Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

But Medium as a platform and a publisher is certainly worth a flyer given the track record of @Ev and the others who work at the place. And I could not in my dreams ever assemble a significantly smarter, wittier, more thoughtful, and more well-intentioned--in short, better--team to try to teach and inform the world about finance and economics than @WhelanKarl, @jamesykwak, @dsquareddigest, @DuncanWeldon, @joshgans, @alexisgoldstein, and @Mark__Buchanan.

And we certainly need a better public sphere for the twenty-first century than we have now.

For example, right now on my other screen the flow of information is about Stephen Moore, Chief Economist--or, rather Chief "Economist"--of the Heritage Foundation. So let me first tell you who Stephen Moore is, and then tell you why he is on my other screen right now:

Who Stephen Moore is: There are only two things you need to know about him. First, from the esteemed Kevin Drum, from back in 2005:

Kevin Drum (2005): Supply-Side Buffoonery: "Stephen Moore's maiden outing... [on] the WSJ editorial board... about the wonders of supply side economics:

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion.

Tax revenue doubled!... [But]... adjust for inflation.... In 1980 dollars, $1,032 billion is actually $670....

[P]opulation increased... $2,283 per person in 1980 and $2,694 per person in 1990. That's not double. It's an increase of 18%... a lot of that is due to consistent tax increases throughout the 1980s....

[W]e can play this game with any decade.... Adjusting for inflation and population growth... [the] 70s produced an increase... of 25%. The Clinton 90s produced... 40%.... Reagan produced the slowest growth in... any decade since World War II. That's a real supply side triumph.

Welcome to the Journal, Steve. You guys deserve each other.

Kevin, of course, is right: If Moore cites a number, and if it surprises you, the way to bet is that the number is either wrong or grossly ripped out of its proper context.

Second, Moore has not changed his spots in the past decade--witness that the Kansas City Star will no longer print pieces by Stephen Moore:

Yael T. Abohalkah (2014): Kansas is at the center of feud after tax cut errors: [Stephen] Moore used outdated and inaccurate... information... [in his]:

No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years; California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops....

Moore... [used outdated] 18-month-old data. [And] Texas did not gain 1 million jobs in the... period Moore measured... [but] 497,400.... Florida did not add hundreds of thousands... [but] lost 461,500 jobs. New York... did not lose jobs... [but] gained 75,900....

With this upshot:

Deron Lee:: Why one editor won't run any more op-eds by the Heritage Foundation's top economist: ‘I won’t be running anything else from Stephen Moore.’ So says Miriam Pepper... of the Kansas City Star.... [Craig] Silverman noted the [wrong] paragraph ‘arguably contains the most important statistics in the piece... the Florida/NY comparison now refutes his claim... very messy....’ It would be good, he said, for the papers to get some comment from Moore ‘about whether his errors undercut his argument.’ The Star did, eventually, get... more than Moore offered at the time of the original correction... only at the end of a ‘snippy’ email exchange in which Moore complained about... [The Star's] further highlighting his errors...

Why Stephen Moore is on my other screen right now: Because of a tweet by Dan Gross:

Please don't tell @NYTimeskrugman and @delong that politico just did a piece noting that many GOP candidates are wooing stephen moore

— Daniel Gross (@grossdm) March 13, 2015

And, lo and behold, it is true: Politico has an article substantially about Stephen Moore. I apologize for the tl;dr quote--but it is essential if you are going to gain what looks to me like the insane tone of the article:

Darren Samuelsohn: The Wooing of a Washington Wonk: Stephen Moore paced the hallways of the Fox News studio one recent afternoon thinking about guest lists. The 55-year-old economist, fresh from a round of live interviews trashing Obamacare and extolling the wonders of hydraulic fracturing, makeup pancaked on his bespectacled face, was co-hosting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker that night at a private dinner at the 21 Club to introduce the 2016 hopeful to New York’s GOP elite....

Moore was... planning another party back in Washington for Sen. Rand Paul... would gather several GOP economic eggheads for a steak-and-wine supper at a Capitol Hill townhouse.... Moore pulled out his Samsung flip phone to connect with Paul’s Senate legislative director. ‘Who’d Rand want at this dinner?’ they asked each other, kicking around a short list of potential boldface names, including former George W. Bush White House adviser Lawrence Lindsey and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist. ‘I do feel like I’m holding down two jobs right now,’ Moore would tell me later. ‘It’s a bit of a grind, but it’s also a labor of love.’...

Moore’s schedule these days [is] like speed dating at a think tank symposium--albeit with better menus and an open bar.... Rick Perry and former New York Gov. George Pataki attended another private dinner Moore co-hosted at the 21 Club.... Within two weeks of his meeting in New York with Walker, Moore would... begin to pencil in events with nearly every other prospective candidate.... For Moore, a paid 2016 campaign job could be the topper to a Washington career that’s placed him at the center of the conservative cause but never within a candidate’s inner circle.... He was excited. ‘I think it’s something everyone wants to do once in their life,’ he said....

