Democrats spend to much time thinking about how objective external forces will help them or hurt them, rather than thinking about what they themselves have been doing wrong or should be doing differently, or about how the other side has been outplaying them for 30+ years. That's reality based politics for you. there's reality out there, it is what it is, and you can't change it. You're a SCIENTIST and you can only watch it. Right wing Republicans have recently taken over a number of statehouses and state legislatures, but ho hum.... mumble mumble.... and Obama DID win the Presidency! And he's been a WONDERFUL President. WHy am I not a Green or a Socialist? Because that would be a wasted effort, and why switch when my efforts within the Democratic Party are equally wasted?

I had the Kelly franchise during the Mediawhoresonline era. I read everything he wrote for close to a year. He was amazingly nasty. I don't remember him writing anything of much intellectual or news interest, one way or another. All that was noticeable was the glee he took in abusing his enemies. I had the feeling that he'd been externally constrained to decency all his life and felt liberated by 9/11, like a lot of others. I posted the this morning in another context, but it's apropos. LOTS of monsters were nice in private and good to their cronies and lackeys. “Natalya, however , remembers Yezhov with love. She has said in an interview “He spent a lot of time with me, more even than my mother did. He made tennis rackets for me. He made skates and skis. He made everything for me himself.” And the authors of the first English-language biography of Yezhov write, “At the dacha, Yezhov taught her to play tennis, skate, and ride a bicycle. He is remembered as a gentle, loving father showering her with presents and playing with her in the evenings after returning from the Lubyanka.” --Robert Chandler, “Appendix” to Vasily Grossman, The Road. Yezhov was the head of NKVD and presided over the Stalinist terror during 1937 and 1938; after being replaced by Beria in 1939, he was shot in 1940. He was responsible for the deaths of close to a million people, including much of the Russian intelligentsia. Adolf Eichmann was also nice to his children. Stalin was nice to his daughter. Hitler was nice to children and dogs. People! Quit being nice to children! That's where it all starts!

Mr. X won and he'll win again.

Why are Mr. X and his boss being protected?

It's the kind of advice that consultants give, and it's economic advice. Qaddafi doesn't call people in to solve difficult technical problems. I will register your apparent belief, however, that it is impossible for economic advice given to a dictator to lead to harmful effects. Your cluelessness still amazes, though your prissiness and butthurt are not surprising. You really shouldn't venture out of whichever protected environment it is that you spend your time in.

I think that, at the state level at least, this is an orchestrated plan. (There was coverage of some kind of organization of Republican state legislators.) The plan is to go for broke and then retreat as much as you're forced to. My guess is that a lot of the legislators, governors, and Congressman are willing to be one-term officeholders, and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who do the most damage get some kind of cushy job as a reward. And maybe some are on leaves of absence and will get raises on their return. Ariel Sharon had a philosophy of "facts on the ground". Someone in an executive position is able to do a lot of things unilaterally, even if it's illegal, even if no one wants him to do it. And once something is done, you can't go back to the earlier state. So his plan was to do things that made his opponents planes dead letters and moot. After he invaded Lebanon, a lot of peace plans became completely irrelevant. It's also movign the Overton Window. Once a governor, etc. tries to do something completely unthinkable, then every lesser position becomes a compromise position. That's the game that is being played on a (willing) Obama on the deficit. He's planning on claiming victory for what actually is a defeat for Democrats (though not for him personally).

Beyond the involvement with a dictator, LSE seems to have sold a PhD to a rich and influential non-scholar. That aspect would have been problematic even if Saif's father had been an innocuous industrialist or financier. Though it probably happens all the time......

Advisers of despots NEVER know whether their advice will be taken. They NEVER know whether they're going to be used for window dressing. This is true because of the nature of despots, who are cagy and brutal, and because the outcomes are all ex post facto. In January when you give advice you have no idea what will be done with it in February. If you cannot imagine sound economic advise being used for ethnic cleansing, you lack no imagination and knowledge of history. Just "Your agricultural sector is inefficient and should be totally revamped", when said to a despot, can have brutal results. (Though I can see that this argument would mean nothing to an economist, since consequences for existing populations are an unimportant part of many development plan s). "I'd have to seriously wonder ... what level of listening comprehension the dictator in question had." Well, duh. Dictators hear what they want to hear. That's the problem. It's strikes me that you're at danger of being entered as an exhibit in the museum of cluelessness, with a special ribbon commemorationg your to incomprehension of brutality.

