Waiting For Octopus City

 

Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.

Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.

Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:

David Brooks Joins Cancel Culture

Ilya Salavskiy, right, at a protest action in Oxford, May 2016. Euromaidan Press.

David Brooks ("No, Not Sanders, Not Ever"):

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years.

Actually, no. As Brussels-based deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1990 to 1994, Brooks got his byline on exactly four articles mentioning the Soviet Union, suggesting two visits to Moscow (and none after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991):

• A puff piece ("It's too late for a party congress", 2 July 1990) extolling Ilya Saslavskiy, a Ukrainian Oxford graduate and member of the National People's Congress, calling him a "combative intellectual" and "New Soviet Man" representing the "real action" in the Communist Party. Saslavskiy became an American and was working for BP's Russian operations when he and his brother Oleksandr were arrested for spying on behalf of the US and Ukraine in 2008—not because they were actually spies, but because Putin found it useful in his campaign to turn BP into Rosneft. I'm glad to report the brothers (who were sentenced to two years probation) seem to be OK, see photo at top. The Soviet Union, of course, had no future.
• A review ("The Soviet Reality: Murder, Apathy, Dishonesty", 17 July 1990) of Stanislav Govorukhin's 1990 documentary We Can't Live Like This which, Brooks notes, was applauded by the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
• A lengthy opinion piece ("In USSR, possession is better than the law", 16 May 1991) illustrating the collapse of rule of law with the case of an astrophysicist, "Maxim Hlobov", who succeeded in stopping the KGB from stealing his new apartment. He got the name wrong (should be Khlopov—he's in France now, working in the Astroparticles and Cosmology Laboratory of the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique de Particules). 
• A travel piece ("An American in Moscow: Hard-currency god", 21 May 1991).

More Power to Dr. Krugman!

Pensacola, May 2014, via Washington Post.

Don't know exactly what the program is in this polemic in the Atlantic by Sebastian Mallaby disguised as a review of a new collection of Dr. Krugman's newspaper journalism, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. But it's kind of peculiar, a review that can't make up its mind, lurching between extravagant praise and angry blame—as in, Krugman "writes amusingly and fluently" but has a "furious and bitter voice". Serially or in parallel? He's a "dazzling academic" but also an "undiscriminating guillotine".

His combination of analytic brilliance and linguistic facility recalls Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes. But Krugman can also sound like a cross between a bloodthirsty Robespierre and a rebarbative GIF. Week after week, he shakes his fist righteously at Republicans and anyone who defends them: You’re shilling for the fat cats. You’re shilling for the fat cats. Over and over. Again and again.

Oh, I get it: Dr. K. is uncivil. He's ought to be a perfect member of the neutral party, the team of the scholarly, with his Nobel and his urbanity. How could he demean themselves by taking some kind of political "side" as if one were better than the other?

Unlike that charming Milton Friedman (whom Krugman always mentions with extravagant respect), whose famous 1970 New York Times Magazine article on businessmen with the gall to talk about the "social responsibility" of corporations says

Global Tepiding

Via Guardian, where there's more on global lukewarming as the third stage of denial

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate"), illustrates an emerging reactionary approach to climate change, the non-denial denial of the "lukewarmers": sure it's happening, but do we have to make a federal case out of it?

Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO₂ emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Shorter:

1. It's not "unique"—my goodness, we have lots of problems, so why should we try to solve this one?
2. The proposed solution might not work, so surely it's better not to try it! That smallpox vaccination sounds like a far from decent operation, putting some sort of pus in my arm, and you're not even 100% sure it will keep me from getting the disease!
3. Dark forces (i.e.,  my political opponents), may benefit from these efforts, so that even if they did save the human environment from destruction, as I just acknowledged they might, that's not the real reason. Better to burn than to allow those dreadful people to gain some advantage from putting the fire out.

Followed by a very Douthatian denial non-denial critique of the position he just laid out:

Nemesis

T-Type Nemesis from the Resident Evil world, I believe. Image via Monster Wiki.

Dr. Krugman on Bret Stephens, January 2014, in response to Stephens's outrageously bad attempt to demonstrate to the world that income inequality hadn't gotten any worse in the US since the 1990s:

In his piece Stephens trashes Obama, accusing him of making a factual error when he did no such thing; then proceeds to commit just about every statistical sin you can imagine in an attempt to minimize the rise in inequality. In the process he leaves his readers more ignorant than they were before. When this is what passes for argument, how can we have any kind of rational discussion?

Oh, and just FYI: this is the kind of journalism that the great and the good deem worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Now Stephens is joining the New York Times as a columnist, presumably replacing the terminally fatigued David F. Brooks (whose imminent departure was scooped at Rectification Central a month ago, kiddies). I hope he holds the Friday spot so he can feel Krugman's cold glare across the page whenever he issues a fact-challenged denial of global warming or announces that Barack Obama "just isn't very bright."

