Clive Crook on DeLong
I don’t care so much about the actual argument they are having (over Krugman, no less), but I thought this was funny from Clive Crook (HT2 Scott Sumner):
Brad DeLong has commented on my beef with Paul Krugman. I’m reluctant to engage, to be honest, because his post exemplifies the intemperance I’m addressing. Once an admirer, I gave up on his commentary a long time ago. You get a sense of the problem from his post about me. He illustrates it with a picture of a clown. He also wants me fired. “Bloomberg has some house-cleaning to do,” he says — charming, and from a tenured academic, to boot.
DeLong’s fine under the supervision of a competent adult, as here (an excellent paper, which I praised at the time). But as an unattended blogger he regresses to intellectual adolescence, light on thinking and exhaustingly heavy on peevish belligerence. Not just uncivil, he actually disapproves of civility — today, as you see, I’m trying to meet him halfway.
Another Point in Favor of Private, Competing Police Services
The stuff coming out about the Cleveland police department on these abducted girls is pretty damning… Here’s just some of it:
Lugo said about two years ago his sister told him she heard a woman pounding on a window at Castro’s home as if she needed help. When his sister looked up, she saw a woman and a baby standing in a window half covered with a wooden plank. His sister told him and Lugo called the police.
Later, Lugo’s mother called the police because Ariel Castro would park his school bus in front of their home and bring bags full of McDonald’s and drinks into his home. They wondered why he needed so much food. Police again responded but didn’t enter the home.
A third call came from neighborhood women who lived in an apartment building. Those women told Lugo they called police because they saw three young girls crawling on all fours naked with dog leashes around their necks. Three men were controlling them in the backyard. The women told Lugo they waited two hours but police never responded to the calls.
Charles Ramsey Interview
This guy is awesome. The interview just builds and builds to the hilarious climax.
An Update on My Work With the “Infinite Banking Concept”
I am running around because I’m about to go on a trip, but I wanted to drop a quick note to explain a major project I’ve been working on over the past year. I am a co-creator of The IBC Practitioner Program, a training program for financial professionals in Austrian economics and the “Infinite Banking Concept” (IBC). Since the release of my book co-authored with Carlos Lara, I’ve spent a lot of time reading insurance textbooks, interviewing actuaries and agents, and visiting insurance company home offices to really make sure I understand the theoretical foundations of what Nelson Nash recommends in his underground classic, Becoming Your Own Banker.
I will be posting blogs and YouTube videos on these issues a lot more in the future, but for now I want to at least make people aware of it.
Another major development, is that Jason Rink (who made the Nullification documentary with Tom Woods) has now made a documentary on IBC as a household response to fractional reserve banking. In other words, Rink effectively took Carlos and my book and put the content in film format, but he also interviews people from the insurance industry to make it more concrete and not as theoretical as our book was.
Below are two samples from the DVD:
Two Views (?) On Using Bets to Test Economic Theories
Back in December, when Brad DeLong said I needed to study at the feet of Krugman because I lost an inflation bet to David R. Henderson, and then Bryan Caplan objected to the tone of the statements, Daniel Kuehn wrote:
I thought the whole point of betting on predictions was to weed out BS and test theories.
Now when people actually propose that some of that actually goes on Bryan Caplan – a big advocate of economic blog betting – finds it “frankly deplorable” and calls it “cackling with glee” instead of… you know… just hoping that betting will do what you all think it will do.
Now, when Bryan is asking Keynesians to explicitly bet with him because they keep saying how much better their model predicts things, Daniel writes:
Bryan Caplan is promoting bets on Keynesian theory – encouraging Keynesians to put their money where their mouth is.
He is concerned that the only bets around are about inflation, and that you don’t have to be a Keynesian to think inflation will stay low.
True enough but this kind of gets at the heart of the problem, right? If it’s hard to get detailed empirical analyses to tease out a distinction between theories, how can you expect a bet on any kind of headline indicator to? There is a lot of other stuff going on out there and in particular a lot of endogeneity.
