Consumer complaint: Left wing econo-blogging in bad shape.
By Tino
Krugman is not the only left wing economist who is loosing his analytical edge from an overdose of partisanship. Brad Delong of http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ may be level headed compared to Krugman, at least in the economic material. But his political writing is very uneven, and when it comes to Bush or Republicans it is becoming more and more unhinged.
It’s hard to take someone seriously who writes that he is a Democrat because the Republicans were turned into ”The Party for People Who Don't Like Black People” http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/thoughts_trigge.html
On what basis might one ask? Delong doesn’t offering any evidence or reasoning to support his case, the mark of the true scholar. What was the last racist law Bush or the Republican Congress enacted? He doesn’t say. Historically we all know that the Southern Democrats were the party that officially supported segregation. Wallace, Byrd, Gore Sr and W. Fulbright were Democrats. Twice as many Democrat’s as Republicans voted against the civil right act, etc.
Name-calling 210b
OK, maybe we can ignore his political writings and only look at economics. Even there he is slipping. Delong, under the tasteful heading “Intellectual Garbage Pickup” yesterday called Donald Luskin “Stupidest man alive”. Why? Because Luskin wrote that
http://poorandstupid.com/ “Times of great prosperity have been associated with greater income inequality (for example, the 1920s), and conversely times of economic decline have been associated with greater equality (the 1930s).”
If choice to you call an opponent writing garbage and call them stupid you should have a pretty strong case. As it happens Luskins quote above it perfectly true.
In 1920 the richest 1%s share of national income (including capital gains) was 14.9% By 1929 it had risen to 22.5%, the highest in the 1913-1998 dataset. By 1939 it had again gone back to 16.2%. This exaggerates the change, as the figures fluctuate. However if we look at the average under the 1920-29 period the figure is 17.9%, compared to 16.6% in the 1930-1939 period. Excluding capital gains the pattern is very similar. Just as Luskin wrote, the 20s had more income inequality and the 30s less.
I also know there is a debate between Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw and Delong about this subject http://www.econopundit.com/archive/2005_06_01_econopundit_archive.html#111920937690172116 , (Mankiw argues that the rich are disproportionably effected both in boom and busts). I don’t care about the debte itself. Maybe there is a statistical relation, maybe there isn’t. I would only note that income for all categories of Americans has gone up.
But what matter is that Delong, a professor at one of the world’s most prestigious Economics Departments is calling someone who is factually correct “Stupidest man alive”.
Delong also claims that “Luskin denies the existence of the entire discipline of statistics”. The reason is that Luskin considers the sample size for the US income study to be too small, 8000 individuals of 295 million. Now should know that sample size does matter if you want to use income data in policy. While 8000 is a large sample overall, for many detailed questions it may well be too small.
As there are so many different categories of people in society Individual sub samples may become too small statistically (the sample would only contain 13-14 people from Wyoming!). That is one reason Sweden’s LINDA database includes fully 3% of our population, compared to 0.003% for PSID.
We on the right need opponents we can respect
Luskin is a grownup and has his own history of names-calling, so that’s not really the issue. But Delongs tone and more importantly nonexistent basis for calling Luskin an idiot still worries me. As Arnold Kling points out http://www.techcentralstation.com/100703B.html these people are the role models for less accomplished leftwingers, and they are setting the bar pretty low.
And we on the right need strong leftwing economists to challenge our ideas, not just the same bitter “Bush Lied” and “Republicans are Idiots” drivel reposted five times a day.
DeLong and Krugman could learn something on manners from their free-market peers. Look http://www.becker-posner-blog.com at or http://www.marginalrevolution.com Both are simply class acts, always keeping a civil tone and focus on discussing ideas, not demonizing their opponents. Can you imagine Tyler Cowen calling writing “Stupidest man alive”?
And the comment pages reflect this. On Becker-Posner-blog you can often read intellectually stimulating discussions by the readers. Delongs comments section is just an echo-chamber since he seems to delete dissenting opinions, the entries looking cut and pasted from Democratic Underground. It would seem even in econo-blogging you reap what you sow.
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