He seems twice as arrogant as Brooks, more than twice as willing to lie for the cause (Brooks's lies are mostly sheer laziness nowadays), and thinks he's got a literary style. I'm looking forward to it.

What's the matter with New York?

Dr. Krugman has written that column about West Virginia that everybody needs to write once in a while, that or the one about Kentucky, or maybe Pennsylvania or Ohio, or there's Kansas. What's the matter with Kansas? asked Thomas Frank back in 2004. Why do those people keep voting for the party that wants to starve and punish them? Why do they vote against their own interests?

And West Virginia's a pretty poignant case, on the one hand because of that emotional fixation with jobs in the coal industry, where jobs have been declining catastrophically in the state since 1948! It's been almost 70 years since coal mining had a future in West Virginia, not because of environmental policy, but because of automation, after the companies gave up digging for it in favor of just slicing it off the tops of the mountains. This is a defunct parrot, folks. And Donald Trump keeps getting them to applaud by saying he's bringing it back.

Via West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. Note how productivity starts a very steep deline around 2000; that's not George W. Bush's fault, it's because all the good stuff is gone ("Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away," as the song says), and what's left is a lot harder to get out of the ground, as the price continues to drop because it has to, to keep up the dropping prices of other fuels that burn cleaner or don't burn at all.

Twentieth-Century Box

One of Hillary Clinton's old-fashioned, 20th-century celebrity endorsers, like Streisand and Cher. Photo by Ramona Rosales via Billboard.

Oops, I forgot all about David Brooks and his Friday column ("The Clinton Calendar")! And now there are fine posts out by Steve and Driftglass and Bethesda 1971. And here's Dr. Krugman, as usual not referring to Brooks by name but as "pundits":

Here’s what happens every election cycle: pundits demand that politicians offer the country new ideas. Then, if and when a candidate actually does propose innovative policies, the news media pays little attention, chasing scandals or, all too often, fake scandals instead. Remember the extensive coverage last month, when Hillary Clinton laid out an ambitious mental health agenda? Neither do I.

For that matter, even the demand for new ideas is highly questionable, since there are plenty of good old ideas that haven’t been put into effect. Most advanced countries implemented some form of guaranteed health coverage decades if not generations ago. Does this mean that we should dismiss Obamacare as no big deal, since it’s just implementing a tired old agenda? The 20 million Americans who gained health coverage would beg to differ.

That's a direct response to Brooks's complaint on Friday that Clinton had failed to join us here in the 21st century:

Just so you know

Via.

Dr. Krugman writes ("No Right Turn"):

we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?

The obvious answer, you might think, is that she should keep doing what she is doing — emphasizing how unfit her rival is for office, letting her allies point out her own qualifications and continuing to advocate a moderately center-left policy agenda that is largely a continuation of President Obama’s.

But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.

I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. But if by any chance she and those around her are tempted to take this recommendation seriously: Don’t.

Some readers are a little baffled by that third paragraph: who are those commentators urging a right turn and a "grand coalition"?

John

 is a trusted commenter Hartford 34 minutes ago

This all seems something of a straw man. Krugman doesn't specify who these "some commentators" so it's hard to know who he has in mind. Rush Limbaugh? Bill O'Reilly? As far as one can tell Clinton has actually turned slightly left in her platform which in any case was very typical Democratic center left fayre. Basically what you're going to get is Obama's pragmatic and sensible approach with a slightly leftward tilt. She has no need to make to concessions to the right nor is she likely too as Trump's campaign goes into the ditch.

No, John, it's not Limbaugh or O'Reilly. It's the Universal Mustache, Thomas L. Friedman, whose Wednesday column made exactly that demand, asking Clinton to abandon the Democratic platform (most progressive ever, as they kept telling us at the convention, and it's true!) in favor of what he calls "pro-growth" policies:

There are a lot of center-right, business Republicans today feeling orphaned by Trump. They can’t vote for him — but a lot of them still claim they can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary, either. Clinton should be reaching out to them with a real pro-growth, start-up, deregulation, entrepreneurship agenda and give them a positive reason to vote for her.

Dr. K. isn't mentioning Friedman's name for the same reason he never mentions David Brooks's name when he needs to check some idiocy Brooks has perpetrated, because all three of them work for the New York Times and it's house policy that they never attack each other directly. But that's no reason for us not to notice it.

More on the Friedman column from me (if you haven't seen it already) at this address. Also see Bethesda 1971 at Kos.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Is Dr. Krugman evolving? It's probably bad politics to talk about it

The views at the Albanian site this comes from, at www.civitas.al, probably do not correspond to my own, but the idea of "Marxism-Sorosism" is pretty cute.

It's another curious case of a dog not barking, and even the same presumptive intruder the dog is not barking at as in that Taibbi piece the other day, this time in Dr. Krugman's column on the unexpected way international trade has become an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Namely, like Taibbi, Krugman doesn't mention President Obama; and he specifically doesn't mention the Obama-linked object that has made international trade an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement or TPP (which now seems most likely to be voted on in Congress in the lame-duck session after the November election, if at all). Without Obama pushing the TPP for most of his time in office, forcing the candidates to take positions on the thing, nobody would be discussing this intensely boring subject in the campaign.

