Ideological Orthodoxy And Saint Elsewhere

Matt Ygleisas made a great point earlier today when he highlighted a throw away sentence from a Washington Post piece about how difficult it really is for the modern GOP to actually enact new policies. As the piece inadvertently points out basically their ideological orthodoxy is hemming them in:

As they cast about for ideas, Republicans are struggling to find policies that match the simplicity and gut appeal of such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage without violating core conservative principles by increasing spending or interfering with market forces.

As Yglesias then quips, "Many of us in America are struggling to find weight loss strategies that don't require us to spend more time at the gym or eat less food. It turns out to be challenging." This is precisely right. As long as the GOP refuses to spend money or "interfere with market forces" (whatever the hell that's suppose to mean) they aren't going to have much success coming up with economic policies that appeal everyone not in the 1%.
The logical solution here is to dump those orthodoxies, but I don't real see any evidence of that happening at all. Oh well.


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My writing over at the Good Men Project has been taking up most of my blogging time as of late, so if you want to read more of my stuff I'd suggest heading over there. I'm not planning on shutting down Longwalkdownlyndale in the near term however and I hope to be able to post more in February. In the meantime here's three of my most recent pieces:

Obamacare is actually not going away.

Hillary Clinton is conintuing to pick up major wins in the invisible primary.

And my take on why the coverage of the State of the Union is often so bad.

What Does It Mean To Be A Public Intellectual? And Saint Elsewhere

The recent media fiasco everyone is talking about Twitter was one that hit the trifecta of race, cable news, and the question of who is "America's foremost public intellectual." Basically Melissa Harris-Perry got in big trouble, that is people got mad at her on Twitter, after she made fun of Mitt Romney's grand kids while guest hosting a show on MSNBC. She ended up apologizing which makes sense, racial humor about a politician's grandchildren is "over the line" when it comes to American political culture.

But that wasn't the end of it, the whole apologizing incident caused another row after The Atlantic's Ta-nehisi Coates wrote about her and called her "America's foremost public intellectual." And Politico's Dylan Byer's went to Twitter (the best place to debate the subject of who America's foremost public intellectual is of course) to say "Ta-Nehisi Coates's claim that "Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual" sort of undermines his intellectual cred, no?" This provoked another Twitter war, and it does seem unfair to me to criticize Coates's intellectual credibility because he disagrees with you.

But then again the whole fight struck me as being pretty silly, mainly because nobody defined their terms. Coates seems to think that all "intellectuals" must be academics or something, and that their CV's not their impact propels them to greatness. He argued Harris-Perry wins because:

Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation. I made this claim because of her work: I believe Harris-Perry to be among the sharpest interlocutors of this historic era—the era of the first black president—and none of those interlocutors communicate to a larger public, and in a more original way, than Harris-Perry. 

I suppose I should take the time now to say I had never heard of her until Coates wrote about how screw up on cable news.

Maybe that just means that I'm an idiot, or an uneducated philistine, but I think there's something more here, namely how detached from American society and actual politics academia has really become. I bet few regular people have ever heard of her, no matter how good her CV is. But that's just because few people follow academics!

A better way to look at it would be to look for "people who write stuff that has a big impact." Under that definition it's not really clear what impact Harris-Perry has actually had. The bogus study sited by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff (published in their book!) which has been totally debunked was used an intellectual justification for lots of the austerity policies we've seen all over the developed world. By my definition that's a whole lot more important than anything anyone at the Tulane history department has done, because the effects of impoverishing whole nations matters more in the course of millions of people's lives and world history than being a trustee at the Century Foundation.

But maybe I'm just an idiot, since Coates doesn't really explain what she did and why it's important I'm sort of in the dark. Personally though I think if you are going to charge out with a huge sweeping statement that basically says some Tulane academic is more important than, oh I don't know John Nash, whose ideas about Game Theory underpinned the creation of the entire modern financial system that crashed in 2008-2009 creating the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression as well of much of the modern study of economics (as well as being used in "computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory") well then I need more than she wrote two books.

