CapitalistImperialistPig

Paul Krugman has a vision of the future, and it's not exactly a rosy one. ...economic half-measures have landed the Obama administration in a trap: much of the political establishment now sees stimulus as having been discredited by events, so that it’s very hard to come back and scale the policy up to where it should have been in the first place. Also, with the apocalypse on hold, the deficit scolds have come back into their own, decrying any policy that actually involves spending money. The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right and demoralized the movement that brought him to power. Krugman is a pessimist, and I tend to like that in a practitioner of the Dismal Science. You need some kind of counter-balance to the hucksters and c...

Well my respect for MacArthur genius award winners just took a big hit. Tina Brown's Daily Beast claims to have gotten some people they thought were smart - who seemed to be mostly academic politicians and media celebrities - to nominate 100 plus people for the category of smartest of the decade. Next they found 40 MacA awardees who had nothing better to do than read their resumes and rank them, resulting in a list of the 25 supposedly smartest people of the decade. I think you can get an idea of the flavor of the result from the first five names you encounter on the list: Roger Ailes, David Chase, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Michael Bloomberg, and Karl Rove. Four terrorists and a rich guy. The list is bottom up, Letterman style, but it doesn't get much better. There are a few people on the list I consider fairly smart, like Jobs and Chu, and others who have had at least one really good idea, like Brin, Page, and Bezos - all of whom had their good idea in the previous decade, btw...

Andrew Sullivan doesn't like what he thinks he is going to hear from Obama on Afghanistan. So instead of staying in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with no real strategy, we will stay in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with lots of super-smart defenses of the indefensible. Great.

Climate scientists have gotten a good dose of the Cassandra syndrome lately. Cassandra , you may recall, was the Trojan seer who saw through the subterfuge of Odysseus and warned her city against the tricky Greeks. Her curse was to see the truth but not be believed. So lately it has been with those warning of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A well-financed and politically connected group of professional doubters, liars and ideologically motivated crackpots have taken advantage of the public's short attention span and an apparent slowdown in the recent pace of warming to persuade much of the population that AGW isn't worth worrying about. A couple self-inflicted wounds by AGW Cassandras haven't helped either. First, Al Gore turns out to be pretty darn confused about basic geology and physics. Now, the CRU at the University of East Anglia lets a bunch of emails get hacked and is very slow-footed in responding. What I have seen, mainly in the denialosphere, is hardly ...

Brad DeLong wonders, perhaps rhetorically, Why Are Good Macro Policies Political Losers? Brad argues that the bailout and the stimulus prevented much worse things from happening, and wonders: So we have a big puzzle: Just what is going on in America? Good policies that are working to boost production and employment without causing inflation ought to be politically popular, right? Brad conjures up some possible reasons - an incompetent press, Chicago crackpottery, and the systematic dishonesty of the Republican party, but he somehow misses the giant beam in his own eye: employment and production have not been "boosted." Employment has continued to decline. Desperate people aren't interested in theoretical economics, they want results. It's easy to be complacent if you have a nice sinecure, but not so easy if you are the one losing job, home, or business. DeLong's dismissal of the bonuses paid to the criminals who engineered the disaster as "a rounding err...

Tyler Cowen notes the irony in the fact that Dubai, which is currently shaking world financial markets because of its inability to pay its debts, imprisons debtors. With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield. Kinda makes one nostalgic for the good old days when a non-performing sovereign debtor would be disciplined by pulling up a few men-o-war to shell the capital city.

I had missed Bee's beautiful post on causal diagrams . Highly recommended. A quote from the introduction: I once witnessed a physicist explain the universe to an artist. The artist had approached the physicist to learn how to understand extra dimensions, a concept, so he explained, that would undoubtedly enhance the depth of his artwork, and be of great inspirational value for his quest to capture the contextuality of essence. Or maybe essence of contextuality. Or something like that. Either way, the physicist took a piece of chalk and drew a line on the blackboard. "That is our universe," he said... The science part is even better.