Beyond Economic Tribalism

Krugman has another post up worth reading —

Consider what the different sides in economic debate have been predicting these past six or seven years. If you got your views from, say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you knew – knew – that there was no housing bubble, that America in 2008 wasn’t in recession, that budget deficits would send interest rates sky-high, that the Fed’s expansion of its balance sheet would produce huge inflation, that austerity policies would lead to economic expansion.

That’s quite a record. And yet I’m well aware that many people – including people with real money at stake – consider the WSJ a reliable source and people like, well, me flaky and unbelievable.

Krugman links to a commentary saying that people are more likely to accept a credible argument when some knowledgeable person in their “cultural community” accepts it. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. The truth is that a large part of the public doesn’t understand the difference between “fact” and “opinion.” Put another way, the falsehood or veracity of something is not judged by actual data, results, or real-world experience, but by whether one believes that a thing is supposed to be true, or not. And the arbiter of suppositions is one’s adopted ideology.

You might remember awhile back I took on a rightie comment thread challenging the notion that Paul Krugman has been “wrong time and time again. The fascinating thing about this exercise was that the righties in the thread had absolutely no idea what I meant by “wrong.” What I meant — and which I explained several times — is show me something that Krugman predicted about the economy that turned out to be wrong. Show me when he said the economy would do X and it actually did Y.

And of course, they couldn’t do that. Instead, they simply linked to his columns (which I suspect they hadn’t read) without explaining why they were wrong, or dredged up the old story about his having worked as a consultant for Enron.

In their minds, Krugman is “wrong” because he says things that contradict what right-wing think tank economists say. The actual track record of the think tankers versus Krugman is irrelevant.

From time to time I’ve caught flak from people who think I should try harder to communicate with righties. The truth is that years ago I went through a phrase of really, really trying, being respectful and patient and polite and just presenting facts and reason. And after a long time I gave up, because I realized I might as well be trying to teach a toaster to tap dance.

There’s very little you can disucss with people who don’t understand what a “fact” is.

The Left is not immune from irrationality, of course. We have our “Obama is worse than Bush” and “The Democrats are just as bad” crowd. The difference is that the leftie-bots generally are not totally untethered from facts; they just cherry pick the facts that support what they want to believe and declare everything else irrelevant.

But righties refuse to acknowledge anything that might wander into the world of evidence-based objectivity. The only truth that matters is what their ideology tells them is supposed to be true, and the hell with reality.

25 thoughts on “Beyond Economic Tribalism

  1. A large part of the problem is that the all of the TV news and financial channels, and financial newspapers and magazines, are staffed by “Baghdad Bob’s,” let’s call them ‘Wall Street Wally’s,’ like Jim Cramer, who will espouse confidence in the markets, even as they sink faster than a lead-coated turd.

    That’s what ‘Wall Street Wally’s’ are paid to do, folks – spew propaganda that ‘everything’s fine, it’s all under control – move along, there’s nothing to see here!’

    And people like Krugman, Johnson, and other economists who have been right all along, never get to appear on/in the MSM, and have to be shunned and denigrated, lest the (not so) sterling reputations of the paid Wall Street Wally propagandist’s take a hit, and people wake-up from their fever-dreams.
    Well, the people are awake – and still being fed the same lame bullsh*t, by the same ever-wrong crowd.
    The Oracle at Delphi, at least gave guarded, coded answers to questions for you to interpret as you wished. Not these morons. They openly opine – and WRONGLY, about 75+% of the time.
    These idiots are whistling past the graveyard, and telling you to do the same, even as the Zombies have risen and are on their way to eat your, NOT THEIR, brains – even Zombies know these financial imbeciles don’t have any.

    And facts are like Kryptonite to Conservatives. They have to stay away from them, lest they die.
    Feckin’ idjits!

  2. I like the old Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Change “salary” to cherished ideological identification. Me? Like Krugman, I’m a scientist. If the data clashes with my cherished beliefs, I toss my cherished beliefs.

  3. Years and years ago I stopped debating (if you can call it that) with fundamentalist Christians. I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, but left the church in my late teens. I stopped arguing with them shortly thereafter. There was no point in subjecting myself to one closed mind after another. I’m now 68. About 25 years ago, maybe 30, I saw the pointlessness of having political discussions with radical Republicans for the same reasons you cited in your comments. Sure, there are Republicans that I can have meaningful discussions with, but their numbers are diminishing. You’re correct, only a few of them are capable of separating facts from opinions. Most of them don’t want to try, and there numbers are growing. It’s sad, disturbing, and infuriating. Thanks for you remarks. HB

  4. Krugman was wrong once – and he’s admitted it.

    When the Bush tax cuts (maybe round 2) were put through, he refinanced to a fixed rate mortgage. He was sure that this lack of seriousness about the debt *would* punish the government’s borrowing rate, and push interest rates higher.