But then again maybe that's just a round about way of saying the work of academics matter little in and of themselves, what matters is what happens once their ideas come out of the stuffy confines of their seminars and tomes and into the world of big business and politics.


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Here's some links from my work at The Good Men Project:

Former Secretary of Defense’s New Memoir Shows Depressing Lack of Context.

Attention Liberals, Here’s How It’s Done.

Our Shrinking Prison Population.

North Carolina’s Unemployment Experiment.

Andrew Sullivan's Terrible Awards

I've actually never taken the time to look into Andrew Sullivan's annual "Daily Dish" awards before. They mainly focus on, much like Sullivan's writing, political punditry. So he has one like the "Malkin Award" for unhinged conservative kookery.

That sounds like good fun and games.

But then some of his nominee's this year are just terrible. He's giving out a "Dick Morris Award" for worst prediction, but awarded it to one made by Paul Krugman from 1998! It was:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other…. By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s...

So yeah that's obviously wrong, but why are you awarding the 2013 Awards to something from a decade and a half ago? If you are going to use historically wrong predictions, why not nominate Field Marshall Montgomery's claim in the fall of 1944 that the war would be over by Christmas? Why not nominate the claims by Confederates that one southern solider was worth 10 Yankees? What on earth does this have to do with 2013?

And if we are going to use past predictions why aren't Sullivan's predictions about the Iraqi nuclear program and how great the Iraq War was going to be (or any other warhawk's predictions) put up every year too?

Then it gets worse. He nominated Kevin Drum's prediction that:

“Traffic on the Obamacare sites will settle down pretty quickly, and that will take care of most of the overloading problems. The remaining load problems will be solved with software fixes or by allocating more servers. Bugs will be reported and categorized. Software teams will take on the most serious ones first and fix most of them in short order. Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked. … I’ll say this: If there are still lots of serious problems with these websites on November 1, I’ll eat crow. But I doubt that I’ll have to,”

But isn't that where we basically are today? And where we've been since late November? Oh okay, everything wasn't fixed with the Obamacare website by November 1, but most people agree it was working pretty well by mid-November. Is Sullivan really saying that Drum missing when the website would be workable by two weeks is some massive failure? And hell, this is pretty qualified prediction ("I'll eat crow.") to boot.

I know some people who love Sullivan for some reason, but I really don't get him. His strengths are so massively outweighed by his faults. Oh well maybe next year Sullivan will get nominated for his prediction on September 16, 2001 that, "The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column." Turns out we didn't, that was wrong prediction too.

The Tories And Saint Elsewhere

Paul Krugman made an excellent point in his column today about David Cameron's tenure as British Prime Minister. Basically after taking over in 2010 the new Conservative government imposed harsh austerity on Britain in attempt to "trim their way to growth." The results where spectacularly bad with the British economy is still smaller than it was five years ago. Now that the economy is finally starting to grow again, all be it at a very slow pace. As a result David Cameron's Tories are claiming vindication after half a decade of failure. Krugman pointed out that claiming victory now is a lot like the old Three Stooges gag where Curly bangs his head against the wall:

Economies do tend to grow unless they keep being hit by adverse shocks. It’s not surprising, then, that the British economy eventually picked up once Mr. Osborne let up on the punishment.

But is this a vindication of his austerity policies? Only if you accept Three Stooges logic, in which it makes sense to keep banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop. 

Yes, exactly.

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Over at The Good Men Project I had a number of posts recently. I talked about our failed embargo against Cuba, how Republicans are open to new revenues when they are called "fees," the silliness of trying to depoliticize Nelson Mandela, the annoying GOP tendency to see outrages at every funeral attended by Democrats, Rick Santorum's attempt to bring back the death panel myth, and how Paul Ryan is a lot like those German nihilists from "The Big Lebowski."