If you’re someone that would bet that when government spending goes up output will go up (this is what Bryan suggests) – without cleaning up the endogeneity bias – then you really don’t understand how economics works and shouldn’t be betting on it in the first place.
You certainly shouldn’t be representing Keynesianism with your bet.
Bets are great for getting people to be more serious about the claims they make, but I think the proponents of betting vastly overestimate how useful it is.
Not an outright contradiction, but a Kuehn Kontradiction? A Daniel Double-Take?
Anyway let’s leave him alone. Soon enough he will be punished by a sleep deprivation experiment.
Potpourri
==> An interesting story of a professor who purposely let his class “cheat” on a Game Theory exam in order to teach game theory.
==> Can’t remember if I already linked to this: The formal details of my June 3 debate with Warren Mosler, at Columbia University, moderated by John Carney of CNBC. (Yes it’s live; before we thought it would just be online.)
==> Tom Woods shares his views on teaching as part of the Ron Paul Curriculum.
==> Nassim Taleb needs to eat a Snickers bar or something.
==> Filmmakers apparently will be hurt by New York State’s gun restrictions, and are protesting. Funniest line EVER: “[T]he entertainment industry should not be penalized accidentally by a law intended as a response to mass shootings.”
==> David R. Henderson on Reinhart and Rogoff.
==> Do NOT let Krugman see this.
==> More Channel 5 coverage of highway robbery. The interview with the cop in the first 2 minutes is funny/scary.
==> Adam Kokesh and I have very different philosophies when it comes to getting the message out.
==> David Beckworth on the case for monetary action offsetting the Dread Pirate Austerity.
Obama vs. “Jefferson”
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” — Often attributed to Jefferson, but apparently spuriously.
Grabbing DeLong’s Bank Account With Both Hands
[UPDATE 1 and 2 below.]
Bryan Caplan discusses a wager between Noah Smith and Brad DeLong:
If, at any time between 7/28/2012 and 7/28/2015, core consumer prices, as recorded in the FRED database series CPILFESL, are up more than 5% in the preceding 12 months, and if over the same 1-year period monthly U3 unemployment (as recorded in FRED database series UNRATE) has not averaged below 6%, then Brad DeLong agrees to buy Noah Smith one dinner at Zachary’s Pizza at 1853 Solano Ave. in Berkeley CA, and to pay Noah 49 times the cost–including tax but excluding tip–of Noah’s meal at Zachary’s in Federal Reserve notes, or in alternative means of payment accepted by Zachary’s should Zachary’s Pizza no longer be accepting Federal Reserve notes at the date of the dinner. This cost will be assessed as the total cost of the dinner to all, divided by the number of people present, regardless of how much pizza is consumed by or how much alcohol is drunk by specific individuals.
If however, the above condition is not satisfied, Noah agrees to buy Brad one dinner at Zachary’s….[Bold added.]
OK if you follow the link, it’s clear that DeLong thinks he and Noah just made a bet at 50-1 odds. But the way I’m reading those terms, this isn’t the case at all. They aren’t agreeing to a specific dollar amount, or even a specific meal.
Consider: If Noah happens to win, he will walk into that restaurant knowing that for every $6 (say) beer he orders, DeLong will cover the cost and on top of that, will owe Noah an additional $147 in cash. In contrast, if DeLong wins, then he merely gets to drink for free, with Noah picking up the bar tab.
I’m guessing Noah will end up drinking a lot more if he wins, than DeLong would. At least, if I believed that incentives affected consumer behavior.
UPDATE: I sent this post to Noah, in recognition of his craftiness. He replied (and gave me permission to post it here): “??? Assuming we can eat and drink the same amount, and that we will both eat and drink as much as we can, the true odds should be the same as the stated odds…”
I’m assuming there must be more to the liquidity trap than I realized, since my point still seems pretty obvious.
2nd UPDATE: Noah writes back, “By the way, if you read the terms of the bet closely, it’s me who’s susceptible to bet-gaming, not Brad. The amount he pays me in cash is 49x the average cost of the meals of the people who are at the dinner. If he wants to reduce my winnings, all he has to do is invite a bunch of friends who don’t eat or drink a thing.”
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