Hie actually put his comments here rather than Delong’s post, but since they seemed rather out of place I decided to move them.
I think as a public expert you go far in being on the side of angels with this post and in general. I take issue only with this line at the end: “help us manage the world to attain the greatest good for the greatest number.” like that’s a smart way to frame the end goal: I think it just rewards population growth competition, a perverse incentive structure.
I like that you’re standing up to what I think is (like a lot of narcissistically/competively deformed public epistemological framings) a kind of hedonic rentier spending of our commons -in this case bashing experts out of the basest of human instincts the desire for “people more like me” to manage resources, because it raises my trait population’s status, rather than for the most effective resource managers to manage those resources.
I think we should start calling out that form of hedonic spending and rent-seeking for what it is.
At the same time I think we should work to neutralize it by burnishing populist credentials (trait-based, not dumb ideological based) within the cohort of most effective resource managers.
Great economics can be done at flagship large population state schools. Experts on public administraton and policy can develop fluencies in mass culture and subcultures without having to lie about serious intellectual and empirical consensus on topics ranging from christianity to counterintuitive insights from empirical macroeconomic research.
We need more top caliber public experts who struggle to remain on the said of the angels AND who struggle to engage mass culture, the way Professor Krugman and (in my opinion) Professor Mankiw do.
The craven, irresponsible, and ultimately destructive narcissitic public epistemology hedonism of folks like Will Wilkinson needs a publicly engaged alternative. Before the rise of the expert academic blogs, I felt trapped in a Orwellian world of relative intellectual mediocrity on all sides.
It’s refreshing to get the unfiltered thoughts of people much smarter than me, even if the ideologically undeformed empirically fluent expert remains asymptotic, particulalry in the social sciences.
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Ultimately aren’t all of us Great Plains Apes subuseful in (seems to be less meaninglessly populist than subnormal) the forecastible future? Seems like it’s check mate, and just a matter of # of moves and illusion of humane habitat in the interim.
A personality and ape-like theatre of consciousness seems to me to be dead weight for a von neumann replictator.
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I think the media engaged academics like you and Prof. Krugman are doing a good job, but I see real coordination failure by media and popular political elites.
Even on CNN and MSNBC I see shtick by personalities railing against the federal government spending too much.
The inability of major networks and mass constituency politicians too coordinate to resist fiscal restraint pandering for popularity is a wicked problem, and I recommend you shift focus a bit to highlight experts at solving these type of wicked problems.
October 11, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Will Wilkinson responds here. I point out there that Milton Friedman eventually concluded there was no compelling reason for government management of the business cycle. I was surprised to read at Wikipedia that he even supported a return of the gold standard. But he seems to have changed his mind a good deal over time. For example, on page 82 of Free to Choose (which I was led to look up on Google Books after the Henderson vs Cowen dispute) he says that if the Federal Reserve System had not been set up the panic would have resolved itself as it did in 1907, but I don’t know if he said the same thing with Anna Schwartz in his earlier Monetary History of the United States.
October 14, 2010 at 9:52 pm
TGGP,
I’m talking about best of breed current expert consensus (that itself is compiled as expertly as possible), not Milton Friedman. My intuition (as a functional macroeconomic and policy illiterate) is that it lies in the direction of federal bond sales and spending (or printing money?) in the general manner outlined by DeLong and Krugman -although I’m leary of ideology deforming some of their specific spending and disbursement mechanisms.
October 14, 2010 at 10:47 pm
“Bad times bring out the worst in people”
I think the worst in people brought these bad times.
Although to be fair Gore and Kerry weren’t great choices. I think Bloomberg deserves considerable blame for not running for President in 2008. He is the only clearly excellent choice as a presidential candidate from 2000 until the present that didn’t bother running.
Also, I think there’s a class of us technocrats (i’ll include myself as a low level yeoman technocrat) that should think seriously about not just being right, but outcomes that result from the theatre of interactions with others, to make sure we’re on the side of angels (inducing good public outcomes) rather than devils (simply gentrifying the policy posture highground for our own wasteful hedonic extraction).
I don’t yet see anyone in the expert classes grappling with this seriously (I suppose Colbert is often on the side of the angels, but he doesn’t have much of a transparent space to discuss it and his audience is suspiciously small for him to claim that he’s influencing rather than gentrifying).
October 14, 2010 at 10:52 pm
TGGP, the above was another reply to a delong post (his recent one on speaking to tea-partiers) the quote is from a line earlier in the comments explaining Tea Partier boorishness. I’m reposting it here cause I think it’ll likely be deleted or perhaps posted wrong (never sure which the problem is on his blog).