John V's point gives a blank check to consultants. As long as you can convince yourself your intentions are good and the results might be good, you're home free, regardless. You have to at least recognize that these are difficult choices and they might blow up in your face. You never have perfect knowledge even of the present and past, much less the future. Suppose that you think that you're advising a Franco and it turns out that you're advising a Hitler? Suppose that abstractly good advice is applied in a way that involves ethnic cleansing (e.g., clearing a development area by murderous means.) Above I accepted the idea that these risks sometimes have to be taken, but I can't accept the idea that there's no moral risk at all. On top of that, this is simply not true: A dictatorship .... will endure with or without his advice. Many dictators use elaborate PR campaigns to make themselves look good for the international community. These campaigns can have a significant effect, and a consultant can get dragged into them. People who have advised dictators and thugs in the past have frequently found that their good advice was not taken, but that their name was used as windowdressing.

My guess is that people who see 200 movies a year are mostly single liberals, while churchgoing family people seldom see as many as 20 a year, so the market isn't really demanding many Christian movies, and the Christian audience is not very sophisticated. "In order to make a movie for conservative Christians you have to make a movie that rejects the main reason for there being movies." An astonishing proportion of movies are date movies. It absolutely ruins a movie for me if the Holocaust or WWII or practically anything I have interest in is used as a backdrop for an attractive couple getting to know one another and getting it on. This goes way back. In the 19th c. in France, the drama, the ballet, and opera were above all social events where people went to flirt and hook up, and not only the female leads but the chorus girls were assumed to be available for the right man. This also seems to have been true in Austria and Russia, but less so in Germany and Britain. (I think. Maybe it was just more secretive). One French theater director said in so many words that he ran a whorehouse. He couldn't pay anyone enough to live on, so he assumed that all of his players were earning a little on the side. (What the guys lived on I don't know; maybe he paid them, or maybe they had independent incomes and were in acting to score chicks, or maybe they were gamblers, con men, gigolos, and pimps.) XIX c France was as bizarre as any other curiosity of anthropology. Adultery is everywhere in the world, but in France you had a strictly formalized and enforced marriage system and an equally strictly formalized and enforced adultery system. The separation was so strict that will I was reading up on the subject I asked myself if French husbands ever had sex with their wives.

How those on the left lost the rhetorical battle ..... Losing rhetorical battles is what the left is for.

I was hurt that I wasn't mentioned among the nihilists. Lord knows I've tried to get Brad's attention.

What Heinlein said is idiotic, and sadly, Obama is saying the same thing. It's a very conventional adminstrative liberal / positivis thing to say. It would be nice if the facts answered all questions, but they don't.

That is to say, "whereby it would not be possible for any economist to prove anything he chose to prove."

The weak spot of DeLong's argument is in his assumption that economists are more than just skilled lawyerlike advocates. The science of economics has not achieved the kind of well-formed, consistent, complete status whereby it would not be possible for any economist to prove anything. Like law, economics is a field of controversy and a set of rules for controversy, not a determinate science. No lawyer believes that the law is a science that gives definite answers. The law is something that you work in order to get the desired result. The law certainly has its skews and is friendly to some views and hostile to others, but it is not a set of truths that someone might someday understand. Just like economics. The convergence of the two is law and economics, and it's hard to be sure which is corrupting the other. The recent corporate personhood Supreme Court case is a wonderful example of the hideousness of law and of economics. By the time those asshole have finished their work, corporations will be able to collect pain and suffering damages from people who say mean things about them. They're people too, you know. They have feelings just like anyone else.

Unless one side is right and the other wrong, vimothy.

