed policy. (HT2 von Pepe)
==> This guy bought his own country off the coast of Portugal. The quotes are hilarious.
==> The awkward moment when your paper calls a suspect a “hulking brute” and then it turns out he was a cop.
==> Dan Sanchez on the “fat blue line.”
God Uses Bad Guys to Serve Him
I often talk about the way in which the God of the Bible clearly structures events such that even evildoers ultimately serve God’s (good) plan. However, even some of the heroes of the Bible were murderers. In particular, Moses, King David, and Paul were instrumental in the killing of people not in self-defense. (Moses killed an Egyptian who had been beating a Hebrew, David gave a military order that was effectively a death sentence, and Paul [at the time named “Saul”] actively hunted down Christians knowing that some of them would be executed.)
I understand that cynics will say this is yet another disgusting aspect of Christianity, that some of its greatest heroes were murderers. But the flip side is that anyone can find redemption in Christ and transform his life. This wouldn’t ring true if the “great men” of the Bible had all had spotless records.
If God can forgive Saul for persecuting Christians and turn him into Paul–the chief theorist of Christianity–then God can use you too, so long as you confess your sins and seek His guidance.
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