But I think the reason for his not mentioning them is very Krugman-particular: it's that if he did, in the course of the argument he's making today, he'd be forced to endorse the damned thing, and he's not ready to do that. I'm really suspecting that he is "evolving" in his position on the TPP in a way analogous to how Obama "evolved" toward support of marriage equality, by which I definitely don't mean it's a bad thing, and beginning to prepare us for the shift.

He starts off with an apparent paradox:

White House Fool Report: I give up

The green card goslings I first saw a couple of weeks ago nestled around a tree trunk in Riverside Park South with their Canadian parents are now fluent swimmers.

Last night BooMan put up a post on the Trans-Pacific Partnership which articulated some things I hadn't understood about how the Senate is voting, which doesn't seem to be on any clear left-right axis but geared more to local issues, and also his informed sense, which I found really surprising and intriguing, that the administration doesn't really know how much it wants the treaty passed, if at all. I left a comment, which I'll just reproduce:

Thanks, that was very clarifying. A lot of the argument on both sides has been very propagandistic; I'm especially disappointed with Warren, who is saying things about the ISDS aspect that are really at odds with reality. The way they've been denouncing TPA as if it were the end of democracy is shameful, and I'm glad you point out that it's the only way the treaty can get written--and voted down if necessary--at all.

Confirmation Bias Watch

Image via.

In the "liberals are the real fascists" department, one of my favorite cases was "public intellectual" Yuval Levin (that's really one of his professions according to the Wikipedia biography, suggesting it's actually on his C.V.) calling out the economist Paul Krugman for being one of those tradition-minded, hidebound, inflexible liberals who, in spite of their also being demonically relativistic postmodernists, consistently insist they are in possession of absolute, indiscutable truth, as in the brief debate I covered in April; in Shorter form,

Confirmation Bias Watch

Some more Piketty fallout: Paul Krugman again bows to empirical evidence and acknowledges changing his mind:

we're rapidly moving towards a state where inherited wealth dominates. I didn't know that. I really was-- I should've known it. I should've thought about it, but I didn't. And so then here comes this book with-- I mean, it's beautiful-- absolutely analytically beautiful, if that makes any sense at all....  You suddenly say, "Oh, this is not-- the world is not the way I saw it."

(h/t Marie2 at Booman Tribune)

Meanwhile Yuval Levin is on record as having (in 2011) blamed current inequality in the United States largely on Great Society social spending in the 1960s and '70s:

Flush with revenue and stirred by the promise of technocratic mastery, our government took on immense entitlement commitments and major social reforms in that era, and these have certainly had some of their intended consequences. But they have also struck at the roots (economic and especially moral) of our ability to sustain our strength. The collapse of the family among the poor — powerfully propelled by the ethic of social democracy and by a horrendously designed welfare system that was not improved until the mid-1990s — has vastly worsened social and economic inequality in America, and the capacity of generations to rise out of poverty.

I'd say that's yet another chance for Levin to show that conservatives can be just as open-minded and ready to bend their opinions to fit the facts as liberals are. How about it, Dr. L? Anything about the Piketty-Saez data make you want to rethink your premises there?

Confirmation Bias Watch

Image by John S. Dykes for Wall Street Journal, July 2012.

A little over a month has passed since famous conservative genius Yuval Levin accused Paul Krugman of refusing to entertain evidence that challenges his beliefs even as he criticizes everybody else for doing the same thing. Here at the Rectification of Names we were able to adduce empirical evidence that Krugman has, actually, repeatedly changed his mind in the face of facts and publicly admitted it, as scientists are supposed to be capable of doing, but not as it happens that Yuval Levin has ever done so.

I just want to note here that Krugman has done it again, on the very important question of whether humanity can afford to stop destroying our Earth with greenhouse gases, in yesterday's Times column:

One front many people didn’t take too seriously, however, was renewable energy. Sure, cap-and-trade might make more room for wind and the sun, but how important could such sources really end up being? And I have to admit that I shared that skepticism. If truth be told, I thought of the idea that wind and sun could be major players as hippie-dippy wishful thinking. But I was wrong.

Still no data on Levin. In 2008, incidentally, he wrote on the subject of climate change denialism,

the genuine abuses of science have been (and frankly continue to be — just listen to “rolling back the waters” Obama lately) more serious on the left in this debate than on the right. 

Maybe now we have some hard evidence on the relative abusiveness of left and right in this connection, this could be a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability to revise his views in the light of reality. I can't find that he's said anything on the subject at all lately.

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,

Jolted Joe

Revised and enlarged 10/11/13

From Politico.

As reported in ThinkProgress, former representative Joe Scarborough conversing on the television with English-accent Serious Person Niall Ferguson:

Scarborough then recalled a conversation he had with a Times editor following his televised debate with Krugman earlier this year. [jump]