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"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." ~Ryan Lizza. After reading his ridiculous Rolling Stone article on Obama’s “sell-out” to Wall Street, I am persuaded that Matt Taibbi should be forced to write these two Ryan Lizza sentences a few thousand times by hand until he has absorbed their message. The problem is not Taibbi’s reporting on the administration’s actions and personnel, but with the overall interpretation he gives to the facts. No one believed that Obama was “standing up to Wall Street” when Tim Geithner and Larry Summers were appointed to top economic Cabinet and advisory posts, and everything that has happened since then is consistent with the modern Democratic Party’s accommodation with Wall Street that has been steadily intensify...
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David Kennedy of Stanford opens his review of Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" with a claim that AEA founding president Francis Amasa Walker defined an economist as a faithful believer in laissez-faire, “not... the test of economic orthodoxy, merely.... [But] used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.” Why am I not surprised that Francis Amasa Walker actually said something very different? Francis Walker did not say that belief in laissez-faire determined "whether a man were an economist at all." What Francis Walker said in "The Recent Progress of Political Economy in the United States" was: (a) the better part of economists had never imposed such a test, (b) the worse part of economists in the United States who posed as "guardians of the true [laissez-faire] faith" had lost their influence, and (c) the subject was much the better for it...
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A string of stronger-than-expected economic reports provoked several analysts to revise up their projections for fourth quarter gross domestic product. The reports show that businesses are rebuilding inventories at a faster pace than many economists thought, consumer spending has been firmer than expected and the U.S. trade deficit narrowed. GDP expanded at a 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter. Now it looks like it’s going at a fast pace in the fourth quarter. If it’s sustained, that could help to bring down the unemployment rate...
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It is hardly the role of the Fed to be deciding that it knows better than the market what the price of every asset should be. Nevertheless, I think it is necessary for the Fed at least to be forming an opinion about what's driving asset prices as one input into the Fed's decision making. Booming U.S. real estate prices were accurately signaling that there was a problem with both the interest rate target and financial supervision, and it's desperately important to ensure that this same mistake is never repeated. Of course, it's easy enough to say what should have been done in 2004. but the real challenge is figuring out what to do in 2010. Are commodity prices experiencing a bubble right now?... [O]ther economic objectives take precedence at the moment, and it is too early to start raising rates yet. But it is not too early to remember that there are limits to how much you can help the U.S. economy by keeping interest rates low.
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Oh, my. Paul Samuelson has died. He had a long, good life; yet he will be sorely missed. It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars. And he was a wonderfully down-to-earth human being besides. For a number of years I shared an office suite with him and Bob Solow; he always had time to talk
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WASHINGTON – A White House economic adviser says it would be "suicide" for the government to focus exclusively on the deficit when the economy is sorely in need of jobs.
Christina Romer says money freed up from the repayment of financial bailout funds gives the government the leeway to boost try to employment while seeking to control the deficit over the longer term. She says "no one is talking about raising taxes" during a recession to pay for the proposed new stimulus plan. Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was asked Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether the recession was over, She said it might be over in official terms, but that it's not truly over until unemployment goes back down to normal levels, in the range of 5 percent.
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So, after hours of research, I can dismiss [climate denier] Mr Eschenbach. But what am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don't know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? Do I have to waste the time of the readers of this blog with yet another long post on the subject?... Well, here's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further "smoking gun" claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story...
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Sullivan didn't suggest that this suicide bomber and his world-view were absurd, but that they were evil--not the same thing at all. The DinA writer appears to believe that if some course of action can be described as "rational" (in a sense that appears to mean it's coherent and goal-directed), then ipso facto it can't be considered "evil". But that's silly. Let's suppose that I make a living by murdering people for their money. Or let's suppose that I make a practice of systematically murdering people on the basis of a coherent and internally consistent world-view, backed up by appropriate authorities, which tells me that they are agents of a Martian conspiracy. Or let's suppose that I systematically capture, torture, and murder random individuals just because doing so gives me satisfaction.... In any of these three cases, the DinA writer could describe me as being, in his terms, "a very rational actor". Well, so what?
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If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don't give me that "It's not attached to me" argument. You're already a cyborg. Deal with it...
