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Economic Methods
The smartest man I know is being savaged on the comments section of the Washington Monthly. Don’t miss it!
The smartest man I know is being savaged on the comments section of the Washington Monthly. Don’t miss it!
Dec 4 2006
The Brink Lindsey essay that everyone is talking about is here. Allow me to hazard a few more specific suggestions about what a liberal-libertarian entente on economics might look like... Shift taxes away from things we want more of and onto things we want less of. Specifically, cut taxes on savings and investment, ...
Dec 4 2006
I just noticed that, four years ago, my co-blogger asked "Is blogging a fad?" Using a simple model, he stuck his neck out and said: No. Good call, Arnold!
Dec 4 2006
The smartest man I know is being savaged on the comments section of the Washington Monthly. Don't miss it!
READER COMMENTS
Patrick R. Sullivan
Dec 4 2006 at 4:05pm
If he was really smart he wouldn’t be wasting his time with Kevin Drum and his ignorant groupies.
jb
Dec 4 2006 at 4:37pm
Hrrmm.
While reading those comments, I could feel the association between liberals and “reality based” fading into nothingness.
Neither side seems to have a good grip on reality. Mostly they just bicker about which part of reality the other side doesn’t have a good grip on.
Richard Pointer
Dec 4 2006 at 4:50pm
I read through the comments on that site. It’s an echo chamber of course. Kind of depressing, but I take solace in the fact that most of them couldn’t follow an economic argument to save their life.
Bill
Dec 4 2006 at 5:28pm
Comments sections like that remind me how insufferable people of average intelligence can be.
Dan Kling
Dec 5 2006 at 4:37am
It’s curious. While I didn’t read through all of the ridiculous comments, it didn’t seem likely that anyone was going to say anything at all interesting or new. What was said in the first 10-20 comments was just repeated ad nauseum.
I wish that someone had brought up the idea that raising the minimum wage makes dropping out to work at McDonalds that much more appealing to the high school student contemplating whether or not to get a diploma. I worked for a local democratic campaign in Missouri this election, so I got a lot of chances to refine my arguments against the minimum wage referendum, and I think that that’s one of the most compelling. If we want to help the working poor, shouldn’t we at least try to not add to their numbers?
paul
Dec 5 2006 at 7:38am
Holy Christ! Sometimes I forget there is a scary world out there…
Barkley Rosser
Dec 5 2006 at 2:42pm
Poor Robin. First he gets dinged for his prediction market for the DOD. Now this. But he seems to be handling himself OK. I think he should join the econophysicist, if he is not already one effectively.
Michael Sullivan
Dec 5 2006 at 6:28pm
After you ignore the mass of blather at the beginning (which is mostly partisans of both sides making silly cracks), Robin gets into a substantive argument at the bottom, and I think takes the worst of it. He’s spinning to put a reasonable interpretation on his claim in the thread, but I don’t think he has a good answer for Drum’s criticism about the min wage as an example.
It isn’t the second law of thermodynamics, or even evolution. It *is* an usettled question among serious practitioners. I don’t think how the press usually handles the unsettledness is optimal, or demonstrates any understanding of the subject, but it’s just as bad with unsettled questions in other disciplines (consider climatology).
As I said in that thread, the uncritical acceptance of everything that comes out of a physicist’s mouth is a much more serious truth-seeking error than the typical perhaps overly skeptical treatment of economists.
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