Moore... [has] establish[ed himself as a notable public figure espousing supply-side economic policies and mixing it up with Democrats and Republicans.... Moore helped Herman Cain craft his “9-9-9” plan to replace all taxes with just three.... The idea played a part in briefly catapulting the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO to the top of the Republican field.... Moore made his initial moves to link up with 2016 candidates in early 2014.... Rand Paul... sent [Moore] a handwritten congratulatory note.... He and the younger Paul really “hit it off.”... Moore also started making regular visits to see Texas Sen. Ted Cruz....

Moore is quick to note that he goes back two decades with Ohio Gov. John Kasich... was one of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s very first guests in 2008 on his new Fox News talk show. Moore told me he used to exchange three or four emails a year directly with Jeb Bush... met Florida Sen. Marco Rubio while Rubio was the Florida state House speaker.... Moore says he thinks he has a competitive advantage in the wonkosphere: his reputation for being able to break down politics and policy in a way that doesn’t sugarcoat the bad stuff. “Most of these guys,” he said, “are surrounded by yes men.”...

Moore confesses that if he had his way he would work full-time for Team Rand.... “I’ve been genuinely impressed with how much for a doctor he knows economics,” Moore said. He also says he thinks Paul is a pretty nice guy.... There are some promising signs Paul and Moore will establish a formal partnership.... Driving home that Monday night in his black Mercedes, back to his Falls Church home on Freedom Lane, Moore tells me, “Right now I’m not in any camp. I may just decide I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

A couple of days later, the Bush camp called. They wanted Moore and his partners to help set up a dinner in New York. At the 21 Club.

This piece is what my old next-door office neighbor Jack DeVore, then Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen's Assistant Secretary for Public Relations, called a "beat sweetener": the point of such an article is not to inform the article's readers about some person regarded as either being influential or typical in an interesting way, but rather to burnish the reputation of the subject. As such, it omits key parts of the story and so misleads the readers in the interest of achieving that goal. The hope is that the subject of the article will at some future point then open up and preferentially dish to the reporter who has done him the favor of burnishing his reputation.

And, indeed, article says only two things that might be taken to be at all negative about Stephen Moore: First, it says that Moore missed a briefing of George W. Bush in 1999, Moore says because "I don't know what happened. I had never heard back from them, so I just assumed...", Bushies "don't recall the exact chain of events as Moore described them, though they insisted there were no hard feelings..." Second, Samuelsohn writes:

He’s taken a relentless drubbing from liberal economists and columnists like The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who has frequently challenged Moore as part of a group of “economic charlatans and cranks.”

That is it. No observations about publishing the wrong numbers. No observations about how Stephen Moore has been a huge backer of Sam Brownback's Kansas tax-cut state revenue disaster. Nothing about how Herman Cain' 9-9-9 plan blew up in his face because no analyst who could add could get it to work arithmetically no matter how many thumbs they put on these scale. No critical quotes from anybody about the quality of Stephen Moore's analytical work--which would have been the easiest thing in the world to get. In fact, no positive quotes at all from any economist about Stephen Moore as an economist or an analyst. The closest Samuelsohn comes is:

There are very few people who are policy rich, know the stuff, managerially capable and mentally ill enough to take that [candidate's policy expert] job,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former Congressional Budget Office director who ran Republican John McCain’s policy shop in 2008. “They are a certain kind of nuts...

And if one were undertaking an Aesopian reading of Samuelsohn's piece, one might note that the natural next sentence for Doug Holtz-Eakin to say would be: "Stephen Moore is one of those very few people"--and one might then note that Doug Holtz-Eakin does not say that natural next sentence.

Over on Twitter, Samuelsohn's editor Blake Hounshell--who is a smart guy, and was someone I use to hope would be a net force for good in the world--denies the obvious:

@delong if that [a beat sweetener]'s what you think it is then you misunderstand the story

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) March 13, 2015

@delong People will take away different things. But it's really a story about how the game works.

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) March 13, 2015

And James Pethokoukis, who is a force for good in the world, :

@delong @grossdm I don't think it is

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) March 13, 2015

@delong @grossdm It may also secondarily serve that purpose [of being a beat sweetener], but I think it is more about seeing how the wonk-pol courtship works

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) March 13, 2015

So the message I get from this is that there is, still, an enormous need for publications and platforms that will call a spade a goddam shovel, afflict the comfortable, entertain-along-with-informing rather than entertain-instead-of-informing, and be trusted information intermediaries in which the words on the page are there to inform you about what is what rather than to mislead you in the hope that those in whose interest you have been misled will at some point in the future dish the writer a scoop.

If I recall correctly--memory is dimmer as I age--I think Jack DeVore was running the Bentsen Treasury meeting at which I suggested using the old Marshal Lyautey tree-planting story as a rhetorical flourish at the end of a speech:

I am reminded of the story of Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The marshal replied: "In that case, there is no time to lose! plant it this afternoon!"

And when Bentsen saw the speech draft, he asked: "Do you all know that story was one of Jack Kennedy's very favorites when he was a young Congressman?"

Lots of slow-growing trees to be planted around here. Let me look for the goddam shovel.

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