    Now, note, this wasn’t exactly his being wrong about the financials. The Bush cuts did make the deficit go way, way up. What he was wrong about was the bond markets. Lots of people can’t guess the stock and bond markets – this is why economists aren’t necessarily super-wealthy stock traders. I think Keynes himself pointed out that markets can stay “irrational” much longer than an investor can stay liquid :-).

    This is why I respect Krugman, even when I think he might be wrong. If he’s wrong, the odds are very high he’ll be able to say “Here’s this model; see, if X doubles, Y should drop by 1/4th. I thought X would double… but it didn’t. That’s why Y didn’t drop as far as I predicted.”

    That kind of thinking leads you to investigate why one’s assumptions were wrong, and whether the model really works, and so forth. In short, when you’re wrong, you learn from it. (People can always be mule-headed, of course – but if you don’t think like this, you have much less chance to learn from it.)

  5. Just to share my personal nightmare – have you read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. M. Conway?

    I’ve been reading it and it’s getting scary. I knew truth had been obscured for a long time, but I hadn’t realized how bad it had been.

    Right now I’m reading the section discussion acid rain. During Reagan’s tenure, the science was resoundingly settled. No scientist working off the science would say that we didn’t know that sulfur and nitrogen emissions were causing acid rain and damage to the environment, nor contest that the damage was severe. But doubt was peddled and quite aggressively. And it was the same tactics that are driving the “debate” over global warming – basically, throwing up so much dust in the air that only the people who are current with the science can actually understand the truth. Lay folks won’t have a chance – even the best of journalists would have a hard time figuring out that the criticisms were invalid, and if they claimed this, they’d be attacked because how can they claim to be right, and all these other people be wrong?

    Right wingers have had 30 years perfecting these techniques. Have you seen people pointing out that pink slime is “treated with ammonia to be extra safe”? Isn’t that a cunning bit of wording? You *can’t* clean it with anything weaker than ammonia (well – you could cook it, but then you can’t make it into hamburgers) so they flip it around and pretend that it’s a special benefit, for “extra” safety. Technically, it’s true – it’s safer = more safe = “extra” safe – due to the ammonia treatment than it would be without it. But on the whole? It’s such a filthy lie that I wonder about people’s sense of shame. And they either seeded comment-writers or got some bozos to be true believers to spread the word – I saw that comment in a great many news stories.

  6. I once worked with an ex-Soviet engineer who had worked in their space program. The same problem, he says, afflicted the Soviets — everything was about ideology, not about reality. An ideological monitor was posted in every installation to make sure that nobody said or did anything contrary to ideology, and interactions with Americans in the rare instances that the engineers were allowed to talk to an American were closely monitored by the ideological monitor to make sure that no ideological contamination occurred. The end result was rather Orwellian…

    It absolutely amazed him that I was interacting with Chinese engineers in our Chinese subsidiary without any ideological monitors involved. Especially when the big earthquake happened and there were so many dead. There were, of course, government monitors on site. I’m pretty sure our dragon lady office manager was one of them, for example, we had been told we had to hire her as a condition of getting the free rent for our offices in an office building the government had built specifically for housing foreign-owned corporations wishing to outsource to China. But the Chinese appear to be rather more pragmatic and less ideological than the Soviets were and were really only concerned about whether people would start saying things that might destabilize the country, not about ideology, which is probably why the 21st Century is shaping up to be the Chinese Century the way the 20th Century was the American Century.

    – Badtux the Pragmatist Penguin

  7. Badtux,
    And our very own right-wingers demand ideological purity.

    And even when their ideology is proven wrong, again and again, they don’t blame the ideology itself and admit that it failed, they say the the politicians and people responsible for carrying out the ideology, failed the ideology. That the ideology is good, and strong, and will work, if only it is slavishly followed.
    -Tax cuts for the rich aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing to boost the economy?
    Solution: More tax cuts for the rich!
    -Tax cuts for the rich aren’t providing enough revenue?
    Solution: Increase taxes on the poor and middle class!
    -Consumers can’t consume because they don’t have jobs, or enough money, and the economy goes down the toilet?
    Solution: Outsource more jobs, and eliminate minimum wage to get everybody working!
    -Deregulation leads to a near economic collapse, and a sluggish economy after the near collapse?
    Soultion: More deregulation, to free corporations and “The Job Creators (All kneel… Let us pray for them… Let them prey upon us… All rise…)!”

