TheAgitator.com
Rash, Insular, and Proud
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008Last week, more than 200 economists signed a letter expressing concern about the White House’s proposed bailout plan. While not completely opposed to government action, the letter urged caution, thoughtfulness, and careful assessment before rushing to action. It concluded this way:
…we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.
When asked about the letter at a meeting last week with leaders of Congress, President Bush reportedly replied:
“I don’t care what somebody on some college campus says.”
This administration’s contempt for intellect and worldliness is bizarre. It’s not as if the letter came from the heads of 200 women’s studies or sociology departments. These are people who’ve studied economics for much of their lives. And most of them share Bush’s alleged (if not practiced) fondness for free markets.
“This administration’s contempt for intellect and worldliness is bizarre”
Not really. People often mock, ridicule, or display anger and/or contempt towards things they r incapable of understanding.
[...] (Hat Tip: The Agitator) [...]
If this keeps up, I may have rethink my position that Bush is the greatest president we’ve ever had.
Would it be Bush’s response have been better if it had been sociologists or feminists? This sort of anti-intellectual hostility has been present from day one with this guy and his administration – only now it matters, because the economists in question were generally free market?
Bush is an idiot, and this comment is yet one more bit of evidence on the sky high pile that he started at the outset of his administration.
I guess we are a match…I don’t care what someone on some cap hill or in some white house says.
“It’s not as if the letter came from the heads of 200 women’s studies or sociology departments. These are people who’ve studied economics for much of their lives.”
I’ve been far too tainted by PC culture. When I read that I thought, “Someone’s going to go off the handle at him for supposedly belittling sociology and women’s studies.” Of course, then the lunchtime beer in my belly said, “Fuck ‘em!”
It’s not as if the letter came from the heads of 200 women’s studies or sociology departments.
I read that to indicate “It’s not as if the letter [regarding economics] came from the heads of 200 [non-economics] departments.”
It’s not always undeserved. “Intellectuals” are frequently braying idiots the moment you get outside of their one specialized field of expertise. In fact, I daresay that they are often even worse than the average person because they tend to lack humility in areas where they are uneducated or barely educated. There is a difference between being “anti-intellectual” and “anti-intellect.” While Bush is frequently both, it’s quite healthy to have a tendency toward the former.
Don’t listen to expert economists! I’ve been a failure at everything I’ve ever done in my life! Listen to me!
- Paraphrase of Bush
Mike T –
I understand where you are coming from and I think I would agree with you except in this case when the only opposing viewpoints are Hank “Yeah, We Can Print More” Paulson and Ben “Hecukuva Job” Bernanke, it might be responsible to at least consider what the dismal scientists are saying instead of dismissing them out of hand as ivory tower nitpickers.
So called intellectuals who are braying idiots are braying idiots. That fact does not justify a general anti-intellectualism.
But this IS their expertise! These are the most educated economists in the country.
It’s not like all the good economists go pro and the universities are left with all the second-rate economists. There very few jobs for economists outside of academia.
Bush has too much invested in being anti-intellectual to change his stance now. He’s spent 7 and a half years trying to paint the world with his black and white, “if you’re not with us you’re against us” brush, he can’t give in to subtlety or reason now. People might start thinking and go back and question the effects of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, Iraq, etc.
Ignoring independent academics. Add another Bush Administration suppression of dissent to the list.
Why the f doesn’t Bush just issue executive orders instead of going to Congress?
“The Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper.”
Oh, come-on. How many of you guys every really cared what your professors said?
Those who cannot do, teach…or at least get graduate students to teach for them!
I cannot find any mention of Bush responding to the 200 economists proposal- if someone else can find a resource I would like to see it.
I’m going to go with Nobahdi on this one. When I scanned down the list of names there were a number I recognized, not that I knew personally, but who articles I’ve read, textbooks I’ve used, and who are indeed very smart, data driven people. Maybe they are all wrong, but pausing for a moment and considering what they are saying is the intelligent thing to do. Blowing them off like this indicates a level of…well stupidity that is shocking.
Here you go pris.
And to be charitable to Bush he does have Ben Bernanke there as well, one of the top economists in the country. The Federal Reserve also employes lots of economists, probably more than 192. So it is probably safe to say that Bernanke does have access to information that academic economists don’t have access too. Still, considering what they have to say is the prudent thing, IMO. Bush response is arrogant and anti-intellectual since not too long ago Bernanke was one of those guys sitting on a college campus.
All your bailouts are belong to us.
Sounds like a suggestion to not go to college at all. Bad role model, our President.
“Blowing them off like this indicates a level of…well stupidity that is shocking.”
It was said about F. D. Roosevelt that he was a traitor to his class. I have my doubts about that. I think Roosevelt did just fine by his class.
But it can never be said that George W. Bush is a traitor to his class. And I’m betting it has nothing to do with alleged stupidity.
I didn’t say that Bush was justified here. What I said was that I think Bush’s anti-intellectual tendencies are often justified, as intellectuals frequently are charlatans who wrap up their wishful thinking in barely parsable jargon.
I’d like to also point out that Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, two people who are as detached from reality as you can be without living in virtual reality or being autistic, are considered by many to be some of the most important intellectuals out there right now. Being an “intellectual” is cheap; being intelligent, and consistently thoughtful, however, is quite difficult.
