L'Esprit de l'Escalier: March 15, 2013
Overheard: Q: "Who is most worth reading these days who is writing in the New Keynesian tradition?" A: "Pascal Michalliet (and Emmanuel Saez), Michael Woodford, and Yuriy Gorodnichenko."
Q: "How is the business of making space for social democracy in a neoliberal age?" A: "You need to get a new line: I cannot do anything. I am paralyzed. I can get no traction until you first make the world safe for vulgar Keynesianism."
The elimination of the [Washington Post] ombudsman position will not erode both credibility and criticism. Instead, it will erode credibility and increase criticism! We will redouble our efforts! Correct Thought is the thought of the populace. The populace cannot betray the populace or the Group of Seventeen! Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts! http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/03/04/1666981/eliminating-the-washington-post-ombudsman-will-save-the-paper-criticism-but-not-credibility/
"Um. Your clown picture. I think you may have an Inigo Montoya/Vizzini issue…. [The] 'Insane Clown Posse'… is not really a 'clown' per se, but rather a dark and disturbing simulacrum of a clown. A bit more of the original, perhaps Mephistopheles/Devil type clowns of the early modern era." Yes! A dangerous clown… "But I would submit 'Insane Clown Posse', of which I hasten to add I do not approve, suggests a self-aware clown. A clown that knows and revels in its very clownness." Touché… "It is an evocative picture though. I miss the Mayberry Machiavellis." Yes. At least the Mayberry Machiavellis wanted to govern. The current crop of Republicans only want to (a) hold onto their jobs, (b) get lobbying jobs/wingnut welfare after they leave, or (c) scream at the world. Of course, there are a lot of dead people in Iraq who do not especially miss the Mayberry Machiavellis…
You mean that you believe the White House thinks: "Because Christie Romer was right not just in 2009 but 2011, we don't want her as Fed Chair!"!?
So at dinner I was asked me why the Democratic base--less sane, they claimed, than the Republican base in the late 1970s--was now much more sane than the Republican base today. I didn't do too good a job of laying out the alternative theories. I wanted to say (a) a march of the thinktanks making arguments that, for example, using market mechanisms for pollution control was not inherently immoral; (b) the defection of the white south meant that Democrats had to grab the progressive pragmatic Eisenhower-Republican north, which Clinton did; (c) that the Republican base had always been this crazy--see Before the Storm--but had (d) been under control via party discipline mechanisms which had broken down; (e) the rise of the Koch brothers and their ilk due to rising wealth inequality had given the crazy base elite allies; and (f) it used to be that in the days of the solid south a good half of the right-wing crazies were marginalized by being members of the Democratic Party. I'm unlikely to get people to divert their focus enough to closely read Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, and that is only one piece of this argument. Does anybody lay out this argument as a whole in a piece that is (a) short and (b) convincing?
At a policy level, over-paying over-treating specialists via reimbursement rates, overpaying insurance companies via Medicare Advantage, overpaying for-profit hospital executives, and general bureaucratic inefficiency have been taking Medicare to the cleaners for a generation. ObamaCare is taking that wasted money back and deploying it where it can do some good.
Paul Ryan wants to force everybody to sign up for Medicare Advantage, let the insurance companies decide on their own how much extra they want to charge you--and then cut back what the Federal government pays. How well is that going to work?
"People who search for Brad DeLong also search for: Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Barry Eichengreen, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein, Christie Romer, Andrei Shleifer, Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Dean Baker, Milton Friedman, Joe Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik, Ken Rogoff, Hyman Minsky, Robert Barro, Martin Wolf, Bob Shiller, Scott Sumner. by and large, a gallant company. But I have to ask about…" "Hey! That's not who I search for! That's who people who search for me also search for! Don't ask me what I am thinking, ask them what they are thinking!
