Well, it's been a hell of a week my friends, a hell of a week. I feel like the pulp that's left clinging to the side of the glass after you drink a glass of homestyle orange juice. I think I've invented a new cocktail:
The Jane Galt Take six ounces of vodka Place in water glass Drink at once.
So now I'm off to the Poconos for a celebration (Happy Birthday, Tatiana!) Yes, that's right -- I'm heading to the land of horseback rides and heart-shaped beds, and a champagne glass whirlpool for two. I'll be back Sunday night. If in the interim you want to drop me a line pouring out your heartfelt adoration, or telling me how generally wrongheaded I am, just drop me a note at my new email: janegalt -at- janegalt.net. Don't use the hotmail box, as it's already full. Otherwise, tra-la, my little chickadees! I'll see you all on Sunday.
Summary The Bush Administration wants to privatise social security. This is a bad idea. Their report is bad. The people in the Bush Administration are bad. Someone deserves a good spanking, but we're not saying who.
Highlights -- He's perfectly right that privatisation will play havoc with the government's accounting. Krugman correctly points out that establishing a private system means paying double: paying for current retirees as the same time as we are paying into private accounts.
Social Security as we know it is a system in which each generation's payroll taxes are mainly used to support the previous generation's retirement. If contributions from younger workers go into personal accounts instead, the problem should be obvious: who will pay benefits to today's retirees and older workers? It's just arithmetic: 2-1=1. So privatization creates a financial hole that must be filled by slashing benefits, providing large financial transfers from the rest of the government or both.
-- The weakest part of the argument for privatisation, and unfortunately about the only part that makes it into the media, is the argument that investors will suddenly become rich off their investments. The 90's are over, 'kay? Private accounts are not going to turn the nation's graybeards into itinerant millionaires anytime soon. Krugman hits on this every single time he writes about SS, and he's right -- those pushing private accounts are usually using inflated or unreliable numbers to exaggerate the potential returns.
Lowlights -- Who cares what happens to the government's accounting? Government accounting makes Enron look like a model of financial probity.
Social Security is essentially a Ponzi scheme; the ones who get in early get a good payoff, and the later suckers get stuck trying to pay their rent with Amway crap. The government has covered this up by using those fake bonds in the "trust fund" to pretend that we aren't going to have to raise taxes, cut other spending, lower benefits, or borrow more money, soon. Even most people who are educated about the issue do not understand how soon the deficits will start affecting the taxpayers. Given this, who cares if the private accounts play havoc with the system?
Any money paid into it now comes out of taxes; any money paid to retirees later will come out of taxes. The trust fund is a myth. In ten years (sigh, people who want to rant at me can go to the SSA and read the numbers for themselves, 'kay? My numbers are right. I'm not arguing with you about this. You can read the numbers or not. I've read them, I know what they say, I know how they derived the projections, and I know the margin for error. Sshhhh! Zip it! You're wrong, and I have no interest in debating the matter. If you are merely ignorant rather than ornery, and you want an explanation rather than an argument, you can email me after you read what the Social Security Administration has to say.) or so, the tax revenues into the system from FICA will be less than the benefits going out of the system under the current regime. At that point, we will need to raise taxes, cut spending on other programs, lower benefits, or borrow money.
But the bonds! I hear you cry. Where do you think the money comes from to pay the bonds, my sweet? Say it with me: raising taxes, cutting spending on other programs, or borrowing more money. It's very nice that the Social Security Administration has equal standing with other bondholders (except it doesn't, because, among other things, the instruments are non-negotiable and don't count against the government's bond rating if it defaults) but it is irrelevant to the question of how much we, as taxpayers, are going to have to pay in taxes to cover retirees.
Note that exactly what Krugman complains we will have to do now to cover privatisation is exactly what we'd have to do in the future to cover non-privatisation.
So why do it now?
Because if privatisation is to work, the earlier the better; the money needs time to work. And that leverage works in the other direction as well; the longer we wait to do something about Social Security (whether or not that something is privatisation), the bigger the problem becomes. No, I'm not being alarmist. People make their retirement plans 10 or 20 years out based on current benefits. The longer we wait, the larger the pool of retirees and near-retirees who have not planned to live on lower benefits, and the smaller the percentage of workers who have not planned to pay another 5% of their income to the government every year.
