The Archives: December 12, 2015
Smart people who can teach you things who you should intellectually engage with! The highly-estimable Nick Rowe! Scott Lemieux! Chad Orzel!
Plus many people... most of them right-wing... who really have no place in any public sphere focused on reality-based discourse.
When will I be allowed to drop dealing with people like David Broder... John Cochrane... Victor Davis Hanson... Chuck Lane and his merry band of misrepresenters... Megyn Kelly... and Enrique Diaz-Alvarez down the memory hole? When will the day come when they no longer trouble the public sphere?
I have to pause to note what may be the worst: one of Chuck Lane's merry band. Far below the fold we have Clive Crook misrepresenting Larry Summers. Larry Summers does not want and does not think the economy needs more bubbles. He thinks we need changes in policy so that we can get to full employment without a large active ongoing bubble.
Why does he misrepresent? You would have to ask him.
Two Years Ago:
- More Thursday Idiocy: Battling Green-Lanternism Yet Again!: Scott Lemieux vs. Jacobin and Enrique Diaz-Alvarez: Surely Jacobin could do something more useful--like publishing an article on the detailed workings of the sixteenth-century global monetary system by David Graeber?
- Bonus Thursday Real-Time Idiocy: The People Who Think Santa Claus Must Be White
- Special Real-Time Thursday Idiocy Watch: Chuck Lane: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
- A Moral Philosophy Final Exam Question: What Rights Does Robert Nozick Have?: Invisible College Weblogging
- There Is Neither Coast Nor Interior, Nor Border, Nor Breed, Nor Birth: Live from the Roasterie LIII: December 12, 2013
- Thursday Idiocy: the Wall Street Journal and Ronald Reagan on Nelson Mandela
Five Years Ago:
- I Think John Cochrane Is Very Confused...
- Physicist Chad Orzel Comes Perilously Close to Winning the Internet...
- Yet Another One from Nick Rowe
- Time to Go Crouch in the Basement...
- Sunday Morning Monetary Theology
- David Broder Enters This Year's Stupidest Man Alive Contest
And: Bonus Thursday Idiocy Department: Clive Crook Misreports Larry Summers: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? When Larry Summers said:
Even a great bubble [first in high-tech and then in housing] wasn’t enough to produce any excess of aggregate demand.... Even with artificial stimulus to demand, coming from all this financial imprudence, you wouldn’t see any excess...
He wasn't calling for more bubbles.
He was pointing out that an economy that can only attain anything like full employment with stable inflation in a bubble is an economy with something deeply and structurally wrong with it--something that needs to be fixed.
Thus when Clive Crook wrote 'No, Larry Summers, We Don’t Need More Bubbles', he was either (a) being dishonest, or (b) being stupid.
There's a moral responsibility here: either raise your game and don't be stupid, or play your hand honestly.