    Point after point, the solution is more of what hasn’t worked before.
    And this has lead to George W. “Baby Doc” Bush, the very embodiment of all of their dipsh*t ideologies, taking the blame for the failure of Conservative ideology. The Conservative ideology is fine, it is perfect, it was W. who was imperfect:
    His tax cuts weren’t steep enough.
    He didn’t eliminate ALL regulations.
    There’s still a minimum wage.
    Etc…
    And so, for those who think that Mitt will, if elected, will govern from anywhere near the center, think again.
    He will have to slavishly follow the whims of his ideological masters, lest he be called a heretic to the Conservative cause.
    Mitt’s administration will double-down on all of the things that haven’t worked in 30+ years – with some other ancient, crazy, batsh*t insane polished and re-polished turds, thrown in for good measure!

    Austerity isn’t working in Europe?
    Well, Europe doesn’t know from austerity.
    Wait until Mitt gets in, and has a Republican Congress!
    Then America can show Europe what REAL austerity looks like!
    Party over country!
    Party uber alles!
    The Soviets didn’t own a monopoly on ideology. Our own right-wingers have more than their fair share, and want to share it with the rest of us – even if they have to shove it down our throats. No, ESPECIALLY if they have to shove it down the Liberal’s throats! ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ And these are some COLD MOTHERF*CKERS!!

    And this bears repeating:
    Party over country!!!!!!!!!
    Party uber alles!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  8. And after a long time I gave up, because I realized I might as well be trying to teach a toaster to tap dance.

    Or, as Janeane Garofalo once said on the subject of conservatives, “I refuse to respectfully disagree with them – they’re wrong.”

    • Pete — Luskin?????? You are citing Donald Luskin???????? Seriously? Who calls Krugman a “socialist” in the headline, proving he doesn’t know what “socialism” is? Who wrote in the Washington Post that the economy was just fine, thanks, the day before bleeping Lehman Brothers went belly up??????? Does anyone with half a brain still read Luskin? Did anyone with half a brain ever read Luskin? Calling Luskin at idiot is an insult to idiots!

      I did glance at the article. The first example he gave is a load of crap. Here is Krugman’s explanation of what he meant by “death panels” being a good thing, which you could have found yourself if you’d tried harder. And ayone who actually took the “death panels” flap seriously is such an obvious idiot that I doubt Krugman felt compelled to explain himself further. (You do know the “death panels” are a figment of the Right’s imagination, don’t you?)

      I will give Luskin no more time than that, but if anyone else here wants to go through the article and explain the facts to Pete, please be my guest.

      About a year ago a college class analyzed the predictions of 26 of America’s pundits. Paul Krugman was found to be the most accurate. The least accurate? Cal Thomas. Apparently Donald Luskin wasn’t one of the pundits analyzed.

  9. The assertion that Obama has been worse than Bush, in terms of actions in a number of significant areas, is NOT irrational. It happens to be factual. Whether it’s the war on whistleblowers, the war on medical marijuana, etc, etc., the record speaks for itself.

    Ignoring facts about Obama merely because you find them to be inconvenient is hardly rational, either. I’ve noticed that some on the left are just as knee-jerk in their defense of Obama’s actions as the righties were with Bush. Perhaps it’s useful to rise above one’s go-to narratives from time to time…

    • The assertion that Obama has been worse than Bush, in terms of actions in a number of significant areas, is NOT irrational. It happens to be factual. Whether it’s the war on whistleblowers, the war on medical marijuana, etc, etc., the record speaks for itself.

      Thanks for proving my point. I didn’t say that leftie bots such as yourself are completely untethered from facts; I said that you cherry pick the facts that support your position and ignore everything else. Some of us think women’s reproduction rights and the environment, for example, are considerably more important than medicinal marijuana — which Bush wasn’t for either, I don’t believe. I don’t like Obama’s treatment of whistleblowers, either, but you have to look at the total package, not cherry pick out a few positions, to make judgments about his being “worse” than Bush.

      Perhaps it’s useful to rise above one’s go-to narratives from time to time…

      As soon as you learn to think for yourself at all, do drop us a note.

  10. But righties refuse to acknowledge anything that might wander into the world of evidence-based objectivity. The only truth that matters is what their ideology tells them is supposed to be true, and the hell with reality.