Ethical lawyers despise unethical lawyers, but a lot of what ethical lawyers do looks unethical to everyone else. Law school trains people to redefine ethics in a legalistic way.

"I think that Joe S is correct in his assessment of Posner. I think that if you removed the binders from his head that were put there by all his U of Chicago friends (where he has been on the faculty for 30+ years), he'd make an honest attempt to reconcile. " For Christ's sake. Posner is a big-time player, not a fourteen-year-old who's fallen into a bad crowd. For all I knew he corrupted the Chicago school, rather than the other way around.

Speak for yourself Brad. Posner ain't MY anus. /joke? I've said for a long time that economists, like lawyers, are skilled and necessary advocates. Posner is both a lawyer and an economist (sort of) and he's one of the human race's most effective antagonists. The ethics and scientificity of the two fields are similar. I don't see how the profession can be respected as long as the Chicago school has the power that it does. They've purged their own enemies, and now someone should purge them. To clarify: if you're talking about "purging" as a bad thing, you're calling it "political". The apolitical purging of bad science isn't just acceptable, it's what we expect from sciences. If bad economists can't be purged, economics is political (advocacy) more than scientific. That's my actual opinion. If bad economists can be purged, go for it. Even as advocacy, though, economics (represented by the Chicago School, which has enormous importance in the external world) hasn't been performing very well, except in a nihilistic wrecking sort of way.

Robert, this sounds like an exact replay of 1870-1896, when "sound currency" (= deflated currency) backed by gold was the first principle of the controlling group of both major parties. Preservation of existing wealth was the main goal. x When Bryan's silver Democrats nominated him, with a program of mild reflation, major powers within the party supported McKinley, openly or secretly. Even today the Populists and Greenbackers are generally regarded as stupid fanatics, but the Greenbacker proposal was reasonably close to today's system, and if we had the state bank they proposed (which North Dakota does have!) instead of the semi-private monstrosity we do have, we'd probably be better off.

"First he restricts allowed evidence to almost nothing -- in this case asset prices alone." Combine this empirical principle with enough counterfactual assumptions and you have a terrifyingly powerful science which can prove anything whatsoever. For economic nihilists, life has been good in the last couple of years.

"Yes it is a science. If you find the right models, the predictive value is excellent. You don't have to look too far." If that were true, there would be agreement about the right models. But there isn't. "Even through their influence on energy and environmental policy? Think, think." So far there's been almost none, and even if energy policy starts to really take global warming into account, the effect will be proportionately far smaller than the influence of Greenspan (AND the Treasury Secretary, AND the Council of Economic Advisers) on the economy. "But then how is any economic policy to be preferred to any other? Without scientific rigor--without experiment and study of historical data, without criticism and consensus--there is no discipline of economics." There are many practical disciplines which are usable but not scientific. That's what economics is and should recognize that it is. During the last century or two Science has had a magic aura and almost every cheap ideologue during that time has claimed Science as his justification. Science (physics, chemistry, biology) often gives unique, precise, certain answer to important questions, and that's why everyone wants to claim to be a Scientist. But few of the social sciences have come close to that except on the edges. A lot of econ is fakery. Hayek and Knight came to grips with the indeterminacy of the future sooner than anyone in the field. Predictivity of the physicist's kind is a mirage.

Just remember that this is not a competence problem. Shear was not badly trained and was not wrongly hired. It's a professionalism problem and a management problem. Shear has been doing what professional journalists are trained to do, and he's doing what Weymouth or Graham hired him to do. In the same way, the problems we have with our economists are not incompetence problems. They are professionalism problems, with a fair dose of venality and conflict of interest.

I'll never finish the Cochrane piece, but I feel confident that if he lives another thirty years, he still won't have learned anything. This guy is well armored.

The contribution of meteorologists to clkimate and weather is tiny, but economists have a lot of influence on the economy. Look at Greenspan. I think that economists should forget about the Holy Grail of Science. The discipline would be far better if they'd forgotten about this deades ago. Oddly, some of the founders of the Chicago School agreed (Knight, Hayek, and later Buchanan). That's the only thing I agree with them about.