-- Ultimately the point that establishing private accounts will mean paying more now is exactly the indictment of the sytem that Krugman is trying to avoid. Because, my little lefty buddies, ask yourself this: if we don't have the money to establish private accounts, then where is all the money from the "trust fund"?
It's in the farm bill and the prison system and the military and the Robert Byrd Memorial Parking Lot (formerly known as the State of West Virginia). It's gone. In other words, the reason we can't privatise is that this would reveal the fact that our politicians have been raiding the pension funds to cover operating expenses -- behavior that would put private executives in jail.
-- Then there's this:
A sample of [Bush administration man railing about a new report on SS]'s tactics is his insistence that private accounts don't weaken Social Security, because diverting money from the trust fund into those accounts doesn't reduce the total sum of money available — if you still count private accounts as part of the total. As they say in the technical literature, "Well, duh." Of course the money doesn't disappear — but it is no longer available to pay benefits to older Americans, whose own Social Security contributions were used to pay benefits to previous generations.
You know, I'd be sympathetic to this argument. I really would. If he weren't neatly reversing this chap's argument and using it himself.
This yahoo from teh administration is pulling some fast accounting to argue that there's no current cash deficit in the system if you include the private accounts in the system. In other words, he's looking at the asset base, rather than the cash flows, and arguing that we won't have to (One more time! Everybody sing it now!) raise taxes, cut other spending, shrink benefits, or borrow more money, because the money being diverted into private accounts will still be there, in the system. This is not true. It will be in the system, but it will not be available to pay current retirees.
Problem is, Krugman's doing the same thing at the other end. He's pretending that the mythical trust fund actually exists and that we will therefore not have to (Final chorus!) raise taxes, cut other spending, shrink benefits, or borrow more money, because the "Trust Fund" has the bonds -- without mentioning that in order to make the payments on the bonds, we are going to have to do exactly the same things to make the pension payments as we would if the bonds were not there.
But the issue is not, as he tries to paint it, whether we have to do these things; only when. The Bush administration has no monopoly on wishful numbers.
-- So why is the Bush Administration doing this? Yes, Pete, sit down; I know that you want to tell me it's because Bush and His Evil Capitalist Cronies are Trying to Take Us All for A Ride. Thank you for your opinion, now please SIT THE HELL DOWN.
No, the Bush administration is putting out these wacky numbers because it wants to sell its program.
And why does it want to sell its program? Yes, thank you, will someone please escort Pete to the men's room? His brain appears to be leaking out his nostrils, and it's ruining the carpet.
It wants to sell privatisation because the Administration believes (no, really!) that it's the right thing to do; just as Clinton, whether or not you agreed with him, believed about NAFTA and Universal Health Care.
So is it?
Well, here's my take on it; it seems to be shared by most of the economists I know.
The benefit of privatisation is not that it will provide outrageously amazing returns; if the economy is growing at 3%, stocks are not going to return 8% year after year. The risk premium isn't that big.
The benefit of privatisation is that it diverts resources into productive investments that the government can't make.
It is black-letter, I'm-not-going-to-argue-about-this-because-it's-proven-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt economics that the government utilizes resources less efficiently than private enterprise for a number of reasons, most of which are some variation on the agency problem, the free rider problem, or the tragedy of the commons. This is not to say that private enterprise utilizes resources perfectly efficiently; only that it is more efficient than the government.
The most basic reduction of the social security crisis is this: currently, each retiree collecting social security is supported by more than three workers. By 2050, that number will be less than 2. If we want to have more people supported by fewer workers without an overall decline in the standard of living, we are going to have to increase the productivity of workers. This is true whether they are taking their living out of the economy through government payments, or payments from private industry. It is the (correct) opinion of the privatizers that investing in private companies now is vastly more likely to produce the productivity increases we need in the future than spending the money (now) on the Trent Lott Memorial University of Mississippi Hogback Research Center and such.
Because money spent by the government almost never increases productivity. The farm bill isn't going to increase productivity, except of things we already have in excess. The military doesn't increase productivity. The many, many "social investment" programs have (look up the numbers yourself!) a dismal productivity record. Of course, that isn't the only reason we have those programs -- but the privatizers (rightly, I think) conclude that making sure that the workers of the future can support all their societal dependants in some modicum of comfort is more important than making sure that every underprivileged green-haired lesbian mother is being the absolute best that she can be.
