Fresh at Project Syndicate: Is Plutocracy Really the Problem?: The larger issue... is an absence of alternative voices. If the 2010s had been anything like the 1930s, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Conference Board would have been aggressively calling for more investment in America, and these arguments would have commanded the attention of the press. Labor unions would have had a prominent voice as advocates for a high-pressure economy. Both would have had very powerful voices inside the political process through their support of candidates. Did the top 0.01% put something in the water to make the media freeze out such voices after 2008?... #projectsyndicate #highlighted #politicaleconomy #publicsphere #greatrecession... 2019-07-09
Hoisted from the Archives: What Was the Point of Robert Woodward's "The Agenda"?: According to the Washington Post's headline writers (and according to pretty damn near everybody else who read The Agenda that I have talked to), Woodward's book tells the story of a president who (a) feels "blindsided" by their actions, (b) feels that the policies his administration is adopting means that he is losing his soul, (c) finds that the Republican Federal Reserve Chair's views are etching a deep impression on policy, (d) finds himself stuck with a "turkey" of an economic plan, (e) has advisors who fight fiercely in order to (f) control a wishy-washy president, and as a result (g) decision-making suffers and (h) clarity of vision is lost... #hoistedfromthearchives #publicsphere 2019-07-09
Hoisted from the Archives: Risks of Debt: The Real Flaw in Reinhart-Rogoff: : A country that spends and spends and spends and spends and does not tax sufficiently will eventually run into debt-generated trouble.... But can this happen as long as interest rates remain low? As long as stock prices remain buoyant? As long as inflation remains subdued. My faction of economists—including Larry Summers, Laura Tyson, Paul Krugman, and many many others—believe that it will not... #hoistedfromthearchives #macro #fiscalpolicy #publicsphere #economicsgonewrong 2019-07-06
Smackdown: Failing to Do Robustness Checks Is Not a Virtue: There never was any "90 percent debt-to-GDP tipping point". Reinhart and Rogoff thought there was because they did not do any robustness checks of their data-analysis binning procedures.... Marking your beliefs to market makes your thoughts stronger and raises your credibility. Not doing so does the reverse: Ken Rogoff: The Austerity Chronicles: "After years of mounting polemics against austerity policies, Keynesian dogma has become something close to a secular religion in popular economic-policy debates. But a new study of 16 advanced economies shows that, as with all dogmas, righteousness is no substitute for empirical facts... 2019-07-06
James McHenry: "A Republic, If You Can Keep It": "A lady asked Dr. Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic", replied the Doctor, "if you can keep it". (The lady here aluded to was Mrs. Powel of Philada[delphia]... #publicsphere #orangehairedbaboons 2019-07-04
The State of America's Political-Public Sphere: Those who have made accomodation with neo-fascism to any substantial degree are not people you want around—they will, for one reason or another, stab you in the back the first moment that it seems opportune #publicsphere #politics #moralresponsibility moralphilosophyinamerica journamalismandthepublicsphere 2019-02-27
Jill Abramson, Formerly of the New York Times, Has Both a Depraved Heart and a Social Intelligence Deficit: She thus made seven changes to Malooley's first sentence, in the process dividing it into two.... She thus made one change to Malooley's second sentence. She then left Malooley's third sentence alone. Clearly the effort of making seven discrete changes to the first sentence had exhausted her... #journamalism #moralresponsibility 2019-02-13
Sigh Yet More Cleaning Up After the Cockroaches: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "... >...It is also worth noting that Weisman garbles his quote from Engen and gets the magnitude wrong by a factor of 10... 2018-10-30
(Late) Monday Smackdown: Why Does Clive Crook Think the EU Has a Duty to Sacrifice the Interests Rights of Its Constituents in Brexit Negotiations? I did not punish this a year ago because it seemed... intemperate. Now it seems not extreme enough. Perhaps if Clive Crook and his colleagues had dared to say: "The Brexiters are bad people pursuing bad policies. They need to be stopped." Instead he and his ilk talked about how important it was that the U.K . have "a fundamentally new relationship" with the E.U., and that the E.U. should bend over backward to make the Brexiters look as good as possible. Not a good look... 2018-10-30
Monday Smackdown: What Tobin Harshaw of the New York Times Wants to Be Remembered For: "I Am Not Authorized to Explain Why I Am Not Authorized...": What Tobin Harshaw of the New York Times claims he wants to be remembered for. From 2007. No quality control at the New York Times whatsoever. Let us take him at his word, and remember him for this... 2018-10-22
Journamalism and the Public Sphere