    C’mon Barbara, this assertion sounds like something from the right. Pretty broad conclusion, wouldn’t you say? And you criticize the Right for being like this?

    • Pretty broad conclusion, wouldn’t you say?

      Not broad if it’s supported by factual evidence, which it is.

      You are a troll, aren’t you? Good bye.

    • Actually, Maha, you just proved MY point.

      You don’t have a point. You are just repeating what all the other leftie-bots say.

      And you are cherry-picking as much as anyone.

      No, just the opposite. I’m seeing the big picture; you are lost in the weeds. So in your world medicinal marijuana is more important than reproduction rights? Thats very weird. But please don’t bother commenting further unless you have something to offer beyond insults and copy-and-paste opinions.

  11. revisionism, a “winners” coverup of history. So when did we turn so soviet/chineese/or Democtatic Socialist? I am sure it wasn’t under Obama, and started before corperations became people, but has been planned buy some of our conqurers.

  12. I’ve looked at Obama with a critical eye, and I still respect and trust him. It goes to his character..that’s the best chance I have for inclusion into being a part of America. We are rapidly transforming into a corporate interests controlled state, and Obama represents for me the only means on the highest level of coming against that potential reality.

    • Swami, you don’t understand. Nobody important cares about income equality, reproductive choice, or the environment. We must have medicinal marijuana now now now! Obama didn’t give that to us, so we must kick and scream and hold our breaths and vote for teahadists to punish Obama.

  13. Pete:

    Barbara, et.al, I agree with the premise of this post, but if Prof. Krugman is to be considered such a heavy weight, how does one explain the findings of the Krugman Truth Squad?

    Krugman said that we would have “death panels” – probably ironically – and sales taxes. Is he right? I don’t know.

    There’s an idea that people just don’t concern themselves about health care costs because they have no skin in the game. But most medical treatments aren’t fun, and people don’t just seek them for grins.

    Rationing might not be part of the answer after all. But it needs to be part of the solution. If a person is 80 years old and is found to have prostate cancer, the odds are very high that something unrelated to the prostate cancer will kill him. So, should we spend lots of money treating it? Maybe – if it’s that important to him, maybe most men are willing to watch and wait, so that the actual costs of treatment are pretty low, since so few men use them. But if too many men are getting treated at that age, someone needs to point out that it’s costing money, and possibly causing *worse* outcomes – if an 80 year old would have lived to 85 before his heart gave out, and instead lives until 85, but also has impotence and incontinence, is that better?

    Some form of rationing is needed. Some forms of treatment *do not* improve outcomes, and should be discarded, or at least discouraged.

    I suspect he’s wrong, though. I think the bigger issue is how we pay for medical treatment. Right now, medical school costs a boatload of money. Why? Because doctors make a boatload of money – supply and demand.

    But if we suddenly said “we’re not going to pay doctors as much”, we might just screw ourselves over as med students leave school in droves, because it’s no longer worth it. So, before we can start paying doctors a lot less, we have to pay for education better.

    Even if we do that, though, paying for treatments that worsen outcomes is still stupid.

    Reading more of the article, I love this:

    “I’m not sure that the current value of the Nasdaq is justified, but I’m not sure that it isn’t.”

    Krugman said that he wasn’t sure if the Nasdaq was valued correctly, but wouldn’t say that it wasn’t. This was “soothing”, per Luskin.

    If that doesn’t set off your BS detector, it’s broken. How can written words that are explicitly stating uncertainty “soothing”? And Luskin also takes Krugman to task because, in *ten years*, Dow is 20% higher “and that’s not including a whole decade of dividends!”

    Wow! 2% per year! You know what I heard is a good investment return for a perfectly safe, completely guaranteed investment? 2%, (we’re seeing 2% *simple*), *over the rate of inflation*. Has the rate of inflation been 0? Has the risk (remember: 2% is okay for *perfect safety*) been low? Has anyone lost any money in the stock market in the past 10 years?

    Right about here, I have to stop reading. That’s such a filthy lie it staggers the imagination. It ignores the entire stock market crash, just to try to claim Krugman was wrong. It’s such a blatant lie that it can’t be an accident. It can’t be sloppy. It has to be deliberate. And if someone is willing to lie in such a brazen manner, nothing they say is worth listening too.