By taking money out of the tax system and plugging it into private investments, the privatizers hope that productivity increasing investments will plug the demographic gap. They want to get the money out now in order to give the money time to work; investments take time to pay off.
The cheerleaders, like all cheerleaders, play down the problems. For one thing, there's no guarantee that the investments will increase productivity by the amount needed. For another, there's the possibility of distortionary effects on the market and the economy that can't be ignored. And then there's the Keynsian excess savings argument, which I find somewhat convincing, at least to the extent that investors generally overestimate probable returns. Privatizers are not unaware of this; they simply think that the alternative is worse. Leaving the money in the government's hands means lower productivity. And while other changes that have been proposed to fix the current system are certainly necessary and good, there's no reason to think that they will be sufficient; to take just one example, is it really reasonable to think that people are going to work until they are 75? Some people are healthy at that age, but a lot of people aren't -- and the ones the most in need of government support are also the ones most likely to be in jobs that are too physically demanding for a senior citizen.
Howlers
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something," wrote Upton Sinclair, "when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." To make sense of what passes for debate over Social Security reform, one must realize that advocates of privatization — of replacing the current system, at least in part, with a system of personal accounts — are determined not to understand basic arithmetic. Otherwise they would have to admit that such accounts would weaken, not strengthen, the system's finances."
Those wacky economics professors of mine -- poor sods didn't understand arithmetic! That's why they ended up at Chicago, famous refuge for Economists Who Can't Do Math.
Predictive Validity
Singles out the Bush administration. I'm tempted to take off points because he's right; but after accusing the other side of what he himself is doing, not that tempted. PV stands at 9 out of 11, or 82%.
Okay, personally, I think that executing the mentally retarded is wrong. Of course, you'd expect to hear me say that, because I'm against the death penalty. But I think that executing the mentally retarded is even more wrong; mental children should not be punished as adults.
But what is this "evolving national consensus" nonsense? If there were such a consensus, legislators wouldn't make laws that allowed it, and DA's, hyper-political creatures that they are, wouldn't prosecute. What the Supreme Court is saying is that they want the national consensus to evolve in that direction, and are therefore giving it a kickstart by imposing their consensus on everyone else.
I'm a soft communitarian: I believe in the hidden law, and that within reason, it's okay for us to get the right result with the wrong legal argument. But when the court is this high, a good result from bad legal reasoning is worse than a bad result from good reasoning, for it opens the door to an unknowable number of bad rulings to follow.
First, the Communist revolution encourages a huge baby boom. Mao dismisses worries about overpopulation by saying "every mouth to feed also comes with two hands and feet." Fails to notice that it does not also come with two acres of arable land, that being the minimum needed to support life in a country dependant on pre-industrial agriculture.
When the Chinese notice that they now have over a billion people, and that the country can't really support two billion in the next generations, they implement the draconian "1 child" policy.
Apple just gave notice that it's going to miss its earnings targets by 10%.
Now I'm interested: will the "Mac is going to rule the world! 20% market share by 2005, baby!" crowd react to, overreact to, or ignore, this information?
I'm not saying he's not; frankly, I don't care enough to know anything about the subject. But some of the reasoning's hilarious:
One of the great mysteries of Watergate and Deep Throat's identity is why exactly he's wanted to remain anonymous for so long. I mean, during Watergate? Sure. For a while after? Fine. But ten, twenty, thirty years later? Deep Throat may be an odd figure in American history. But for most he'd be a hero, someone who turned on a corrupt administration, the ultimate whistleblower, etc.
After all this time, why wouldn't this person come forward to get some of the limelight?
It's hard to figure ... unless he was someone still operating in those Republican circles where that sort of disloyalty would be very damning and even career-threatening. That is, unless it was someone like Patrick J. Buchanan.
It seems to me that if Buchanan were really concerned about alienating his peeps in the GOP, he'd be more worried about, oh, say, his running for national office on a third party ticket and thus siphoning off some of the party's base during a tight election year than he would about admitting he blew the whistle in a 30 year old political scandal.
Summary Congress is considering a prescription drug benefit. The Democrats are nice and have a good plan. The Republicans are mean and have a bad plan. Neither plan is probably going to get passed.
[For which we can all humbly thank God every day -- ed.]
