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Assorted links
1. The truth about Zora Neale Hurston.
2. Rortybomb on libertarianism and feminism.
3. Soros puts up $50 million to change economics.
4. Brilliant post on the Great Moderation.
5. Why you can't get the swine flu vaccine.
6. "Sichuan Pavilion makes Hong Kong Palace look like Burger King."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 28, 2009 at 11:04 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
The truth about Zora Neale Hurston: It's not clever to spell words the way someone speaks them.
Really, it's not. Get over yourselves already.
Posted by: Silas Barta at Oct 28, 2009 11:09:42 AM
WRT Soros: It's about time someone other than free-market fundamentalists started up a serious economics-focused think-tank.
(cue Glenn Beck: "it's a fascism research center!!!")
Posted by: a goddamn communist at Oct 28, 2009 11:40:26 AM
Wouldn't it be more apt to say that Sichuan Pavilion makes Hong Kong Palace look like Panda Express?
Can't wait to check it out.
Posted by: traveling boho at Oct 28, 2009 11:52:45 AM
Soros, if he were really serious, should simply put out contracts on most of them. However, most of them are his political allies. He won't be changing anything.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Oct 28, 2009 12:38:24 PM
#3: A very biased article. Stiglitz as a leading opponent of "free-market zeal"? Maybe in the mainstream of the top six faculties, but hardly anywhere else. Was George Akerlof really being marginalised when he was President of the AEA?
Posted by: Millian at Oct 28, 2009 12:55:39 PM
4. Bill Gross is going trick or treating as Murray Rothbard for Halloween.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/362503/Bill-Gross-Assets-Are-15-Trillion-Overvalued-and-Fed-Will-Keep-Rates-at-0-Forever-to-Keep-the-Fantasy-Alive?
Okay, so that had nothing to do with the article. Hey GD, Soros has it wrong. It isn't the free marketers that say the market is always right. It's the government and the regulators. We just like it free. If GS has a problem with the research the government has funded, why doesn't he take it up with them? Democracy is the shiznit, after all. Or, does he prefer a free market in research funding.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 28, 2009 1:10:56 PM
@ Silas Barta
I suppose you would equally pan the works of Mark Twain, DH Lawrence and other noteworhty authors known for their authentic use of dialect fiction. Or do you just have something against blacks, conservatives or both?
Posted by: wlu2009 at Oct 28, 2009 1:45:28 PM
lol @ wlu2009: It's not that I pan authentic dialect transcription. It's just that:
a) No one sould be considered clever for doing it -- it shouldn't be part of the reason their writing is superawesomewowthisistherealthing(tm)
b) Anyone who does it is inevitably arbitrary about how faithful to the spoken words their text is, allowing them to opt out of whatever part would require actual skill from them.
Posted by: Silas Barta at Oct 28, 2009 2:21:57 PM
From the Soros-y link:"Economics has failed not only to predict and explain what happened but has also failed to protect society," says Robert Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who will direct the new institute. "That's what the crisis revealed. The paradigm has failed. There is no guidance."
He evidently confuses government policy and control mechanisms with economics.
Or is he just going to completely ignore the State's role? Mae and Mac? Anyone?
The job of economics is to explain and model how human beings interact to solve scarcity problems... not to "protect society" or "guide" people in some moral sense. It's a useful tool for the latter, if one cares about guidance and protection based on how people act and the effects of those actions... but economics no more "failed" because nobody understood how CDO repackaging worked well enough to risk-asses it, than economics "failed" because the State thought it could demand outcomes without side-effects.
Posted by: Sigivald at Oct 28, 2009 2:39:08 PM
Swine flu - since it now seems that the seasonal flu jab that I have had for the past 14 years might be ineffective (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200911/brownlee-h1n1)
I'm not sure I'll bother with the swine flu jab.
Posted by: dearieme at Oct 28, 2009 2:55:39 PM
I think Soros confuses that he has a genuine insight with the idea that he can simply tweak academia a bit and everyone's light bulb will turn on.
I don't think he would comprehend that the entire system could let slip this kind of research error.
"Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”"
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 28, 2009 3:21:11 PM
Dearieme, thanks. The government is made up the kind of people who don't see why it might be a problem that the public often cannot tell the difference between what they do and the inquisition.
In un-related news, it's kinda funny that Yglesias says a black woman's opinion is unrepresentative of black opinion. I of course know what he is saying. I just wonder if they know what they are saying?
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 28, 2009 3:41:23 PM
Tyler,
And so, is China Star also somewhere between Burger King and Panda Express?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Oct 28, 2009 4:03:08 PM
How can a Nobel laureate be considered marginalized?
Also, isn't what he is doing sort of a insult to every economist? What he is saying is almost that Economics is only a tool to prove your ideology is right.
Posted by: John at Oct 28, 2009 5:21:53 PM
a goddamn communist,
You'll like this (or maybe not):
http://comeletusreasontogether.com/big-oil-caught-paying-climate-science-agrees-them
Posted by: Thomas Sewell at Oct 28, 2009 5:58:28 PM
@John
Also, isn't what he is doing sort of a insult to every economist? What he is saying is almost that Economics is only a tool to prove your ideology is right.
Um, yes, that /is/ the main function of macroeconomics in the real world.
Its also one of the (many) reasons that the hard core Austrians are so marginalized. Their policy recommendations usually end up leaving very little room for rent seeking, power grabs, and political payoffs.
What I find it funny is how many times everyone says that the the free market folks didn't predict the crash. Tyler here predicted the crash when he was doing the "hypothetical 'if I were an austrian'" example.