  14. Obama is only enforcing the law..what’s wrong with that? My thought is don’t look the other way..change the law if it’s such an outrage. Maybe there’s a point to what Obama is doing in regard to Federal marijuana laws..If he doesn’t honor the States right’s because of federal law,maybe the States will decide to take the Marijuana issue out of Federal hands. Possibly leading to a new approach on the war on drugs..at least where marijuana is concerned.

  15. The delusional-left, basically Socialists, have had very little power within American Government. But ironically, this is a function of the American Right (Krugman too) being largely correct about them. For many years, the US was pretty much alone in the world in considering socialism outside the boundaries of respectable discourse…like “tax cuts pay for themselves” should be.

    The closest we get to a delusional left in the US are anti-globalization / anti-free trade activists. Krugman himself compares them to creationists.

  16. LHW,
    My father, who just passed away, went through both radiation and chemo treatments for Stage 4 bladder cancer that had spread to the brain, spine, lungs, and the cancer also broke the smaller bone in his arm that goes from the elbow to the wrist.
    He was a veteran, and got these treatments at no, or little, charge.
    I don’t know if these treatments lengthened his life, or if they shortened it. They did little for his quality of life. The Oncologist told us that he had anywhere from 3, 6 to 12 months, but he’d seen patients go quicker, and last longer. When I privately asked the radiation doctor, he said 3 to 6 months. From the time that he was diagnosed, to the time he passed away, it was almost exactly 3 months.
    I really didn’t think he needed the chemo, since the cancer was so advanced, and he had grown so frail, so fast, from the cancer (and the radiation treatment?). But we, as a family, along with him, decided to do whatever he thought he wanted to do, as long as he could still make decisions rationally. And I was kind of surprised, after I gave him the chemo literature, talking about the side-effects, and we’d discussed it, that he decided to go through with it. I didn’t tell him I didn’t think it was in his best interests, but, hey, it was HIS decision. I, of course, didn’t tell him that.
    He loved my mother, and of course, his family, and I think he went through all of that for her and us. But in the end, I can’t help wondering if went through all of that because he could do it at minimum cost. I can’t say for sure, but if we had to pay every penny that everything cost in total, that may have changed his mind, and he may have gone for more pain management instead – and, at the end, that’s what it became a game of anyway.
    If the cancer had been caught earlier, say last summer, then I think the radiation and chemo made more sense than at the stage he started both. And he died before the 3rd, and final, chemo treatment. Maybe the treatments would have allowed for a slower decline phase, and he could have enjoyed a slightly longer life, and been able to do things he enjoyed with less pain. Or maybe not. Who knows? I don’t think anyone. As it is, he had constant pain from the broken arm, and hated the brace and sling he had to wear day AND night – lest he roll-over, and re-break the arm that had set naturally.
    When you realize there’s going to be a battle, and in the middle of it, sometimes perspective is clouded. In retrospect, there’s a lot I would have counseled to do differently.
    But it wasn’t just my fathers ever deteriorating mind that was clouded – mine was too. And my Mom’s. And my sisters. Would it have made a difference? Again, who knows.
    In this age, there are options, choices, that weren’t around a decade, or two, or three ago, when they would have just handed-out pain medication, and said if you were a religious person, to pray, and if not, to hope for the best, because you never know…
    We as a society pay for those options and choices that weren’t available before. But if we continue down the path that Conservatives want, the only ones who’ll have those options and choices will be those families who can afford it.
    And is that what we want? A society where the richest get to try to extend their lives, while the rest of us are told to go home and get our affairs in order? Because that’s surely where we’re going if Conservatives have their way.

    Part of being in a society means that we share and help one another – and that should include medical procedure and their costs. Because, in the end, no matter what we do or don’t do, we’ll all share in the loss of our loved ones. ALL of us – from the richest to the poorest, because we’ll ALL will die at some point.

    I don’t know that I can add anything to this already overly long comment, so I’ll stop here by asking, “Like a person who’s dying, wondering how he/she will be remembered, we need to ask ourselves, ‘what kind of society do we want to be known, or remembered, as?'”
    I know what I’d like us to be known/remembered as.
    But Conservatives, and the rich, will tell us that we can’t afford mercy and dignity for all – only for those who can afford it.

  17. I always find this very comforting – “the intelligent man finds most everything ridiculous. The sensible man, hardly anything” – given that in my mind this entire campaign season is “ridiculous.”

    Really? What we’re witnessing are fund raisers with the sole purpose, at this point in time, of acquiring enough money to stage further fund raisers to raise funds to acquire further funds for further fund raisers. For some reason the image of my kids’ hamster ‘running’ in its wheel, around and around going nowhere pops into my head.

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