Highlights -- The best part of the article describes adverse selection, which is a major problem with all types of insurance, but especially those designed to cover risks that are already known, such as current prescription drug costs; only those with above-average risk/consumption will want to buy the insurance, so the average cost goes up, so the insurance company has to raise the price to the new average cost, which means that all those with risk/consumption below the new average cost drop out. . .
-- He does a good job of describing why Medicare doesn't cover prescription drugs
Lowlights -- He predictably shills for the Dems single payer model, but glosses over the most probable outcome of such a plan, which is to destroy the pharmaceutical market for new drugs that are primarily consumed by the elderly. Why? We've been through this before; such a plan will inevitably involve bargaining the price of the drugs consumed by those over 65 to near marginal cost, which will mean no one wants to undertake the task of researching new drugs for that market.
-- He repeats forecast numbers as if they are actually meaningful, so that he can compare them with Bush's tax cut -- and hey! Where's the guy who was complaining about the Bush administration relying on far-off cost calculations?
-- More to the point, if they're political numbers (and they are) those numbers are projected on a trendline; in other words, they assume that having someone else pay for your drugs has absolutely no effect on your consumption of drugs. Done this way, I was recently told, the current cost of Medicare would be 1/10th of what it actually is. The Dems say that their plan would cost $500 billion over ten years. Hah! Want to bet?
Predictiva Validity Test Shills for the Democrat plan; criticizes the Republican plan. PV of 1. Current PV is 8 of 10, or 80%.
Okay, so I cheated. I didn't read the column, but I did see the teaser, so I knew it was going to be about prescription drugs. That's how I knew that Paul Krugman would be plugging the Democratic plan.
[Memo to those who ask how the predictive validity is relevant: if I can predict, before I read them, that Paul Krugman's arguments will inevitably bolster the Dems, how compelling do you think those arguments are from an objective viewpoint?]
So here's a serious offhand question: why the hell do women in Saudi Arabia and like countries cover themselves head to toe in black?
No, that was not an invitation for comments about the Islamic interpretation of the Koranic verses regarding the attire of women (which do not, by the way, mention anything about dressing up like a bed every time you leave the house). What I want to know is, why black? In the world's hottest, sunniest, most miserably prickly-heat-inducing climate, why are these women wrapping themselves in fabric that absorbs heat rather than reflecting it? I mean, maybe the images I'm seeing on television are not a representative sample, and the women only wear black for formal occasions like anti-US rallies. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
Every so often I ask myself why I do this. Why do I keep reading stupid European columnists saying incredibly stupid things about America, things that they would pounce upon like a flaccid, over-cooked, smothered-in-cream-sauce-and-capers wedge of trout if we said such an ignorant, limited, foolish thing about their little plot of blessed soil? Why do I do this to myself?
Take this [expurgated] [expletive deleted] from the Independent. There are, of course, many things to criticize in the Bush administration. And what does this lackwit git seize upon? His foreign policy? His trade protectionism? His uncertain compromise on education?
Why no, of course not. The problem with our president is none of those things, you see; it's his grammar.
I consider myself something of an amateur grammarian. I reveal myself now as that difficult person who spoiled the curve on the SAT's. The Chicago Manual of Style is my bible; Strunk and White, my concordance. I have friends who can be found, in the midst of arguments, shouting "you are not supposed to talk like you write!", which is to say in complete sentences and without split infinitives or incorrect transpositions of "like" and "as".
All of which is to say that I am second to none in my horror of the sin in which the columnist has caught George W. in flagrante delicto: the misplaced modifier.
I have lost count of the times I have been ticked off in recent months, sometimes by quite senior politicians, for suggesting that George W Bush is a complete idiot. He is nowhere near as stupid as he seems, I have been told, a proposition that has some force solely because it is hard to imagine any world leader being afflicted with quite the degree of bovine incomprehension that the President habitually displays. On Monday, for instance, he was on cracking form, announcing in halting English – you'd think he'd be fluent by now – that a dangerous terrorist had been detained and "is now off the streets, where he should be".
As so often with Bush's pronouncements, what he appeared to say – that terrorists should be on US streets – was the opposite of what he meant. Unfair, unfair, his defenders will say: we have never claimed that our man is an accomplished public speaker.
