Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Hoisted from the Archives from 2001: Information Technology and the Future of Society: My CITRIS Kickoff Talk http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/hoisted_from_th.html: But now as we try to realize the technological promise of information technologies, the old forms of economic organization no longer have a natural fit with the requirements of technological development and economic growth. Once an "information good" has been produced, sharing it with another person doesn't reduce the rest of society's resources and opportunities. So there is no efficient-distribution reason to charge a price for it. But where then does the flow of signals to assess which production organizations are efficient come from? In an earlier age we would be more inclined to rely on government funding, but these days we have a keen awareness of the advantages in applied development at least of semi-Darwinian competitive mechanisms, where investigators are responsible to investors seeking profits and not to committees seeking whatever committees seek... 2007-04-01 (2001-09-01)

The Secret Language of Central Bankers http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/brad_delong_the.html: The more central banks talk, and the clearer they try to make their language, the more it seems that markets may be reacting excessively and inappropriately to statements that are not really news at all. More information may be leading not to better knowledge, but to more confusion... 2007-04-02

In Which I Fall Down on the Job... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/in_which_i_fall.html: "I don't have the heart to surf on over to Luskin's web site and point out stupid errors, and egregious tendentious deliberate misinterpretations.... I can, however, grab two truly unbelievable--but, alas! not atypical--examples... 2007-04-02

Journamalism Watch: Michael Gordon, Max Frankel, Fred Hiatt http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/journamalism_wa.html: To put it bluntly: when a story by the New York Times's Michael Gordon appears, I can't tell whether it is accurate, whether Michael Gordon's sources are lying to him (and he is letting them do so by not blowing them when they do so), or whether Michael Gordon is lying to us. Gordon would deserve the benefit of the doubt if I were confident that he was trying his best to inform rather than misinform us. I am not. And Reihan shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt either... 2007-04-08

Michael Novak of AEI vs. Saint Ambrose of Milan Cage Match on the Meaning of Easter http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/michael_novak_o.html: "'The liturgy at St Mathew's was one of the most beautiful.... [But] it is not the human performance... that ought to hold our attention, but the real abandonment and cruel suffering of Christ on the Cross, in a demonstration of how much the Lord loves us, despite our faults and our miseries and our own emptiness...' Saint Ambrose certainly doesn't think that on Easter Sunday 'our attention' ought to be held by "the real abandonment and cruel suffering of Christ on the Cross...' Saint Ambrose's attention is elsewhere... 2007-04-08

Ross Douthat Claims That the Press Didn't Pull Its Punches on George W. Bush http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/ross_douthat_cl.html: The second counterexample is Tom Ricks, also of the Post, to demonstrate that the press pulled its punches in the runup to the war. Tom Ricks now says that he believed in March 2003 that Iraq had no ongoing WMD program--"I thought that at most they would find some old mustard gas buried out in the '91 war that somebody had forgotten about"--yet there he was writing about how http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/why_oh_why_cant_1.html: "One major early mission of U.S. forces would be to locate and secure Iraq's suspected arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, [General Richard] Myers said. The U.S. government expects to learn far more about those weapons programs once its forces invade Iraq...." You cannot--I cannot, at least--place Tom Ricks's book Fiasco at my right hand and his earlier Post coverage of Iraq on my left without getting sick http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/thomas_e_ricks_.html... 2007-04-09

Kai Bird Thinks That Alger Hiss Wasn't the "Ales" Mentioned in VENONA http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/kai_bird_thinks.html: It's the wrong headline. The evidence--if correctly interpreted--points to somebody else rather than Alger Hiss being "Ales".... My view: Would Richard Nixon and company have forged evidence against Alger Hiss if they had had the opportunity? Yes, at the drop of a hat. Did they have the opportunity? Probably not. Was Alger Hiss at some time a spy for the Soviet Union? Probably. Is there a reasonable doubt? I have doubts, and I am not sure that my doubts are unreasonable... 2007-04-09

How Supply-Side Economics Trickled Down... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/how_supplyside_.html: I'm less sure that Bruce Bartlett was on the side of the angels on growth policy.... In practice... it seemed to me that Bruce's political masters like Jack Kemp were excesssively eager to throw the "budget in balance or surplus on average over the business cycle," and that the eager embrace of deficits and their crowding-out of investment did more harm than the focus on reducing marginal tax rates did good. We can argue about that, however... 2007-04-10

The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/the_us_equity_r.html: We have a new draft of J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin (forthcoming), "The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future," Journal of Economic Perspectives: http:// It's good. It's not great yet. But we hope to make it great... 2007-04-12

Yet More Journamalism from the Economist: The History of Neoconservatism http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/yet_more_journa.html: "Perhaps my big problem with the Economist is that I got used to it as it was at the beginning of the 1980s--when it rarely, rarely said things that weren't true. And even when the things it said weren't true, they weren't stupid. So it is still a shock when an Economist writer like Lexington says something both false and stupid.... The intellectuals who provided the energy for the early Public Interest--Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et cetera--were what we now call "neoliberals": they wanted to do the Great Society and the Cold War right. In the 1960s they did not think of themselves as neoconservatives, and they were not neoconservatives--not even in retrospect... 2007-04-21

"Reduction of the Wave Packet" and Other Mumbo-Jumbo http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/reduction_of_th.html: Effects-that-happen-before-causes department: "Scientific American: Quantum Erasing in the Home." I am not sure whether this is as disturbing or more disturbing than Bell's inequality... 2007-04-21

Joe Klein, Journamalist: "I'm Fake But Accurate!" http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/joe_klein_journ.html: Joe Klein writes: "RE: Kos - Swampland - TIME: It was chronologically incorrent [incorrect or incoherent?] for me to make it seem that Kos was responding to the "shorter leash" comment, but substantively correct..." Translation: Joe Klen says: "I lied, but in a good cause..." 2007-04-23

Anti-Speech Situations http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/04/antispeech_situ.html: "I think what I miss the most is the absence of reality-based conservatives. Real conservatives should recognize that they lose their honor by going all the way with the global-warming-isn't-real crowd, the Saddam-Hussein-and-Al-Qaeda-are-friends crowd, the we-are-making-rapid-progress-in-Iraq crowd, the Mussolini-and-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-are-friends crowd, the Paul-Wolfowitz-is-THE-MAN-for-fighting-corruption crowd, and the George-W-Bush-is-our-fearless-leader crowd. And they should be smart enough to realize that they weaken their cause in the long run as well. But--with a few honorable exceptions, of whom Bruce Bartlett and (gulp) Andrew Sullivan come first to mind--the public voices of the reality-based conservatives are few and weak (although their private loathing for their corporate and political masters is in many cases loud and shrill). And I find nothing in my volumes of Juergen Habermas to tell me how to deal with this problem... 2007-04-25