October 15, 2010 at 12:33 am
The comment you were responding to is this one.
I realize Milton Friedman does not represent the consensus, I commented because I think Delong is misrepresenting his views, as he also repeatedly did to Herbert Hoover. More recently he’s been accused of misrepresenting John Stuart Mill. I have little to say about his work as an economic historian or his policy advice, but as a blogger his dishonesty and manipulation of comments (not merely deletion but selective editing that can give a distorted view of someone’s argument) gives him a poor grade.
October 15, 2010 at 3:18 pm
TGGP,
You really have little to say about his policy advice? The general topic of macroeconomic best practices seems to me to be one your major wheelhouses (sp?). The main thing I think he lacks compared to you is a demonstrated deep interest in global history.
I’m dazzled by his apparent insight (the closest thing I’ve found online to if-scott-aaronson-became-an-economist) but I wish he played more in the repugnant space like Prof. Hanson and Prof. (Steve?) Roth, the “repugnancy of organ markets” guy.
October 15, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Your statement is ironic; in his debate with Michele Boldrin he was at pains to point out that he was innocent of the macroeconomist badge, and was really an economic historian!
I read a lot of economics blogs, and I agree with the quote (I forget who from) “Experts understand very little. Ordinary people know even less.”. That applies the most to macro. I’ve found Scott Sumner persuasive, but I’m not qualified to judge. I’ve found Nick Rowe similarly persuasive and the wide chorus of condemnation Steven Williamson received makes him sound less competent, but I found recently that Rowe was seriously ignorant of the “Dark Age macro” he was criticizing, and his admitted deficiencies in the kind of math often used there may contribute. I am similarly untrained in that mathematics (certainly as applied to economics), so I can’t have much confidence in my impressions. While Paul Krugman may complain about an excessive focus on math in economics now (and I find plausible Williamson’s claim that Krugman doesn’t really keep up with the literature), he sang a different tune in the past.
October 15, 2010 at 7:31 pm
TGGP, you’re going with a posture Prof. Delong took in a debate over past jobs (macroeconomist for the Clinton Treasury) and publications (literaly a college textbook entitled “Macroeconomics”)? What the fuck happened to you?
As for “experts understand very little” -so what? As for excessive focus in mathematics, I think that’s phrased poorly, but a general point that economists should have broad literacies in the social sciences as well as deep applied computational technical chops is solid, IMO.
BTW, my blog went to sleep around the time I got interested in the hard problem of how exactly to we grade the value of qualitative analysis, I think my last couple of blog posts touch on that.
It still exists, I haven’t found a space yet where someone grapples seriously with qualitative analysis and qualitative-quantitative bridges. My cargo cultish instincts say that someone like Prof. DeLong or Prof. Pinker is headed in the right direction, combining deep topic literacy with strong quantitative chops and engagement (I’m presuming the latter from their writings) but that bridge from dual qual/quan competencies to an advantage in insight and model construction eludes me intuitively. Qualitative analysis tends to be stories, and stories tend to compete for our mindshare on multiple levels, not just for their predictive value the way mathematical models and data mining do when we’re at our best in using them.
October 17, 2010 at 6:50 pm
I guess I had forgotten he had a job under Clinton. Didn’t know about his textbook. I would still say that he does have an interest in global history, though perhaps not back far past the 19th century.
I think pretty much all social scientists are going to need more quantitative chops than they once did. Computers seem to create more available data and the means to get information out of that data. Ultimately I think E. O. Wilson’s “Consilience” is right and that all knowledge is one, but for right now it seems like we are a long way from bridging the gap between, say, individual psychology and macroeconomics. I basically accept sticky wages as a fact of life since so many economists say so, but I haven’t yet heard a satisfactory explanation for why wages are sticky. Macro in particular is difficult because we can’t easily conduct experiments and serial correlation reduces the number of independent data points. This lead Brad Delong and Kevin Lang to publish a paper saying that nearly all published economic hypotheses are false. One of the things they note is the very low number of papers published which fail to reject the null hypothesis. Researchers have constructed a hierarchy of the sciences based on how often such negative results are published. One of the things mentioned is that within the realm of psychiatry the sub-discipline of animal behavior is “harder” than that of human behavior. Perhaps if aliens studied us or we studied another species we could be more accurate! MMOs offer another opportunity to conduct a variety of experiments and collect more & better data. But for now I think we may look back on our present knowledge like the old chymists of Boyle’s Day: possessing some number of correct insights but still groping in the dark.