Or they might point out that no one in the entire known universe, not even writers for the Independent, speaks in perfectly arranged sentences every moment of their life because that is not how the human brain is constructed; making sure that none of our modifiers dangled or modifiers were misplaced would slow down conversation to a crawl. The purpose of rigid grammatical rules, in writing, is to substitute for the redundancy inherent in conversation: the context, tone, body language, and ultimately, the ability to correct a misapprehension immediately which, should it occur with a piece of written work, would remain uncorrected.
Of course, this is not an excuse for horrendous grammar, in speech or in writing. Yet the lapses upon which the press pounces are inevitably trivial, evident only in transcripts of speeches; the speeches themselves, when viewed, are perfectly comprehensible. Of course, I may be setting the bar a bit too high in the case of this columnist; as a friend once remarked, the first thing she assumes when she hears that someone is a European journalist is that they are probably just a bit thick.
Of course, it may just be the language barrier. For example, Americans customarily view it as -- I'm afraid I don't know the word in your language -- wrong to use a complete clause as a parenthetical expression, especially when its content is not parenthetical but integral. However, since I understand that the journalist, being unfamiliar with the rules of our language, may have made this mistake inadvertently, I will not draw the logical inference about her total [deleted] stupidity that her article seems to suggest.
Fine, but my other reaction to the announcement – I am being unusually frank here – was, "You credulous git, do you believe every single thing anybody in the administration tells you?" US intelligence agencies are trying to deflect accusations that they failed to pick up warnings of last September's suicide attacks and desperately need the kind of crowing headlines – "US foils al-Qa'ida 'dirty bomb' plot" – that the announcement prompted.
Hello, I'm from the Royal Non-Sequitur Society. Tea cozies make lovely summer gifts!
Did I miss a memo? Was a transition edited out in order to save space for the earth-shaking observation that Bush does not deliver his informal remarks in gilt-edged, copper-plated sentences scripted by one of the itinerant Flauberts on his speechwriting staff?
I am lost. I was wandering around in Bush's grammatical errors, admiring the scenery, when the columnist coshed me on the back of the head and, while I was out, dumped me in the uncharted territory of his foreign policy mistakes. Now, like any kidnapped American tourist, I am in trouble. I don't know how I got here. I don't know why they've brought me to this place. And I haven't the faintest idea as to how I get back to somewhere I recognize, much less somewhere I'd actually care to be.
But the administration was soon backtracking, accused of exaggerating the importance of a US citizen known as Abdullah al-Mujahir, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and changed his name in prison. The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, admitted "there was not an actual plan" to set off a radioactive device in Washington, and it now seems that al-Mujahir's research had not gone much further than surfing the internet. Nor is it clear why he was arrested while on a reconnaissance trip to the US from Pakistan on 8 May, after being under 24-hour surveillance since February, when further observation might have yielded valuable information about al-Qa'ida associates .
It must be the language barrier. The thesis of the article appeared, to my American eyes, to be that he was stupid. Then it appeared to be that he was a liar. I had attempted to synthesize these two into the thesis "Bush is a stupid liar", but this is seemingly belied by her plaints that he has put one over on Britain's senior politicians. With the new paragraph, however, I've given up. Clearly, she doesn't like the Bush administration, and harbors a sneaking fondness for those who wish to blow up things in America. But there does not seem to be any unifying thread holding it all together.
[Yes, I am starting my sentences with conjuctions. I revel in it. And occasionally, I do it just to prove I can. I dare you to correct me. I dare you. I'll have you up to your ass in incorrect idioms and dangling particples faster than you can say "William Safire".]
Meanwhile, a terrorist whose plans were at a rather more advanced stage succeeded in bombing the US consulate in Karachi on Friday, killing 11 people. None of this seems to have fazed the President, whose announcement about al-Mujahir coincided with a decision to transfer him to military custody, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having the more lurid allegations against him tested in open court. Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was not so lucky, having been foolish enough to make grand claims about al-Qa'ida operating in the disputed border territory of Kashmir without a shred of evidence. Rumsfeld's announcement during a visit to India on Wednesday collapsed under questioning from journalists in Islamabad. "I don't have evidence and the US doesn't have evidence of al-Qa'ida in Kashmir," he admitted.
Still looking for evidence to any of the originally identified theses. Stupid? Nope. Liar? Nope. Columnist went out last night on the premise that she'd just write it in the morning, but rosy-fingered dawn has found her too hung over to think straight? Ah. . . .