“… two people who are as detached from reality as you can be without living in virtual reality or being autistic…”
I’m guessing the “IMO” is implied.
FWIW, Klein is an idiot, Chomsky is spot-on except for his penchant for socialism, IMHO.
No they aren’t.
Making decisions in spite of what experts suggest is not “anti-intellectual”; it’s arrogant and stupid.
There were protests against the bailout over the weekend on Wall Street, someone supposedly was carrying a sign that read “Jump, you fuckers!”
French Revolution, anyone?
Interesting. Everyone is ranting about Bush’s statement that was quoted from “sources” I guess you are all intelligent enough to know that that source is truthful and accurate. I mean there’s no chance that he didn’t say that is there? Sort of like, I know these documents are forged, but I’m sure that what they would have said if they existed.
“It’s not like all the good economists go pro and the universities are left with all the second-rate economists.” -nobahdi
Thank you for that, for a split second I saw my old E101 teacher in football pads and laughed myself silly.
> > “I don’t care what somebody on some college campus says.”
>
> This administration’s contempt for intellect and worldliness is bizarre.
Well, that may be so, but I wouldn’t call it for certain based on that particular sentence. — After all, you could probably round up 200 people from college campuses who think we need socialized medicine like yesterday. (I’d even lay odds that someone already has done so.)
==
“Jump, you fuckers!” — seconded.
I’m sure the government has a lot of economists working for it. And I’m certain that one of the most important qualifications for those jobs is to favor government control.
While we all know from previous discussion on this site that there are no such things as conspiracies, I sometimes wonder if the idea that the government should own all means of production wasn’t cooked up by some lowly government economist who just wanted to get in tight with the head of whatever state he was living in. It’s like telling the ugly babe sitting next to you in the bar how gorgeous she is so you can get laid (I’ve heard that this happens, but have never done it myself, of course). Indeed, socialism is so infeasible that one has to wonder how the idea could ever be taken seriously by anyone with any economic sense at all.
I think it is becoming clear that both socialism and capitalism have large, glaring flaws. But, it seems unlikely to me that there are only two ways to arrange the transfer of goods and services between people. Shouldn’t we be trying to think of better ways to arrange that transfer instead of arguing over which of the failures is better?
Dichotomies are inherently unstable, and rife for manipulation by pitting one side against the other. Imagine a cuisine with only two recipes, sex with only two positions, or American with only two parties. Well, I guess you don’t have to imagine that last one; how well is that working out for ya?
Not necessarily. Lots of the government jobs that go to economists are ones where information is supplied–e.g. the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both supply valuable information that help the market function better (CPI, labor data, economic growth data, etc.). One can do that and still have fairly consistent libertarian views…in fact, I used to work for the latter agency. Most of the economists I worked with had a very healthy and positive regard for markets and their ability to allocate resources.
You have to look long and hard to find an economist that favors outright socialism, IMO. Looking at the literature on the principle-agent problem would suggest that most economists understand that there are very significant problems there.
One of the glaring flaws of markets (i.e. capitalism) and socialism is the same: information. Information is not symmetrical nor is it complete. Or another way of putting it is ignorance…even rational ignorance. Factor in that people generally have a really hard time with evaluating uncertainty (i.e. probabilistic events) and you can have problems in both systems.
However, economists have studied these information problems in capitalism far more extensively and have found strategies for solving them. Heck even markets come up with such solutions since there are profits to be made and people can be innovative. For example, using Akerlof’s lemon (cars) model. If a buyer doesn’t know if a car is a peach or a lemon the peach market fails to exist. However, people with peaches (assuming they know they are peaches) can offer things like limited warranties as one way of signalling the quality of the vehicle. Another is to allow the prospective buyer to take the car to an independent mechanic. Now these are sub-optimal outcomes (economists call them second best outcomes) in that they increase the cost of purchasing a peach, but so long as these costs are less than the benefits that accrue to the seller and the buyer then the peach market can come into existence, albeit smaller than it would be in a situation of complete and symmetrical information (or as economists call it perfect information).
But with socialism and the method of allocating resources there, very little work has been done on the incentive problem, information asymmetries, and so forth. Most economists would likely say that without some sort of price to signal information such a system is going to have lots of problems before you even get to the issues of things like the principle agent problem, moral hazard or adverse selection. How do you know where to ship input X? People producing X in a capitalist system answer this question quite easily: who is offering the most for X? The fact that these people are offering the most suggest they want it the most. No such mechanism exists in socialism if there is no price.
Capitalism, for all its faults, is a system with distributed information that is aggregated up into single (or maybe a vector that is finite) measure: the price(s) of the good in question. The informational problems distort that measure.
In socialism, the price is not set by market participants and aggregated up, it is made up out of whole cloth by the political process. For example, if people, in general, have persistent economic biases (see Tyler Cowen’s work on this) then that political process is going to set the wrong prices. And this assumes that people are not going to be voting for a candidate that is pandering to them…and nevermind that most Socialist systems always seem to end up as dictatorships.
I think I’d rather have the inadvertant errors associated with capitalism than the deliberate errors of socialism.