Noted for June 5, 2013
Josh Barro: The Reformists and Me | Jonathan Portes: Monetary policy and fiscal consolidation? | Duncan Black: Eschaton: Repetition | Dani Rodrik: Turkey’s protesters have been let down by all sides | John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace | Brad DeLong: Robert Skidelsky (2000), "John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain" | William Galston and Elaine Kamarck (1989): The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency | Storm of Swords: "It gets better--not really" | Mike the Mad Biologist: Maybe We Should Give Up on Peer Review and Just Dump Everything in ArXiv | James Pethokoukis: Have conservative reformers really won the battle on monetary policy? Not quite… | Paul Krugman: Our Driven Elite (Trivial and Time-Wasting) | Transcript: Larry Summers on Austerity | Brad DeLong: Where the Money Is Going to Be | Ezra Klein: Ron Brownstein thinks Rick Perry may be about to turn Texas blue | Josh Barro: Erick son of Erick shows the worst in GOP | Tuesday Delong-Being-Stupid Self-Smackdown Stock Market Forecast Watch (1995) |
Duncan Black: Eschaton: Repetition: "What Daniel Hallin (via Jay Rosen) called the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy seems to be changing. Since Serious People don't acknowledge dirty hippies, it's hard to know whether we've had anything to do with that. Perhaps the R-squared embarrassment was a tipping point, giving cover for people to change positions without admitting having been idiots. Still--encouraging!"
Josh Barro: The Reformists and Me: But while market monetarism is the shining success of the conservative reform movement, it also points to trouble for the reformists. We have had zero success in convincing Republican elected officials that easy money is ever a good idea. The Republican party has gotten, if anything, more rabidly afraid of inflation and more flirtatious with the idea of returning to a gold standard. The 2012 Republican National Convention adopted a platform calling for a “commission to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar. In this specific case, the reformists were able to get a hearing from the Republicans who count: the ones at the Fed, including Ben Bernanke. But in almost any other area, changing the conservative policy agenda will require getting Republican politicians to listen to you. And on that subject, Pethokoukis ran a disheartening quote from an anonymous GOP Senate staffer: 'It’s not that we don’t know about your ideas or understand them. We just don’t think they’re any good.' This is the key problem for reformists — actual Republican elected officials aren't interested in what we have to say unless it can be used to craft anti-Obama talking points. That has me pessimistic about changes in areas beyond monetary policy, and it makes me angry. And I suspect, in time, it will make my fellow reformists angry, too."
James Pethokoukis: Have conservative reformers really won the battle on monetary policy? Not quite…: "Right-of-center market monetarists like myself have made no detectable progress in bringing along the politicians, particularly the inflation-obsessed Washington Republicans. In the battle of the Austrians versus the (Milton) Friedmanites, the former still hold the field…. And this matters economically, as well as politically. The market monetarists’ (so far) failed evangelism means the Fed may be a bit less likely to pursue more aggressive monetary easing despite inflation running below the bank’s 2% target and the labor market a shambles. While the US central bank is independent, it can’t get too far ahead of Congress — at least if it wants to stay independent. So not only is the GOP’s adamantium-hard money policy view likely, to some extent, keeping the Fed from doing more, it might make the bank’s current efforts less effective since investors and consumer and business know Team Bernanke can’t do 'whatever it takes' to get the economy back to trend. This reality may be reflected in American’s depressed expectations of income growth. I’ll tell you this: Watching Washington operate the past few years makes it abundantly clear how a nation like Japan could settle into a long stagnation."
Mike the Mad Biologist: Maybe We Should Give Up on Peer Review and Just Dump Everything in ArXiv: "Consider this abstract, 'Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again'…. 'A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables… we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments…. With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as 'serious methodological flaws'…. Let’s leave aside the complete breakdown of any plagarism detection systems. If I did the probability theory right, the rejection of previously accepted papers is indistinguishable from the editors deciding to randomly accept papers with a twenty percent acceptance rate (with an acceptance rate of 20%, the probability of rejecting 9/9 papers is 13%, and the probability of rejecting 8/9 is 30%). I suppose the good news is that the study is too underpowered to detect a rejection rate definitively greater than would be expected randomly."
Paul Krugman: Our Driven Elite (Trivial and Time-Wasting): "Like many of us, Atrios is still having fun with the hysterical WSJ screed against rental bicycles. Unusually for him, however, I think he fails to fully recognize the role of class…. Driving around Manhattan in your personal car unless circumstances totally compel it is completely crazy…. However, the Journal isn’t reflecting the attitudes of people who drive around Manhattan; it’s reflecting the attitudes of people who are driven around Manhattan. The point is that, even in Manhattan, there’s something to be said for getting places in your personal car driven by your personal driver, who drops you off where you want to go — no search for parking or anything like that — and picks you up when you want to go someplace else…. We shouldn’t think of the Journal as reflecting people who try to live in Manhattan as if they were upper-middle-class suburbanites; it’s reflecting people who are members of the modern carriage trade, and who get annoyed at the proletarian peddlers getting in the way of their chauffeurs."