That is not to say I underestimate the threat from Islamist groups whose motivation is as much their complex and ambivalent relationship with secular modernity as the genuine grievances – the US's uncritical support for Israel and undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia – felt by moderate opinion in Arab countries. But what I am suggesting is that the response of Mr Bush and leading figures in his administration, with the exception of his sadly marginalized Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is akin to a bunch of ham actors staging a noisy hunt for pantomime villains. Think about the search for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, whose whereabouts appear to be as great a mystery to Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft as they are to readers of this newspaper.
A-ha! She's found her nut graf! And I realize that I too, have been leading one of those noisy pantomime hunts -- and that was the point the entire time! She makes us think she's a marginally competent thinker with a thin veneer of recycled wit, when actually she's staging one of those elegant structural prose excercises that used to captivate writers before they abandoned elegance in favor of navel-gazing.
This reminds me of a story.
When I was in college, some of you may be aware that I majored in English. During my stay there, I perfected the art of working exactly hard enough on a term paper to get an A. This was not, I regret to confess, always very hard. In an ideal world, I would have worked as hard as possible, motivated by the pursuit of knowlege, rather than grades. However, in many of my classes, knowlege was rather thin on the ground, and pursuing it would have interfered with my other pursuits, of which more later.
At any rate. I was given an assigment in one class to write about similarities and differences between Uncle Tom's Cabin and a book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which was a slave narrative from before the civil war. As I racked my brain for something to say, it occurred to me to comment on the fact that the actual slave narrative spoke much more kindly of the slave owners than did Uncle Tom's cabin, even though some fairly horrifying things had happened to the author's family. I therefore hit upon the idea of writing about Stockholm Syndrom, which you probably already know is the phenomenon whereby captives (in the epynoynmous case, hostages in the embassy in Stockholm) come, through a mixture of proximity and terror, to identify more thoroughly with their captors than their rescuers.
Tossed off the paper and handed it in. A month passed. Finally, I got it back from the graduate student who had graded it who said, "That was the best undergraduate paper I've ever read. I didn't understand all that stuff you said about Helsinki, but it was incredibly well-written and thought out." Now, keep in mind, I'd written the paper in a couple of hours and forgotten it as soon as I'd handed it in. I couldn't remember what I'd written about, but I was mystified as to how Helsinki might have entered into it. So I smiled and nodded and took back the paper -- A+ -- and read it as soon as I was out of the TA's sight.
I'd been so carried away with my Stockholm Syndrome idea that I'd forgotten to define the term.
Now, this was the backbone of the paper. If you didn't know what Stockholm Syndrome was, it was literally impossible to understand what I'd written about -- I tested this thesis by handing it to multiple friends who had never heard of Stockholm Syndrome.
The TA had given me an A+ because he didn't understand what I was talking about, and therefore figured that I must be smarter than he was, and therefore figured that my paper must be good. That, my friends, is the secret to success in this world; confuse them, then take the money and run.
And what does this have to do with the rest of this post? Well, at first glance it might seem to be an unrelated digression. But dig deeper. You will notice that while the individual paragraphs of my post may have nothing to do with each other on the surface, you are actually being cleverly led to the inescapable conclusion. Which is that I am not very clever, and also that I am insane. Which is exactly the same conclusion I have reached about the author of this piece.
It all comes together now, doesn't it? Take that, PoMo.
Readers of this newspaper, however, are not supposed to know that kind of stuff. It is not your job, or mine, come to that, to have advance knowledge of terrorist outrages. But we are entitled, in a world where what the US President says may affect all our lives, to expect something better than the overblown claims and ignominious climbdowns that are the hallmark of this ignorant, inept administration.
We are entitled, in fact, to direct US foreign policy, even though we have just proclaimed that it is not our job to know anything about potential threats, security issues, or US goals.
How will we do this, you ask? Luckily, the Psychic Friends Network is still operating in Britain.
Frantic displays of patriotism, random round-ups of hundreds of foreigners and unverifiable claims about imminent terrorist attacks cannot conceal the fact that its members do not know what they are doing; any day now, I expect to hear that Switzerland, or perhaps Belgium, has been added to the axis of evil.
You see how I have cleverly foreshadowed the discovery that this columnist is trying to fight a battle of wits with a regiment that's half-strength.
It is not just Mr Bush, as I naively hoped, who is absolutely clueless.