Time's Person Of The Year And Saint Elsewhere

So the Pope got named Time Magazine's Person of the Year and there's a lot of talk about whether this is a "good" or "bad" choice. The choice sort of makes sense to me, the Pope is important and moving the Catholic Church away from doctrinal questions about regulating human (largely female and gay) sexuality and instead addressing things like social inequality and poverty will probably be important in the long run.

But honestly Time's list has always struck me as being pretty goofy. Sometimes they seem to try and pick "the most important person" that year, sometimes they seem to want to pick "the person(s) we should all try and be like", and sometimes they pick intangible patriotic concepts for some reason like "The American Fighting Man" or "Middle Americans." Heck they even come up with really silly ideas that aren't really people at all like "The Computer." And some people on the list I had to look up because I had no idea who they were like like Pierre Laval.

Basically its a silly list that tends to grow sillier as the years go on, picking the Pope is a vote for trying to make the list less silly, but it's not like it actually matters or anything.


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Over at The Good Men Project I talked about how the minimum wage will likely be a big issue in 2014 and how shows like Scandal and House of Cards gets conspiracies in politics all wrong.
 

Michelle Obama Is Not A "Feminist Nightmare" And Saint Elsewhere

Recently Politico decided to publish an article about why Michelle is a "feminist nightmare." To be sure, these types of "provocative" articles are in no small way a sort of clickbait. By writing an article designed to annoy feminists you can cause a lot of people to post about the article and why they didn't like it on social media and their own personal blogs. You can even get professional writers to take you to task as well. You might look kind of silly in the end, but at the same time you drive traffic to your site, if only from people who are mad at you. In the blogging biz we call this "trolling."

But personally I found the Politico article haranguing Michelle Obama to be really frustrating. Why? Well, there's basically no nice way to say this, so I'll just say it: in her Friday cover Michelle Cottle showed a deep lack of understanding about how the government of the United States actually functions.

To review: the First Lady does not hold a policy or administrative position, like say United States Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, in fact her position is not even an elected or appointed office. So saying things like "...Michelle Obama is not about to tap her inner wonk..." is silly because not tapping your inner wonk makes sense when you aren't in a policy position. And again I hate to be rude, but the last time the a First Lady was given a major policy initiative was when Hillary Clinton was put in charge of the First Clinton Administration's health care policy. As I recall it ended in disaster. Not because Hillary Clinton is dumb or anything like that, but because of the fact that her position was very much unsuited for the task of building a coalition in Congress to pass a bill. It's not her fault that it failed, the failure was in large part because of a flawed approach to passing bills in Congress and Bill Clinton's overall dismal transition during his first two years.

It's like if I told Cottle that she needs to do more to improve education in the Mississippi Delta. She would probably respond with something like "Yes John, I agree that is a problem, but I'm a writer, not a philanthropist or Governor of Mississippi so I don't really control the educational policies there." I could then write a screed about how Collet "isn't a good feminist" because she doesn't care about the issue of girls being poorly educated in the Mississippi Delta but that would be silly because it's the institutional and structural reality that's driving things, not her failing as a feminist or whatever.

Michelle Obama raising issues like obesity in low income and minority communities does in fact make sense because these are issues that otherwise completely ignored. So actually she knows exactly what she's doing.


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Over at The Good Men Project i recently wrote about how the issue of unemployment hasn't exactly gone away, I also revisited the media's coverage of George Zimmerman over the summer and compared to it the silence now that he keeps getting caught up in incidents of alleged domestic violence, and wrote about why we should be thankful for our politics.

On The Minneapolis Fed Shake Up

There's been a big staff shake up at the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve. If you don't know much about the Fed you should first read Matt Yglesias's great overview from 2011. I'd also recommend Paul Krugman great piece for The New York Times Magazine from 2009 about the state of the "dismal science" to get a good look at divisions inside the discipline.

