Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Let me toss my hat in with Matt Yglesias and say that I don't quite know what Greg Mankiw has in mind when he writes that "We are all supply-siders now." The term "supply-side economics" has done a really bang-up job of shedding all meaningful definitional content over the past decade. But my sense is it usually refers to one of three claims, and not the one Greg has in mind. Here's my quick and dirty taxonomy: The "strong" version of the supply side argument is that tax cuts will generate enough growth to increase tax revenue.... I don't think anyone uses the term "supply-sider" how Greg Mankiw seems to be using the term -- which is to describe someone who believes in the general proposition that taxes affect incentives. Everyone believes that! But I can assure Greg that all of us are not supply-siders.

That's the new book by Diego Gambetta and it is the best applied book on signaling theory to date.  Gambetta's task is well summarized by a single sentence: "Given these propensities, one wonders how criminals ever manage to do anything together." The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard.  On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness, namely that they are criminals in the first place.  This is useful for both meeting other criminals and also for intimidating potential victims.  On the other hand, the criminals wish to signal that they are potentially cooperative, for the purpose of working with other criminals.  Sending these dual signals isn't easy and Gambetta well understands the complexity of the task at hand.

Johnson is saying that while many Southern Democrats may have been hard-bitten white supremacists others knew perfectly well that they were doing the wrong thing and just did it anyway. Johnson argued that it was time to knock it out: “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing.”

Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that Marc Ambinder’s “the hippies were wrong to be right” post is such a classic that it merits further discussion.... The rules of modern day punditry are almost as complex as those of modern day wingnuts (minus the boycotts, I guess). Whether or not something is rational is of no relevance. Arcane mixtures of “balance”, deference to power, and “seriousness” have completely replaced common sense.