She fooled you all! You thought you'd found the nut graf earlier, but here it is; clever modern inverted design. And it is impossible to disagree.
No, I think we've all got our eyes on someone else who fits that description.
I've gotten some emails over the past few months from liberal correspondents who seem to be unaware that there are economics departments outside of Stanford and Berkely.
Specifically, several of them have mentioned that they have no interest in economists who do not come from those two august institutions, because they seem to be "generally wrongheaded". One correspondent has stated that he refuses to read other economists because "they're a waste of time".
What's shocking is that this fellow works at a University.
Okay, it's not shocking that he's liberal. But it is shocking that he would choose to take all of his economic information from a single school. I went to possibly the most reputable single school in economics, and I wouldn't limit my reading to Chicago economists; for one thing, I'm suspicious of some of their more aggressive theories, and for another, there's a lot of good work going on at other schools; it would be ridiculous to confine myself to one or two departments, no matter how fine. In addition, programs usually end up specializing to some degree, because powerhouse economics professors, just like famous professors in other fields, attract young professors who want to work in the same specialty. So a great program for energy economics might be only mediocre in, say, labor or trade.
But it did make me think more generally about the phenomenon. What are we saying when we say that there are only one or two schools we like? Well, for one thing, it means that the programs are probably outside the mainstream of their profession. Now, they may be doing excellent work. They may even be right; for a long time, political scientists could only work on certain theories at Rochester, because departments everywhere else were in violent, pig-headed disagreement with their ideas. But the broader the scope, the less likely that this is so. In other words, if you think Chicago is the last word in Finance, that's one thing; if you've decided that they are the Only Source for economics of all kinds, you're probably seeking confirmation, not information.
Academic departments, like any organization, are prone to being colonized by those who shut out, through selective hiring, those who disagree with them; that's why companies develop cultures and regulatory bodies almost never change their style after the early years of their inception. The tenure system only makes this more likely, as the colony sticks around for the next fifty years to make sure none of those bad-type people with different ideas get on board. It doesn't happen with every institution, or every single brand of thought, but I think few who have labored in academia (or seriously considered doing so) would fail to recognize the phenomenon.
Which is why I found it surprising that a reader with academic experience would confess that they are so disinterested in learning things about economics that they refuse to have any truck with information sources outside of Northern California. They can't be unaware of the likelihood that these departments, if they are so comfy and other departments are not, are probably colonized by a particular brand of politics. And even if you share those politics, it's still a very good idea to seek information from non-believers.
First of all, all scientists look for data that confirms their beliefs; peer review mitigates, but does not eliminate, this bias. (Ironically, this has been demonstrated by multiple peer reviewed studies, including ones which reviewed not social science, but Biology and Physics.) So it's important to seek academics from the other side; even if you don't agree with their conclusions, they will have apprehended the weaknesses and potential downfalls of your theory more fully than you have. And second of all, in a field like economics there is always the hope and expectation among many in a top-flight department of working in some administration; work does get curtailed or steered away from things which might hurt your chances with your political party of choice. J. Bradford DeLong and Larry Summers are unlikely to voice cogent criticism of the Clinton administration, any more than you'll expect to see Larry Lindsay headlining the problems with Bush's economic plans in 2 or 6 year's time.
A toiler in the groves of academe, even one who isn't a professor, should know this. That's why it's odd that you would say this to me. It's tantamount to saying "I have no interest in finding any information that does not confirm what I have already decided to believe." Okay, but then why do you want to get into an argument with me? It is unlikely that you are going to pop up with some startling economics I haven't seen before (given that we're usually arguing matters of broad public interest); I'm probably not going to be converted by someone who isn't better versed in the subject than I am; and I am certainly not fulfilling your stated goal of keeping you free from uncomfortable facts.
On the other hand, you're reading the site. Probably you're just reading it to find things to rant about on your own web site, but hey, the smallest journey begins with one step. So welcome, pinko trolls; stay awhile and let's chat.
Oh, sure, he acts all innocent, like all he's trying to do is write about his dog. Bah! I say, and Bah! again because it felt so good the first time. What Lileks does, of course, under the guise of producing his daily bleat, is write about dogs so beautifully and completely that there is nothing left to say about doggishness except that Finnegan appears to be the coolest dog ever in the entire universe and also makes me laugh like a child.