Simply put, the Minneapolis Fed, along with a few other regional branches like Dallas and Kansas City, have been consistent advocates of a hard money approach to monetary policy. They've been arguing for years now that the Fed should tighten credit in order to head off non-existent and imaginary inflation.

The result has been a divided central bank under Bernanke that knows what it needs to do, for example pull out all the stops to help alleviate unemployment and heal our nation's economic wounds, but can't go "all the way" so to speak because of Ben Bernanke's moral cowardice and a wrongheaded obsession with "consensus" that allows the hard money wingnuts to tie the Fed's hands.

Enter Narayana Kocherlakota, the current president of the Minneapolis Fed. Kocherlakota is the former chair of the economics department at the University of Minnesota (along with the University of Chicago a stronghold of hard money fire eaters and the idea that the marketplace is what some have called "a perfectly self-correcting instrument" and other such silliness) who, unlike few members of his profession, has changed his mind over the past few years in light of the the experience of the "Lesser Depression." Basically Kocherlakota used to be a hard money kook and believed that there was nothing that the Federal Reserve could possibly do to ease unemployment. Then he actually changed his mind about something in light of reality. Kocherlakota decided that there were things that the Fed could do to help address unemployment and, amazingly, publically annouced this view.

He recently appeared to have decided to fire his research director, then another researched was removed, and yet another monetary policy "adviser" named Ellen McGrattan was forced into taking unpaid leave. Ellen didn't like that one bit and she was all outraged to Minnesota Public Radio, "I'm a monetary adviser, by the way. The job is to advise the president. He has chosen not to use me in that capacity."

To which I would reply with something along the lines of:

"Yes he did, and good for him! Your "research" is a bunch of silly nonsense that has been proven totally wrong over the last five years and you refusing to take this into account shows that you are a terrible "adviser." You coauthored a paper back in 2008 where you argued that monetary policy can't do much to affect the unemployment rate. This was obviously pretty silly back then and now is an egregious error, (note that Ireland, Iceland and Israel all dealt with the global downturn with different monetary policies, this has resulted in radical different experiences between them. So yeah, you're an "expert" on monetary policy in the same way phrenologists were "experts" on intelligence.) no matter. You'll obviously get an easy gig teaching econometrics or whatever at the University of Minnesota where you and the rest of the "New Classicals" can be bitter about how horrible Obama is and what an unappreciated genius Alan Greenspan was. Okaythanksbye."

I've noticed some hand-wringing by econ folks on twitter over this new development. They, and the Wall Street Journal, seem to be following the view that this has nothing to do with disputes about policy and is more of a Kocherlakota-going-nuts type story. To which I have to say: I honestly don't care. Maybe Kocherlakota got drunk and did this on a whim, maybe he really is a mad dictator obsessed with power, maybe he just believes in things like the idea of the free market and meritocracy and thus doesn't believe high level research gigs at a branch of the Federal Reserve are entitlements that should be handed out to the enlightened few. As I see it, it's just great to see these folks kicked to the curb. In fact as MPR has pointed out this will probably severly strain, and maybe even break, the long standing ties between the Minneapolis Fed and the University of Minnesota's econ department, "If the Minneapolis Fed is going to split from the U's economics professors philosophically, it's not clear whether that mutually beneficial relationship will hold up."

But that relationship not "holding up" is a really good thing! Rather than letting one of the branches of the Fed be captured by hard money kookery and Randian nonsense from the so called "freshwater" school of economics, we could see people who are, you know...uhh...right about stuff, take over in Minneapolis! It will also put pressure on the U of M's econ department to be...uhh...right about stuff instead of resting on the laurels of a "close relationship" with a branch of the Fed.


All in all this is a wonderful development.


This post probably sounds a little harsh, but as I see it these people kind of deserve it. The hard-money-inflationistas that call Minnesota and the University of Chicago home are responsible in my book for a great deal of human suffering in this world. As someone who graduated from college into what would soon become the disastrous job market that they helped to create and prolong, I can't feel sorry for them. Now we are even.