Posted by: Doc Merlin at Oct 28, 2009 6:36:05 PM
Tyler's linking to Yglesias is very subversive. He tends to praise Yglesias, but the linked-to posts are invariably silly. So Tyler is trying to undermine him.
Posted by: JB at Oct 28, 2009 6:45:40 PM
I find Kerry Howley's Reason essays linked on Rortybomb to be quite interesting. I have noted that many libertarians are against government coercion but are quite tolerant of it sociologically. For example, some were very against Janet Reno's Waco, TX assault on the Branch Davidians, who were by any reasonable metric horrible child abusers, etc. Obviously less extreme, other libertarians belittle political correctness -not just the wacky stuff- but also the aspect of it that that helped eliminate discriminatory rudeness.
Posted by: liberalarts at Oct 28, 2009 9:02:29 PM
An incredibly stupid article. I am amazed Tyler is plugging it. Is the role of economics, or any science, to protect society? Why do we need a "new concept of the proper role of government and regulation in the economy"? What, has somebody proved First Theorem Of Welfare Economics flawed last week? Stupid economic policies led to predictable bad economic outcomes and for this we should have a new economics paradigm, with rules and a roadmap no less? That's like saying we should rethink our whole view of the physics science because of these two pilots who fell asleep and missed their destination.
But Soros' idea is not entirely bad. Money is fungible. Stiglitz applying for more grants from the Institute for New Economic Planning means Stiglitz applying for fewer grants from NBER, which means more "free-market fundamentalists" getting grants from NBER. Sure, the Institute will produce crap. But we'll all know it is crap and we will laugh our asses off when we hear it all the way to the bank where we cash our NBER grant checks.
What I don't get is this: Soros is a practitioner, not a theorist. Instead of throwing 50 millions nudging economists to study how to remake the US economic system, why not double that, buy a whole country like Cuba, and remake the economy anyway he wants it? Exhibit 1: Cubans are already used to taking order from megalomaniac idiots. And unlike the Newsweek piece I have Exhibit 2 too: the state Cuba is now, any change is likely to have positive results.
Posted by: Bushequalhitler at Oct 28, 2009 9:23:25 PM
Doc,
You are right. A few people like Tyler and Krugman had hypotheticals. Like all prognosticators, it's hard to tell if those opinions benefit from survivor bias. That they haven't marketed these opinions more makes me believe they were off-hand.
There are others like Shiller, Reinhart and Rogoff who were more adamant who I've learned about after the fact (more excellent marketing).
But the only place I heard the constant, consistent drumbeat of warning came from Austrians and Libertarians like Gary North, Mike Rozeff and that-way leaning professionals like John Hussman, Bill Bonner and Mish Shedlock.
Soros's 'reflexivity' is a genuine insight, but it is not unique. The Austrian insight is that the government tricks investors. Soros says that investors trick themselves and each other all the time. I've read Ben Graham. It's not new. Ben Graham and Warren Buffett believe you can correct economic error one buy at a time. But what Soros is saying is that the government can fix things. As a democratic institution, I'm not sure how he plans to make it countercyclical when we've just seen how pro-cyclical it is. The de-regulation during good times and the reregulation hawking during the crisis are just one example of pro-cyclicality. Maybe he thinks we can install better technocrats. Maybe he'll get the balance just right, but of course, we know he'll just be trading mania for public choice and agency cost concerns.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 29, 2009 4:31:07 AM
Oh, and importantly, the Austrians have an actual hypothesis, credit cycle, debt burden, malinvestment, all that good stuff. Fundamentals.
It seems to me like the people similar to Soros main hypothesis centers around sentiment. Sentiment can always get better or worse and it's somewhat unpredictable. That is one reason everyone was fooled this time.
It seems pretty clear that the fundamentals precipitated the crisis.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 29, 2009 4:38:32 AM
2. Rortybomb on libertarianism and feminism.
That is their critique of American libertarianism? In the country that has more female college students than males by a wide margin? Where do they get this stuff?
Okay. It's interesting to see these peoples' thought process. Here is the deal on this stuff. It is actually a discipline and a logic that we keep our opinions compartmentalized. It's not that we like a lot of the injustice that we think is not within the purview of government, we just separate it. For a thinking libertarian to get to a government solution, he must resist the incompetence argument, the public-choice argument, the natural rights argument, etc.
They don't get Waco for instance. If you want The Feds to crack down on child abuse (or guns, or cults, or whatever the rationale evolved to), then you have to accept the occasional Waco where all the kids die. We don't accept that cost.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 29, 2009 5:04:43 AM
Sigivald and Bushequalhitler raise a point worthy of some discussion. They claim that it is not the job of economics to protect society. Part of me agrees, but I wonder if this isn't a crucial matter for debate. Dare we tell the world this? I wonder how policymakers and the public would view our discipline if we told them it was not our job to protect society. Further, perhaps we should ask them if that is our job. What if they thought it was our job?
I don't want to reduce this issue to superficiality and rhetoric. I was trained as an economist and I understand the differences between tools, understanding, and their uses. But I have trouble with the notion that economimsts are above the fray, just objective modelers that provide theories and tools for others to use as they wish. Sometimes I wish we actually felt some obligation to "protect" society. Frankly, I think the reality is that we are not above the fray and any economic analysis attempts to "protect" society in some sense of that word - it is just that what some people are protecting differs from what others would protect. Fostering economic efficiency is one notion of protecting society and it is debateable. I think economics is the only social science that refuses to admit that we have opinions and that they color our analyses.
Posted by: dale at Oct 29, 2009 11:08:03 AM
If Soros was a honest truth seeker he'd give the money to Elinor Ostrom
Posted by: yc at Oct 31, 2009 1:53:52 PM
